There was a young man who said "Damn!
I perceive with regret that I am
But a creature that moves
In predestinate grooves
I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram."
It also reminded me of a playful limerick that my daughter wrote about me:
There was a girl named Geet
She was incredibly sweet
Her dad was fat
Nobody likes that
But she loved him head to feet
More background on the first limerick:
I have seen several versions of the first limerick here, attributed to Maurice E. Hare, 1905. The reply was authored by Nicholas Humphrey, and first appeared in Nicholas Humphrey, “Predispositions to learn,” in Constraints on Learning, ed. R. A. Hinde and J. Stevenson-Hinde, pp. 301- 304, Academic Press, London, 1973. To me, these limericks address the topics of free will, determinism, and biological constraints on development.
There was a young man who said "Damn!
I perceive with regret that I am
But a creature that moves
In predestinate grooves
I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram."
"Young man you should stay your complaint,
For the grooves that you call a constraint
Are there to contrive
That you learn to survive;
Trams arrive, buses may or they mayn't."
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations renders the limerick this way:
There once was an old man who said, ‘Damn!
It is borne in upon me I am
An engine that moves In determinate grooves,
I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram.
Singing oneness!
