2009

Happy New Year!

Here beginneth 2009. Thus far I have been getting up not exactly 'early' but in time to listen to Melvyn's In Our Time (Darwin Season). His (Darwin's, I mean) biography is very interesting - not least the time he spent training for the priesthood in Cambridge and the intellectual oppression he must have experienced. Much of this morning's programme was conducted by Melvin in what he called several times "this extraordinary museum" which is just round the corner from my house. I shall have to go and have a look at the bodies of some of the creatures he killed on his various expeditions. I saw Bill Bailey's latest performance in London during the festive period. Focusing on a specific aspect of Darwin's biography, he made us all (by which I mean the audience) say 'barnacles'.

Thinking about when religious people talk about 'the soul' and pray for "all who are ill in mind body or spirit". This must surely be based on a Cartesian view but the puzzle is that Descartes never distinguished between 'mind' and 'soul'. Whatever it was that Descartes thought was distinct from the body and which could potentially survive the destruction of the body was 'thinking substance'. So not only is a questionable dualism built into the fabric of Christianity but a bad version of it, in which a third term is invented, apparently for little more than rhetorical effect. Can anyone out there tell me what a 'soul' is meant to be and how it is supposed to be different from a 'mind'? It's maddening, the degree to which religion depends on bad philosophy.

Very sad to hear of the death of Harold Pinter on Christmas Eve. Bought Michael Billington's biography of him today, together with Wordsworth's Prelude, in all its papery loveliness.