This is not really a post - I just wanted a place to copy down a couple of passages from the last two books I've read. The two passages are perhaps polar opposites of ways of looking at our world, and I mysteriously can identify with both of them. The first is from Michael Cunningham's new and wonderful book: Specimen Days. The speaker is a woman who has been driven round the bend by current American society, and who has become part of a curious form of terrorist ring
"Look around," she said. "Do you see happiness? Do you see joy? Americans have never been this prosperous, people have never been this safe. They've never lived so long, in such good health, ever, in the whole of history. To someone a hundred years ago, as recently as that, this world would seem like heaven itself. We can fly. Our teeth don't rot. Our children aren't a little feverish one moment and dead the next. There's no dung in the milk. There's milk, as much as we want. The church can't roast us alive over minor differences of opinion. The elders can't stone us to death because we might have committed adultery. Our crops never fail. We can eat raw fish in the middle of the desert, if we want to. And look at us. We're so obese we need bigger cemetery plots. Our ten-year-olds are doing heroin, or they're murdering eight-year-olds, or both. We're getting divorced faster than we're getting married. Everything we eat has to be sealed because if it wasn't, somebody would put poison in it, and if they couldn't get poison, they'd put pins in it. A tenth of us are in jail, and we can't build the new ones fast enough. We're bombing other countries simply because they make us nervous, and most of us not only couldn't find those countries on a map, we couldn't tell you which continent they're on. Traces of fire retardant we put in upholstery and carpeting are starting to turn up in women's breast milk. So tell me. Would you say this is working out? Does this seem to you like a story that wants to continue?"
(Note to self: look up his two books prior to The Hours: A Home at the End of the World, and Flesh and Blood.)
The second passage is from Ian McEwen's latest book: Saturday.
Once, on a walk by a river - Eskdale in low reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow - his daughter quoted to him an opening verse by her favorite poet..."If I were called in / To construct a religion / I should make use of water." ...They stopped to drink coffee from a flask, and Perowne, tracing a line of lichen with a finger, said that if he ever got the call, he'd make use of evolution. What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of foms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities - and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true.
So, would this religion be Intelligent Design or Creationism? Or, simply, science. These were both books I could not put down, stayed up too late reading, read most of Saturday yesterday (which was itself Saturday!) because I was felled by some mean and nasty sort of flu.
