Helmintholog

About three years ago, my friend’s wife developed brain cancer, though we didn’t understand this. She stayed angry and resentful all that summer; when too weak for emotion, she was withdrawn, and chewed by headaches. She couldn’t find a job. About six months after she had first mentioned her troubles to her GP, she finally had a scan, and they found a tumour on the right side of her brain, pushing out tentacles like a hungry starfish. It was not malignant, but it would grow steadily until her brain was crushed. They put her on drugs at once, and did everything they could She had always been gaunt; now the steroids puffed her right up. She grew slow and confused. The emails she wrote were badly spelled all of a sudden. Her rages grew more violent. After four or five months, she went down to the west country, where he mother lives, to die. This was, I think, by that time a relief both to her, and her husband.

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I’m working on a speech for the Oxford Union, one of the most ridiculous events of my life. There is an inherited penguin suit hanging on the door, which must be nearly fifty years old, to judge from my father’s waistline when he bought it. I have reached the stage of a piece when almost all my time is spent throwing away wonderful ideas that just won’t fit. Here’s one of them: people talk as if the moral cost of a religion consisted in the effort required living up to the ideals. But the real cost is the effort involved in living down to reality, in persuading yourself that this bewildered bunch of ineffective bureaucrats is the ultimate reason that the universe exists in the first place. Live up to an ideal, and you get somehting back, if only self-discipline. Living down to reality just wastes your life.

I have known for years of the distinction between the God of the philsophers and the God of the believers, but only in Marburg did I manage to express it clearly: The god of the believers couldn’t exist, whereas the God of the philosophers just doesn’t.