Endings and Beginnings

Orcadia as in Orkney, but et in Arcadia ego ... refers, I think, to death, I am even to be found, says Death, in Arcady, the place of unsuspecting delight, not that I think that Orkney is Arcady: my friends, or at least some of them, think I am insane to move there, but I am not that insane. I do not yet know my way round this public/private space, what to say, what not to say, but Orkney lies some weeks in the future for us, the wife of one of my oldest friends has just died, the funeral is next week, I woke in the small hours of the night she died, with the palpable sense of her presence, that vivid knowledge of a person's essence that one sometimes feels, and my friend is grief-stricken. They have both gone on ahead of us ...

Here the Stourbridge house is filling with boxes ...

I have been reading Darwin's Angel by John Cornwell, a resp0nse to Dawkins' God Delusion:

Dawkin's negative critique is standard fare and accurate enough and so needs to be repeated constantly, and Dawkins needs alas no urging, but his serious failure lies in not making distinctions, not seeing the possibilities embedded in religious language and poetry. He quite properly insists that there is a difference between 'good' science and 'bad' science but seems to dismiss out of hand the possibility that there can be 'good' religion as well as 'bad'. He really does seem to be one of those who see poetry more generally as 'the merely decorative word' and not as a mode of exploratory thinking not necessarily available yet to him. Cornwell is good at pointing this out and investigating Dawkins' sources, which often bear a different meaning from the one he supposes. He is also good on death.