“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Ere Terry

When Terry Eagleton was my tutor at Oxford I totally loved the moment when the Cuban embassy phoned up to invite him to give some talks. Then a bit later when I invited him to NYU he told me this story.

Working in a supermarket as I had quite recently done (we were swapping stories) one of his coworkers caught him reading a book and admiringly said: “Ere, Terry, you've read more books [Lancashire accent] this summer than than I've done in me fooking life.”

Brilliant!

So I loved this review of his latest (sorry, who sent it? Thank you Rick Cliff and Dirk equally!). It says true things about him. And it looks like the kind of book one thought he might eventually write. He was never fond of nihilism, even in the 80s when you sort of had to be fond of it--oh whatever you have to be fond of it now too. In my line of work. Which is not in a supermarket.

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