This guy who was a scrupulous naturalist believed something that normal people gave up believing in the 12th century. Why should he?Īs an example of the monstrousness of the father, he has a fixed belief that physical ailments were inflicted directly by God to chastise the sufferer because of bad behaviour or spiritual deviance, “and not in relation to any physical cause”. He loves his monstrous father, he doesn’t want to hurt him. This is not a spoiler, because readers shouldn’t have the misconception I had, so I will say that the kid as he grows up to be 15, 16, 17 just mentally disengages and drifts away from the Christian cult. I thought there was going to be a big fight between the son who realises Darwin and evolution was right and there would be great dingdongs over the breakfast porridge and furious debates about Genesis and where were the dinosaurs on the Ark and all of that juicy stuff. It mostly deals with the author as a little kid, between ages 5 and 9. This is a beautiful book which I would never have thought would have entranced me like it did. Since this kid had literally NO contact with other children until the age of ten (!!) it is no surprise he was odd. If you are wondering what the kid was like, the kid was a classic geek.Īt other times I dragged a folio volume of the Penny Cyclopedia up to the study with me, and sat there reading successive articles on such subjects as Parrots, Parthians, Passion-flowers, Passover and Pastry, without any invidious preferences, all information being equally welcome. When next Thursday rolled around with no Jesus the father rushed back to the Book of Revelations to figure out where he had miscalculated. The kid was groomed to be a living saint and the Second Coming was expected next Thursday at the very latest.
(By the way the father had a passing resemblance to Oliver Reed, but that is not especially relevant.) Always with one eye jammed in a microscope, examining God’s tiny miracles. And this was interesting because the father was a scientist, a zoologist and botanist, a writer of the definitive book on British sea anemones, and many many others. This was a sect which did not celebrate any Christian holiday – they looked upon Christmas with horror, because, as you can see, it includes the word “mass”. It was Jesus this, the Lord that, the blood of the Lamb everywhere you looked, day in day out. In fact he drank a gallon of it every day. This is the memoir of a boy growing up in a Christian cult in the 1850s, the cult was the Plymouth Brethren, and the father of this son was a guy who had drunk the koolaid. You have never read such a warm, loving portrait of a monster.
0 kommentar(er)
