8/7/11

Meanwhile I am also reading In Memoriam AHH, which I started reading due to the famous phrase ‘Nature red in tooth and claw,’ quoted in Darwin’s Origin of Species. This is a very interesting poem – a close friend of Tennyson’s dies at age 20 or something, and in the process of this long elegy, which took him years to complete, he grapples with implications of Darwinism, and other scientific developments that came before. Such as the idea that continents come and go due to volcanos and things. So life is transient. And will he see his friend again as in the traditional Christian theology. So it is really sort of a major grappling with lots of developments of that time.