Mrs Darwin

M R S . D A R W I N

Before Charles Darwin published his work On the Origin of Species in 1859, he had to hear many reproaches from his wife, a deeply religious person, who could not accept his decision to send to the printer so noxious a book.

-Charles-she would say- God has told us that He created man in His image and likeness. He did not say that about the ant, the bird, or the ape, or the dog or the cat. He placed man above everything alive and subjected the earth to his dominion. By what right do you deprive of his dignity a being that has the face of God and is the equal of angels?

Her husband then would answer that if he did not do it, Wal­ lace would, since he had hit upon a similar idea.

-Charles-she replied- we should be aware of our motives. You would not have been so intent on achieving fame as a scientist, if not for your successive failures. I know you do not like to be reminded of that, but had you succeeded in becoming a physician, as you desired, you would have derived enough satisfaction from curing people, instead of trying to satisfy your ambition at any price. And had those years when you studied theology at Cambridge allowed you to become a minister of the Church, your work in a human community would have protected you from adventurism.

-You know very well where you borrowed your theory. You found it in Malthus. A bad man, Charles, cruel and indifferent to the fate of the poor. I don't believe your theory, for your observations were not made with good intent.

Charles Darwin had occasion later to think of her words, though he was at the same time quite certain that his theory of evolution was correct. So much the worse for me and for humans. The theology that can be drawn from it is nothing but that of the devil's chaplain. What good Creator would con­trive such a world, an arena in which, like gladiators, individ­uals and whole species struggle for su rvival? If he watches all that, like some Roman emperor sitting in his special box, I will not pay him tribute. Happy are those who, like Emma, pre­served the image of God as our Father and friend.
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C H R I S T O P H E R  R O B I N

In April of 1996 the international press carried the news of the death , at age seventy- five, of Christopher Robin Milne, immortalized in a book by his father , A. A. Miln e , Winnie-the-Pooh, as Christopher Robin. I must think suddenly of matters too difficult for a bear of little brain. I have never asked myself what lies beyond the place where we live, I and Rabbit, Piglet and Eeyore, with our friend Christopher Robin. That is, we continued to live here, and nothing changed, and I just ate my little something. Only Christopher Robin left for a moment.

Owl says that immediately beyond our garden Time begins, and that it is an awfully deep well. If you fall in it, you go down and down, very quickly, and no one knows what happens to you next. I was a bit worried about Christopher Robin falling in, but he came back and then I asked him about the well.

"Old bear," he answered. "I was in it and I was falling and I was changing as I fell. My legs became long, I was a big person, I wore trousers down to the ground, I had a gray beard, then I grew old, hunched, and I walked with a cane, and then I died. It was probably just a dream, it was quite unreal. The only real thing was you, old bear, and our shared fun. Now I won't go anywhere, even if I'm called for an afternoon snack."

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A L A S T O R

It would be an exaggeration to say that the films directed by Alastor are gloomy, yet they are disquieting. They have their fans who appreciate in them precisely the ambiguity of the characters and the use made of symbols. Alastor's case is pe­culiar, as can be guessed not only from his films but also from his quite numerous pronouncements in interviews and articles.
A man of traumas and obsessions, Alastor simply declared that he did not like his films, because they were not positive enough. He would like to make different ones, but till now he did not know how. He confessed that he was a Christian but a sinner, and his personal shortcomings were responsible for what de­ pressed him in his art, though there were also objective reasons for its defects.

To grow up in a pious Anglican family was not enough to preserve one's independence from the pressures of a milieu which did not care much for religion, and Alastor lived like his peers, perhaps differing from them only in his being given to philosophy. At a certain moment, however, he went through a crisis and the faith of his childhood recovered its lost mean­ing. This occurred not under the influence of any preachers but because of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which he read in his adolescence and which worked slowly in him for years. A fairy tale about the struggle between good and evil, it suddenly tore him from his amused tolerance toward illusory standards of human moral judgments and threw him into a meditation on the power of evil in his century. Identifying ourselves with a hero from our adolescent readings, we often pave the way, unaware, for the decisions taken in maturity, and Alastor, like Frodo Baggins in Tolkien, came to feel that he was burdened with a mission to oppose the ominous land of Mordor.

Judging by many signs, Hell was spreading over the world like a drop of ink on blotting paper, and this was happening not only outside but also inside every one of his contemporaries. Alastor observed that dark stain in himself and in moments of soul-searching was ashamed of his life, so similar to that of his friends and acquaintances. Calling a spade a spade, he was a bigamist and an adulterer, which fact could help him in reach­ ing the public, for he certainly was not old-fashioned, yet it was detrimental to his image of himself as a delegate of the forces of good, battling Mordor's dominion.

In his films a murderer is usually surprised that such a thing could happen to him. Me, so good and kind, how could I have done something like that? In such situations it was not difficult to see the director's efforts to cope with his own internal disorder, which he either excluded from moral judgment by spe­cial privilege or, reluctantly, submitted to the exigencies of the Ten Commandments.

What was the meaning of his speaking out against his films? His ideal was simplicity of action combined with the defeat of evil and the triumph of good, of the kind that appeals to chil­dren. Is it not true, he asked, that The Magic Flute is Bergman's best film, and is not this due to the music of Mozart? Yet in his striving toward his ideal of luminosity and simplicity Alas­tor stumbled upon an impassable barrier, as if built into the very technique of the genre he practiced. This astounded and angered him. He even began to suspect that, in a demonic century, works not contaminated by the darkness of Hell are possible as the rarest exceptions only.

Road-side Dog
Czesław Miłosz