The text of my biography is now as ready, I think, as it’s ever going to be, my approaches to publishers are roughly on course, but I am far behind with my Permissions, and that means with writing my voluminous and hugely important Acknowledgements. (More next time.) We also have to assemble the twenty-six illustrations digitally.
The reason for the delay is that, as I wrote a few weeks ago, I am also working on another book; so altogether, I’ve been working overtime for more weeks that I can now remember. The ‘other’ book I am working on has come about as a result of this one:
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
I was in Waterstones, doing my monthly survey of the biography industry and its publishers, when this small volume caught my eye (the cover is from Rogier van der Weyden’s ‘Portrait of a Woman with a Winged Bonnet’). I’d long been intrigued by Eliot’s quotations from Julian of Norwich in Four Quartets, I thought it was about time I learned more, and I have been impressed by Janina Ramirez on television, so I bought a copy.
It’s a truly fascinating piece of writing. Dame Julian, who is rather convincingly identified here with the noble Norwich lady Julian de Erpingham, may have been an ‘anchoress’ who had died to the world and could only communicate with it from behind a curtain across a window onto the street, but out there, literally only yards from her cell inside the Church of St Julian, the Black Death raged, Lollard ‘heretics’ were burned, and an army of peasants pillaged Norwich. Julian knew medieval reality as deeply as anyone, yet held fast in the midst of it to her vision of God’s love. ‘All shall be well, all shall be well,’ she wrote, ‘and all manner of thing shall be well.’
It will be some time before I read her Revelations of Divine Love, which has been described as the first great work of English prose, but in the meantime I have read Ramirez’s book twice and that should be recommendation enough.
But what particularly struck me was that although a short book (97 pages), S.P.C.K. have published it in hard covers, attractively, and marketed it very well. It suddenly occurred to me that I could shape and hone the transcripts of my recent interviews with John Polkinghorne, 86-year-old mathematical physicist, theologian and Templeton Prize winner, into a narrative of roughly the same length and try it on S.P.C.K. myself. John rose to the challenge (we had previously had a journal publication in mind), so since January we have held six more interviews and I have been labouring away moulding the twelve into five chapters that move somewhere.
The interviews derive from my reading of two books edited and written by John Polkinghorne about ‘eschatology’, i.e. the future of the universe and ‘the doctrine of the last or final matters, such as death, judgement and the state after death’ (Chambers). John, who is a neighbour, suggested I read these books some time ago, and at first I found them ingenious but provocative. It is a matter of different temperaments and, probably, different brain types. But the opportunity to argue with one of the finest minds of the day is never to be turned down. I have about another fortnight’s work to do on this short (30,000-word) book, which has been provisionally entitled What Can We Hope For? Dialogues about the Future.
Someone asked me what our conversations were about. ‘Eschatology,’ I said. ‘Escapology?!’ she exclaimed. Er, well, may be..!
How interesting! I used a quotation from John Polkinghorne only last week, in a lecture in Venice (in a stunning lecture room on the Grand Canal – it can be hard being an academic!). The idea is that in linguistics we need baselines to measure from, just as normally we measure, say, length from zero. If you set up several such measures, which is the Canonical Typology enterprise, there may be no actual attested example that meets them all. That troubles some people, but it shouldn’t. … after all, this is part of a much more general issue:
“… there are so many more ways of being disorderly than there are of being orderly, so that disarray wins hands down.”
John Polkinghorne. Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction
Dear Grev, thanks so much for this! Venice is, of course, the ‘Siberia posting’ for academics and you have my every sympathy. The Canonical Typology enterprise is new to me and your explanation most interesting. JP is apt to bring in the ‘second law of thermodynamics’ as he sees it when one is least expecting it. In our current project it takes this form: ‘In the end, disorder always, always wins. The waters of chaos rise, and disorder wins the day.’ I think his ‘Very Short Introduction’ to quantum theory is brilliant. I’ve read it twice and still don’t understand it!
It could have been worse – she might have exclaimed “Scatology?” or “Holy Crap!”
More seriously, it does sound very interesting – and an example of where a bookshop and a good dose of curiosity can take you. Keep going and good luck with it all.
I hadn’t heard of Janina Ramirez until I saw the first of her and Alastair Sooke’s ‘Art Lovers’ Guide’ series, currently on BBC4. This dealt with Amsterdam and was very impressive. Unlike many ‘cultural tour guides’ on TV she clearly knows her subject inside out. Her enthusiasm for Renaissance era books was particularly infectious. Now I’m looking forward to viewing the second programme, on Barcelona, recorded on Monday. Next week the series closes with St Petersburg, which I’m guessing should be a treat for both of us.