Terry Eagleton's Blog, page 8

Obituary: Charles Swann

He took his Cambridge finals on the carpet, too, by himself, in a room where I was his personal invigilator. Having started him off, I slipped out to the pub for half an hour, only to find myself the target of his wrath at the end of the exam for the gross insensitivity of choosing a pub where the two of us normally drank together.

Charles was erudite, combative, searingly truthful and endlessly kind. Though he was in almost constant pain, he disdained, for the most part, to mention the fact. He died as he had lived: bravely, selflessly, realistically.

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Terry Eagleton: The Pope has blood on his hands

The Pope did great damage to the church, and to countless Catholics

What was needed for this task was someone well-trained in the techniques of the cold war. As a prelate from Poland, Wojtyla hailed from what was probably the most reactionary national outpost of the Catholic church, full of maudlin Mary-worship, nationalist fervour and ferocious anti-communism. Years of dealing with the Polish communists had turned him and his fellow Polish bishops into consummate political operators. In fact, it turned the Polish church into a set-up that was, at times, not easy to distinguish from the Stalinist bureaucracy. Both institutions were closed, dogmatic, censorious and hierarchical, awash with myth and personality cults. It was just that, like many alter egos, they also happened to be deadly enemies, locked in lethal combat over the soul of the Polish people.

Aware of how little they had won from dialogue with the Polish regime, the bishops were ill-inclined to bend a Rowan-Williams-like ear to both sides of the theological conflict that was raging within the universal church. On a visit to the Vatican before he became Pope, the authoritarian Wojtyla was horrified at the sight of bickering theologians. This was not the way they did things in Warsaw. The conservative wing of the Vatican, which had detested the Vatican Council from the outset and done its utmost to derail it, thus looked to the Poles for salvation. When the throne of Peter fell empty, the conservatives managed to swallow their aversion to a non-Italian pontiff and elected one for the first time since 1522.

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So, I went to see this man about a donkey ...

Terry Eagleton had always wanted a donkey. Finally, after weeks of searching, he went to buy one from an Irish farmer. But instead of returning in the saddle, he came home in an ambulance

It happened on the day I went to see a man about a donkey. In Ireland, where I live, donkeys are nowadays purely decorative, having long since been overtaken by the diesel engine. For me, however, their pointlessness simply adds to their modest, moth-eaten charm, so when I was offered one as a birthday present by my partner I was delighted to accept. They are, however, notoriously hard creatures to come by, even in a country where they have been in constant use since Roman times. (Part of their usefulness in Ireland comes from the fact that they put their feet down in a way that creates a gliding motion effective on bog land.) So I took to scouring the advertisements in the agricultural press, familiarising myself with jargon as esoteric as literary theory: "Quiet brown four-year-old for sale, running with jack and filly foal at foot."

After a few fruitless weeks, I began to wonder whether I might have to join a party of donkey adopters on a trip to some Chinese orphanage. We might have to promise not to give our beasts western, imperial-sounding names, and allow them to nurture their roots in their indigenous donkey culture.

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