![]() ![]() Abandoning a youthful vocation as a poet and scholar, he drifted into becoming manager for his actress wife. His life has been a jumble of notions arrogantly expounded and entirely without practical effect. Unwin has never followed an idea as far as the corner. A man, he marvels, can give up all the attachments and comforts of a life to follow an idea. To Bill Unwin, a dilettante and something of an academic fraud-his university post was in effect paid for by his stepfather, an American plastics manufacturer-the journal is a revelation. He breaks with his devout wife and his father-in-law-a kindly ditherer and avid beekeeper-sails for America and is drowned en route. As long as God was just, it didn’t matter so much whether He existed now, Matthew announces himself as a Darwin disciple. The seed sprouts only when his baby son dies. “It was the moment of my unbelief,” he writes in his journal. Years before, he had stumbled upon an ichthyosaurus skull. The father seemed to be manufacturing “this vital stuff called time, this stuff which Matthew still thought of as being essentially human in meaning, the companion and guardian of human affairs.”īut Matthew was carrying a seed of doubt. ![]()
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