Until I read Ruth Padel’s Darwin: A Life in Poems (which I cannot recommend too highly) I had not fully understood the effect that his wife’s Christian faith had on him
I never bought the idea that this was just the superstitious beliefs of a silly woman standing in the way of scientific progress
Darwin himself wrote about how difficult he found it to write a coherent argument, rather than just a narrative or factual account of his observations & experiences
In the context of Ruth Padel’s poems, Charles & Emma’s own words have tremendous impact
Charles, when considering the future:
Sometimes I see ahead a cottage of rusty brick
hiding in light green, & before it some white thing
like a petticoat – which drives the forms of granite clean
out of my head in the most unphilosophical manner
Charles again, soon after marriage:
………. I cannot say how happy
you make me in this one, nor how dearly I l love you
Emma, approaching her first confinement (¬ long after the death in childbirth of)
I should be most unhappy if I thought
we would not belong to each other for eternity
because if Charles did not have faith he would not make it to heaven
Charles kept this letter & left it where Emma would be sure to find it when he died
….. When I am dead, know
I have kissed & cried over this many times
It says much for Darwin’s intellectual honesty that he did not consider Pascal’s wager a solution to this predicament
