A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel
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About this ebook
David Starkey
David Starkey is Honorary Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and the author of many books including ‘Elizabeth’; ‘Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII’ and ‘Monarchy: England and Her Rulers from the Tudors to the Windsors’. He is a winner of the WH Smith Prize and the Norton Medlicott Medal for Services to History presented by Britain’s Historical Association. He is a well-known TV and radio personality. He was made a CBE in 2007. He lives in London.
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A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel - David Starkey
I. Will
Q & A: Will
Q. Did Adam display free will when eating of the Tree of Knowledge?
A. That depends on whom you ask. Hegel was said to be famously bored by the question. Aquinas, in contrast, could hardly think of anything else. In all his voluminous writings, Aristotle, strangely, seems not to have mentioned the First Man at all.
Q. Does Aquinas attribute spontaneity or autonomy to the will?
A. Aquinas is rather too preoccupied by the Almighty to take that tack.
Q. Have you noticed how frequently Schopenhauer returns to the idea that our individual wills can lead us to the Kantian Ding an Sich?
A. Yes, he seems to be obsessed by the topic.
Q. Does Freud use the word will
when analyzing voluntary movements in ideo-motor terms?
A. No, but William James does; he calls this mental picture a kinaesthetic image.
Q. Do animals have free will?
A. No, they do not.
A Few Things You Should Know about the Weasel
It conceives at the mouth. The jack sticks
its long wet tongue down the doe’s throat.
A few months later, she gives birth
through her ears. A kit whelped
from the right ear will be a buck;
the left’s a bitch. A group of weasels
is called a gang. Skilled in medicine,
they revive their freshly killed young
with herbs. They carry the dead
they cannot save on their backs
and bury them in weasel cemeteries.
Above all, they stink. The once proud
basilisk, famed in myth and song,
became extinct after long exposure
to the feculence of weasels, a smell
so foul that Pliny the Elder and Isidore
of Seville vied with one another
to describe its stench in epic similes.
Jamestown
O America, let us celebrate
your miserable beginnings: this feeble fort
thrown up on the banks of a foul, salty river by adventurers hoping to cash in
on a New World they thought would forfeit
its treasures as easily as the whores
of Southwark’s stews surrendered their sweet goods. It didn’t work that way. Gold
was not forthcoming. Imported vines perished,
silkworms shriveled. In their damp lean-tos
the alien men and their few tattered women faced winter and typhoid fever,
dysentery and sloth. The natives were equally
unimpressed by the thatch-roofed church
and the invisible, nugatory god who ruled it.