Christmas 2016 (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, December 27, 2016, 13:09 (2887 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: It was between Christmas and the New Year three years ago that my wife – who had a terminal form of cancer – suffered two strokes, the second of which left her totally unconscious. She died on 8 January. (In an unforgettable gesture of friendship and empathy, David and his wife came to England from the States to attend her funeral.) The grief is as low as emotion can reach.

DAVID: ….During that terrible time we had worked on a book together that he had proposed to me as author and he as editor. I agreed and then found out how tough he is as editor, but I persevered and it was created while she was fighting her cancer and published before her death. We had to come to the funeral.
Susan and I plan, if ever on the way to somewhere European, we will stop in Taunton to renew our friendship personally. That is a requirement. In the meantime I do not plan to stop the theological battle, of course, in the friendliest of fashions.

With regard to your book, I took it as a great compliment that you invited me to be your editor, but I hope you will agree that my “tough editing” was devoted solely to the cause of honing your own arguments, and never to imposing my own agnostic counters. In its final form, The Atheist Delusion seems to me to offer as powerful a case as one could muster in its quest to “arm the believer with accurate scientific information to counter the claims of atheism”. My objections, of course, are the subject matter of our battles on this forum, but the battles are indeed tempered by great affection and respect, and it would give me enormous pleasure if you and Susan were to return to Taunton to share the celebration of birth rather than the lamentation of death. But oh, make haste!

One Moment in Annihilation's Waste,
One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste -
The Stars are setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing - Oh, make haste!

(Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám)