WHEN he had tucked his wife, Dame Iris Murdoch, the great novelist, into bed, registering from her expression of sweet content that Dr Alzheimer had been temporarily banished by sleep, John Bayley would go downstairs. There, at the kitchen table, he would pour himself a drink and find a book to read. Among the piles of unwashed plates, papers and pill packets—and, somewhere, a large pork pie which they had put down and never seen again—would be a Jane Austen or a Barbara Pym, well-worn and ever welcome.As he read, though, his thoughts would start to wander, first ambling and then running, like a horse let out in a field. He had held them back all day, of necessity, as Iris had rattled the front door crying to escape, or fought against putting on her shoes. Now he did not resist them. Like the devil Belial in “Paradise Lost”, he surrendered to open-ended daydreaming.For who would loseThough full of pain, this intellectual being,These thoughts that wander through eternity?He was, he supposed, that “intellectual being”, though he made no great play of it. The Warton Professorship of English at Oxford sat on him as lightly as his tattered Oxfam jumpers and caps...
from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1Ch8Nmg
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