Phillips' "Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories"

Darwin & Freud

Even after Naomi's description of the text and a lengthy class discussion, I still have a difficult time wrapping my mind around this text. Not that it was particularily dense, but more that I'm feeling tired and particularily dense at this point in the semester.

I felt that Phillips used Darwin's words as a framework to air his own views on death, but that Darwin himself did not necessarily intend for his words to be heard this way.  I was particularily conscious of this as I had to fight against doing so myself - I believe that Darwin, as a biologist (or Naturalist as Stephen pointed out) was genuinely interested in the actions of the animals that he studied.  It was me, and my academic English practice of reading between the lines which kept envisioning the ants and the bees and the butterflies as metaphors for the working class in Darwin's time.  I believe that Darwin had his own hands full with dealing with the role he played in the downfall of the Christian church to really engage in evoking class-warfare at the same time.

The aspect of the Freud dialogue that jumped out the most was simply a reaction to my studies this weei in preparation for my presentation on Virginia Woolf.  Phillips takes time to describe Freud's clinical autobiography, where Freud consciously presented very little of his life as a man, but instead chose to present his life in the context of his achievements.  This directly counters Woolf's feminist approach to validate the small things in a woman's common life, by specifically encouraging the celebration of the personal journal. 

At my core, I believe in evolution.  I believe that what we term devolution, or even unnatural progression (eg technology) is evolution as it is built on every choice made that challenges the innert.  I believe in ongoing personal growth, physical maturity, emotional progress.  I don't think that evolution always has to be deemed an improvement; it just has to be a developmental reaction to preceding factors.  One can develop physically because of personal maturity, one can regress emotionally because of physical developments. 

Works Cited:
Phillips, Adam. Darwin's Worms:  On Life Stories and Death Stories. New York: Basic Book. 2000. Print.