Book of the Week: TERRIER, WORRIER by Anna Jackson
Thought takes place wherever it finds purchase, which, if you think about it, is pretty much everywhere. When we stand in the centre of our personal worlds we stand also in the centre of our thoughts, which stretch to the edges of our awareness and contain others who seem to us also to think. What are the thoughts like of these others? How do the thoughts of animals, for instance, differ from or suggest themselves to be similar to our own thoughts, and what could this difference or similarity tell us not only about what thought could be but also about what makes a person, and who or what else, apart from us, might be persons? Anna Jackson’s very enjoyable and thought-provoking book blends domestic circumstance, scientific factoids, hens, and philosophical conundra into a kind of thought generator, spilling thought, both Jackson’s and the reader’s own, in a way that makes it pleasurably impossible to tell which is which. Terrier, Worrier demonstrates the benefits of including the associative method of poetry alongside the Socratic method and the scientific method as useful modes of seeking knowledge of our world. {T}
Lucy’s weekend reading.