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Francis Bacon
The eccentric tale of Bacon’s death through pneumonia
contracted while trying, in the interests of science, to bugger a recently
plucked chicken with fresh snow, is worthy of the imagination of a Borges.
Take this as praise and not a burial. The incident tells us as much about
this brilliant, charming and tormented (or as tormented as any Renaissance
adventurer could be) individual as any of his writings. Indeed it summarizes much of
the extraordinary spirit that inflamed England during the reigns of
Elizabeth and James I.
Extraordinarily the story of Bacon's death is sorely
rivaled by the circumstances of his marriage at the age of 45 to the 14-year
old Alice Barnham, his own personal Abishag. The best part is the senior
citizen married the nubile teen for her money. This man is my hero.
Those like
me who have been brought up to believe that Bacon was no more than an
anti-scholastic fulminator, a sort of intellectual Jacobin avant la
lettre, will be pleasantly surprised. It is hard to tell what is more
exciting, his pyrotechnic mastery of English prose whereby one quotable
quote follows another, the sheer flood of ideas, observations, witticisms
and wisecracks that tumble from his quill (Internal consistency be damned!), or
the excitement of being in a world where there was so much to discover and
so much to think about. Montaigne and Bacon give us an idea what the
Renaissance must have been like, how the world must have felt rich and new
with the pleasure of discovery around every corner. In this respect Bacon
compares favorably with the next generation. Descartes and Hobbes were much
more focused and eventually much more intellectually respectable. But they
were a lot less fun.
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Bacon on Atheism
The New Organon
The Major Works
Bacon and Descartes on a New Beginning
The Virgin of the World
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