I Oversimplify

Stopped by Square Books today on my way to lunch with Tom Franklin. Picked up a book about death. It's by a guy named Terry Eagleton, whose name I mainly recall because Dr. Theresa was reading a lot of his stuff while she was trying to become a Dr. ... So, right away, he refers to the universe as "a Creation not conspicuous for its self-irony," which made me laugh. It also made me think of what the author of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years memorably called "the embarrassing non-sequitur of death." One sentence later, Eagleton calls comedy (I oversimplify) "a capacity of of conceptually sophisticated animals involving a salutary self-distancing unavailable to worms and slugs." I get it!