Iris Murdoch

A slightly mad and very brilliant New Zealander I respected hugely, as one must such people, introduced me to her work. All through college I thought the world of her and read plenty of her books. Then, a few years after graduating, I completely lost interest, to the point of not clearly recalling my previous fondness. It happened right in the middle of *The Green Knight*, as I remember. A college friend once summed up the entirety of Murdoch's work as "secret Jews and surprising homosexuals." Yup, I thought, as I closed the book and put it in the pile to return to the library, and she has already done the one where the secret Jew *was* the surprising homosexual.

So today, casting about on the Internet, I find this quote by Iris Murdoch from an interview with Sarah Booth Conroy, published in the Washington Post in March of 1990.

"One of the problems in life is to distinguish between demons, magic, and God."

Yup. I very much like that she said that.