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'As a medical practitioner, Peter Goldsworthy has been confronted, all too frequently, with human suffering, morbidity and mortality: he wrestles with their existential meaning in his poetry, essays and stories. Death, in Goldsworthy's works, is ubiquitous: it becomes an engine for tension between belief and scepticism, for contention between the legacy of his childhood Methodism and his professional grounding in scientific method. Goldsworthy describes incidents and presents arguments which explore the feasibility that we are not ephemeral but potentially eternal: séances and hoped-for hauntings; near-death experiences ... explained physiologically; cloned Tasmanian tigers, and a doctor's self-insemination with the DNA of Jesus; God-centred science fiction, and a convincing postulate for resurrection expressed in the language of mathematics and quantum mechanics. Detached and irreverent, Goldsworthy dissects and analyses, but avoids circumscription or dogmatism. He desires, at best, some proof that there is a dimension beyond the physical; he feels some sadness that a scientific mind is deprived of a certainty of the metaphysical; and he expresses hope that "perhaps, just perhaps ..."' (Author's abstract).
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 31 Oct 2011 16:05:11
257-273
Metaphysician: Trying to Read Peter Goldsworthy's Prescription
Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Subjects:
- Honk If You Are Jesus 1992 single work novel
- Everything I Knew : A Novel 2008 single work novel
- Three Dog Night 2003 single work novel
- Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam 1993 single work short story
- Death and the Comedian 1993 single work criticism biography
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