William and Otzi

In one of those coincidences that make me smile, September 19th is both the birthday of Novel-Prize-winning novelist William Golding (1911, for anyone who's checking) and the anniversary of the discovery of Otzi the ice man (in 1991, for anyone who's checking).  Golding is best known, of course, for his 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies, which I had to read as a junior in high school and which seemed to capture the group dynamics of Catholic school pretty well, I thought; however, he's also the author of a subsequent novel, The Inheritors (1955), which imagines a group of Neanderthals encountering homo sapiens for the first time.  As you might guess if you've read Lord, this encounter does not go well for the Neanderthals.  And if you've followed the Otzi story over the years, then you know that his end now seems to have been a good deal more violent than originally was thought.  One of my former professors spent the day with Golding when he came to read at New Paltz in the late sixties; what this guy most remembered about Golding was his remark that, of all the various doctrines associated with Christianity, Original Sin was about the only one in which he could believe.