Pippa Middleton, I learnt from the Daily Telegraph, has a ‘passion’ for writing. Justin Welby, the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the BBC said, has a ‘passion for resolving conflict’. The Times, in a piece about entrepreneurs, quoted a lawyer as saying: ‘Passion is very, very important.’
Can any of this be true? Certainly not if passion is meant in the pleasantly old-fashioned sense found in Alice. Tweedledum points at his broken rattle, saying: ‘Do you see THAT?’ in a voice ‘choking with passion’. Humpty Dumpty accuses Alice of listening at doors, ‘breaking into a sudden passion’. It was a nursery emotion 150 years ago, and would not help in resolving conflicts, writing books or starting a business.
Oddly enough, Lewis Carroll had an older sense of passion in his mind as he wrote Through the Looking Glass.
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