QI The Book of the Dead

slept on a hard bed and suffered from bad dreams and loud snoring (‘If a Bentham does not snore,’ he said, ‘he’s not legitimate.’). By day his favourite pastime was badminton – then known as ‘battledore’ where the players simply kept the shuttlecock in the air for the highest number of hits possible. In Bentham’s lifetime, a Somerset family set the record, managing 2,117. He was also one of the first ‘joggers’, startling people by suddenly taking off at high speed while walking in London parks, or in his garden on what he called ‘ante-prandial circumgyrations’. He once confessed he couldn’t swim or whistle, but ‘saw no reason to complain’.
    As he got older, his eccentricities multiplied. He kept two walking sticks, Dapple and Dobbin. On meeting friends he would use one or other of these to tap them on the shoulders, in mock knighthoods. He also had a ‘sacred teapot’ called Dickey which he referred to as a pet. His (real) pet pig allegedly shared his bed for a time, and he was also fond of cats, in particular a tom cat called Langhorne that he referred to as ‘Sir John’ for several years, before redesignating him as a vicar to be addressedas ‘The Reverend John Langhorne’. His collection of mice ran wild in his office, destroying manuscripts and terrifying guests. ‘I love anything with four legs!’ he proclaimed. Bentham’s house had once belonged to John Milton, to whom he erected a plaque in the garden calling him the ‘Prince of Poets’, though he personally found poetry a ‘misapplication of time’. ‘Prose’, he said, ‘is when all the lines except the last go on to the margin. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.’ It’s hard to know whether he was employing the same dry wit when he wrote to London City Council asking if he could replace the shrubs beside his driveway with mummified corpses, which he said would be ‘more aesthetic than flowers’. This idea was developed further in his book Auto-Icon; or Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living in which he proposed the wholesale transformation of corpses into varnished garden ornaments. On the basis that this suggestion was unlikely to enhance his reputation, his literary executors delayed its publication until a decade after his death.
    Bentham liked a joke, but his writing on the Auto-Icon can’t simply be dismissed as either a prank or the onset of dementia. His value as a philosopher was in his unswerving application of the principle of utility. Death, then as now, was a taboo, steeped in fear and religious superstition. Burying corpses and letting them rot in the ground seemed to him wasteful, repugnant and unhygienic. Graveyards had been fearful places to him since childhood. He recalled going through one at night, his heart ‘going pit-a-pat all the while, and I fancied I saw a ghost perched on every tombstone’. The Auto-Icon solved both problems at once. It made death useful, offering the safe disposal of corpses, while providing a permanent memorial to the dead person. Bentham’s own Auto-Icon at University College is the perfectEnlightenment object, a triumph for rationalism, materialism and utilitarianism, and a rejection of fear, superstition and the tyranny of the Church. The fact that it is also very odd and faintly off-putting somehow seems entirely in character with its inventor:
    Twenty years after I am dead, I shall be a despot, sitting in my chair with Dapple in my hand, and wearing one of the coats I wear now .
     
    Bentham’s publicly displayed three-dimensional version of the afterlife might not shine with the mystic intensity of Blake’s, but starting from opposite ends of the spiritual spectrum, they both ended in the same place. Both had faith in the power of their own imaginations. Both used their imaginations to release themselves from the old myths of heaven and hell that had so tormented Ann Lee and, in the process, both made themselves feel a lot happier about dying.

     
    Practical philosophy and mystical visions come together neatly in the life of the American architect, inventor, poet, philosopher, author, teacher, entrepreneur, artist and mathematician, Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983). He was also preoccupied with salvation, both individual and collective. ‘We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully, nor for much longer, unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody,’ he