A Villainous Post

I just wrapped up a season of fantasy baseball in a position typical for me: I finished 6th out of 8. I’ve loved playing this game for the last thirty years, but I’m so bad at it! I think the problem breaks down into three parts. (Thanks for reading while I work out my frustration in print!) First, I have a stubborn loyalty to ideas that I think ought to work, even if statistics suggest otherwise. Second, and maybe this is the same thing, I’m a slow learner: if I don’t see some relationship or pattern, memorizing a formula doesn’t work for me until I can finally internalize the reason for the formula. And I usually have to try something over and over and make, in my estimation, a hundred mistakes before the right way really settles into my brain. Third, fantasy baseball essentially boils down to having a drafting strategy in March and then watching for six months to see how that strategy works. It takes way too long for me to make my hundred mistakes in a game in which each turn lasts a year!

Yes, I’m a slow learner. It seems I’m often confessing my weaknesses in these posts, things about literature or the life and people and ideas depicted in that literature that didn’t really make sense to me until I was over 50 . . . or 60 . . . or 65. A few months ago, I wrote about realism in some heroines that many people don’t think are realistic. Today I want to write about realism in a villain that I didn’t really understand as realistic until just two days ago. I just finished C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet for the third time. I probably read it for the first time when I was about 20. The book has two villains: Devine, who wants to exploit Malacandra (we know it as Mars) because its abundant gold will bring him power on Earth, and Weston, who doesn’t care a fig for any single human being but wants Humanity with a capital H to survive forever by taking over the galaxy, even if that means killing sentient extraterrestrials. It’s Weston I want to talk about today. (I think I understood greed even when I was 20.)

To be fair to my younger self, the villains of my childhood and youth were all exaggerations. Snidely Whiplash (from Dudley Do-Right) and Dick Dastardly (from Wacky Races) took what were already exaggerations from melodrama and cartoonified them. The Joker and the Riddler (either the comic-book versions or the TV versions) could be taken either as mere personifications of weird ideas or as caricatures of serial killers. I’m not sure I ever took an outlaw from Cisco Kid or Gunsmoke seriously enough to think of him as a depiction of a character from life. Of course there were mad scientists, swamp creatures, the Blob, Frankenstein’s monster, Wells’s (and Welles’s) Martians, and other imaginative antagonists that didn’t appear anything like realistic to me. Then when I was 18, I met Darth Vader; it never occurred to me then even to wonder whether the man in the spacesuit who spoke while his machinery breathed for him and choked underlings with a hand gesture was realistic. Even the very idea of a villain, a character who constantly goes about trying to do harm to a given person or group, seemed to me more like a plot device than a realistic human being. I didn’t know anyone like that. Even the bullies at school just sat around being bewildered most of the time and only occasionally thought that abusing me might be fun. It wasn’t until I started reading lots of Dickens (I’m sorry I always seem to get around to him!) that I found out that a villain in a story might be something as mundane as a businessman who cares more about continuous profit than the well-being of his neighbor. It probably helped that I started paying attention to the news in the 1980s and learned about blackguards like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken.

Back to Lewis. Weston is taken by the Malacandrians (who are good, unfallen creatures) to meet Oyarsa, who is, as I understand it, the angel of the planet. He sees people living simply and assumes they are uncivilized and ignorant and superstitious. He hears the unbodied voice of Oyarsa and assumes a witch-doctor must be using ventriloquism. He identifies someone he believes to be the shaman (actually an old creature who has merely fallen asleep) and tries to tempt him with a cheap necklace from Woolworth’s. He dances around shouting “Pretty! Pretty!” to all the other creatures while trying to get them interested in the plastic baubles. All of this display only makes the Malacandrians laugh. I think I thought I was supposed to laugh at the ludicrous character myself. In an angrier mood, he tells them they have no idea who they’re dealing with and that if they don’t do as he says, “Me go Poof! Bang! and you dead!” You don’t understand the primitive mind, he tells his fellow earthlings when they urge him to stop. All of this looked to me like it came straight out of the recipe book for fictional bad guys, not out of observations from life. It was reasonable but inexperienced of me to think this way: I had read about people like Weston in stories and seen characters like him in movies, but I had never met anyone who did or said these things in real life.

But the other day, it occurred to me that I had actually known many people like Weston. Take out the details of the dance and the cheap necklace and the threat with the gun (I thank God I’ve never had to deal with that threat in real life!), and Weston is completely recognizable. He assumes he is the smartest person in any group he finds himself in. He assumes that a simple life, or any life unlike his own, indicates stupidity. He assumes a stupid person is of inferior worth. He thinks of all relationships in terms of strength and weakness, winning and losing. He cares only about his own wishes and believes he can manipulate anyone by means of his superior skills into suiting those wishes; if he ever thinks about the others’ wishes that he is violating, it’s only to think that their wishes don’t matter as much as his on some objective cosmic scale. And yet for all his supposed superiority he depends on tools – guns and trinkets – to get his way. I’ve known many people like Weston. I’ve worked with them. I’ve had Thanksgiving dinners with them. I’m sorry to say I’ve gone to church with them. It was an amazing, awesome, satisfying, revealing, sad, powerful moment when I suddenly found, in the middle of a fantasy about space travel, a stark bit of earthly realism.

Furiously Taking Notes on Orlando

I’ve written before about the importance of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso to my reading project. I wish I remembered what work by C. S. Lewis mentioned Orlando and made me want to read the classics that the good professor knew so well. But I do remember the exact spot I was standing on – on a sidewalk in Norman, Oklahoma – when I read the Lewis passage. And I remember how excited I was when I finally got to Orlando a few years later and found that it was indeed worth reading. My only regret about my first encounter is that I read the epic over six years, one sixth of the long work each year. This time through, I’m reading it in thirds. The next go around, I’ll probably read half of it at a time.

Reading a third of it in the last two or three weeks makes me realize that the plot is more tightly constructed than I previously thought. There are lots of cuts from one strand of the tale to another and many groups of characters that meet or get separated while wandering in the woods, narrative devices that give the book a feeling of being only a wobbly web of randomly arranged episodes. But when the girl captured by pirates in canto XIII finds her lost love in canto XXIII, you know Ariosto sees the connections between all the parts. In canto XXII, when Ruggiero and Bradamante are freed from their magical illusion, see each other clearly, and kiss again for the first time in a long time, only then to be separated when Bradamante runs into the woods after Pinabello, who stole her horse in canto III, you know Ariosto has a plan. 

So I’m taking lots of notes – some in a separate file, some in the margins of the book itself – to help me when I read Orlando a third time: notes like, “This is the letter Ruggiero wrote in XXV, 85-92.” Supposedly contemporary readers or listeners had no trouble keeping track of the multitudinous threads. The poem is written in 46 cantos, and it helped me a lot to realize a few years ago that it must have felt then like a 46-episode television series. Just as any one episode of LOST or Stranger Things or Rings of Power cuts abruptly from one subplot to another, and just as some subplots in any of those series are sometimes set aside for a couple of episodes, and just as a guest character in season 1, episode 4, may return and become a major character in season 2, episode 7, so Ariosto juggles his storylines and hits on two or three in each canto. But I have my own issues with attention, and I live in an age of video, and it’s harder for me to keep track of it all when I’m reading than it is when I’m watching – and it’s pretty hard for me when I’m watching, to begin with! I’ve tried different methods of keeping notes on Renaissance epics before. I made a giant spreadsheet for Faerie Queene, but I decided it didn’t do much good after all that time compiling it. For Orlando Furioso, besides my marginal notes, I’m writing a canto-by-canto summary as well as character-by-character synopses. It helped immensely to keep referring to the ones from last year as I read this year’s third of the work. So I’m hoping it will all help me keep the storylines straight the third time I read Orlando. But I have to say that I love every bit of storytelling that happens in Orlando Furioso, even when I’ve forgotten the context.

As I was writing this post, I started thinking, “Will I ever read Orlando a fourth time?” Then I had a curious thought that, if I get the chance to know someday that I’m in the process of dying, I might want to comfort some of my hours with Ariosto’s great poem. When my dad was dying of cancer, he wanted me to read Dickens’s Little Dorrit to him, just because it was the last Dickens book he had obtained. (I had given it to him the previous Christmas.) I already know that if I find myself in that situation, I’m going to have one of my kids, or maybe my grandson, read Dombey and Son to me. But I may want to give Orlando some time, too. I guess it’s a version of the desert island question: if you knew you had six months to live and felt too weak to hold the book yourself, what book would you want a loved one to read to you? You can let me know if you come up with an answer.

By the way, I reached the part this year where Orlando becomes furioso. He’s been in love with Angelica since the beginning. But I’m giving the plot away and telling you right now: if you ever read this book, don’t waste any time hoping that 1500 pages later Lando and Angie will get together and live happily ever after. Halfway through the epic, just before she leaves the tale forever and Ariosto tells us he’s glad to be rid of her, Angelica runs off with a fellow named Medoro. They carve their names in entwined knots on trees and leave notes in caves telling the world how much they love each other (and how much fun they had in the cave). Orlando sees it all and goes crazy. Whatever will Charlemagne do now that he’s lost his greatest paladin? Will Paris survive? Or will history change? Everything up to this point including enchanted castles and magic shields has been absolutely historical, of course. But maybe Ariosto wants to veer into alternative history now and let the Saracens take the French capital. Or maybe Astolfo will ride a hippogriff to the moon to search for Orlando’s lost wits! 

Selected Literary Essays, part II

I introduced this topic last time. So I’ll just jump in to the review this time, starting with some scattered notes on various essays, moving into a topic that ties together three essays and leads to a point personally very satisfying, and ending with a point quite unsatisfactory.

In “Variation in Shakespeare,” Lewis points to passages in the Bard’s work in which one metaphor tumbles forth after another, all basically saying the same thing. Cleopatra says of Antony, “His legs bestrid the ocean; his rear’d arm / Crested the world; his voice was propertied / As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends.” Each of the three sentences essentially says, “He was more a Titan than a human.” For me, the most interesting point Lewis makes out of this observation is that the variation technique allows Shakespeare to write beautiful poetry and yet create realistic, deep characters. Speaking one great poetic line sounds forced, but speaking several poetic lines saying the same thing sounds like an imaginative mind trying to find the right metaphor off the cuff.

Speaking of Shakespeare’s characters, in “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?” Lewis complains that critics told his college-age self that true enjoyment of the play required appreciation of the characters, while he wanted to continue to enjoy the ghost and the poison that he enjoyed when he was a child. In “The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version,” a topic he was asked to speak on, Lewis disappointed his orginal audience by saying that there is none: the Bible has influened literature to be sure, but any element of a particular translation, even the AV (i.e. King James), that finds its way into non-Biblical literature is a knowing reference, not an indication that the translation’s vocabulary or grammar has worked its way into the English language. In “Sir Walter Scott,” he says that the novels shine because they created, for the first time in literature, the feeling for period, even with all their anachronistic mistakes. 

In two essays near the end, “Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism” and “The Anthropological Approach” Lewis makes essentially the same point. Scholars from nonliterary fields had started explaining  literature (explaining it away, really), claiming that they had discovered what hadn’t been understood before. Freud said all literature is “just” competition with the father and sexual desires too shocking to be admitted; anthropologists said it’s all “just” a reworking of primitive myths. To Freud Lewis argues (1) that people aren’t really all that shocked at sexual desires anymore and (2) that sexual desire is one of the most boring topics in literature. To the anthropologists he says that the stories of the Holy Grail are exciting and mysterious and have captured imaginations for centuries, while the Celtic cauldron myth they trace it to is simplistic and has fallen out of all interest for anyone but anthropologists. To both he says that literature is so much more interesting and so much more varied than any of their supposedly exciting sources. Maybe those things are truly in or behind or under literature, he argues, but literature can’t be “just” that, or we wouldn’t be so devoted to it. I wrestled with some people who tried to take away the legitimacy of my field of scholarship, as well, so I sympathized with Lewis as he battled bravely against the barbarian invaders!

In some post from the last year or two, I said that I enjoyed poetry partly by listening (even when I read it to myself) to the conflict of the underlying meter and the actual rhythm of a line. I may even have admitted that I sometimes read a line with the meter clearly accented – to BE or NOT to BE, that IS the QUES-tion – and try to follow with an inner ear the way the line would be read if it were just a bit of prose. Sometimes I go the other way: I read the line naturally while attempting to keep some internal click marking off the longs in the feet. I know I said that I was unsure that my way of understanding the issue had any true validity, that perhaps I was just trying to impose an idea of musical meter and syncopated rhythm into a place it doesn’t belong. Well, in three essays on meter in poetry, Lewis affirmed my view. In “The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line,” he says that, while all meter allows for play between the paradigm (i.e. the pattern of metrical feet) and the natural pronunciation, "the decasyllabic" (i.e. iambic pentameter) allows the most. "Hence all poetry in this metre has to be read with what we may call ‘double audition'." Wait! Did he just say what I think he said? I had to wait a few essays to find out!

In “Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century” (I really should read some of Donne’s love poetry!), Lewis says that most modern readers, including every last one of his students, do not know how to scan. I first thought he meant scan with sophistication. But, no: he meant that they didn’t understand meter at all. All their teachers had decided that meter was a pointless distraction, so they didn’t teach it. Then, in the simply titled “Metre,” he picks up that point again and furthers it. Students are missing out on so much by not knowing how to scan the meter in a line! Meter, he says, is only interesting if the actual line goes against the paradigm (five iambic feet, for instance) with some frequency. There are two main schools of performing poetry with these contradictions (what I think of as syncopations): Minstrels sing the paradigm and leave the listener to imagine the rhythms of ordinary speech, while Actors offer the rhythm and tempo of ordinary speech and leave the listener to imagine the meter. "Scansion is the conformity, made audible by Minstrels and concealed by Actors, of the individual line to this paradigm." Amazing! Not only did he say that I was right to hear two different levels of rhythm in a line of poetry, but he even gave names to my two ways of reading: sometimes I’m a Minstrel and sometimes I’m an Actor!

Well, I’ve covered the scattered notes and the satisfying point. Now it’s time for the disappointment. In “High and Low Brows,” Lewis spends some time on what he calls “style,” which, he says, is the ability to use exactly the right word or turn of phrase to make a mountain in the description seem unlike any other mountain, to make a sunset look to the reader like a particular sunset on a particular evening, and so on. Then – brace yourselves – he throws in the gratuitous remark that Dickens has “detestable” problems with style. *uggh* I can hardly type the words. But Lewis can’t have meant it! I don’t believe that he praises G. K. Chesterton’s wisdom in any other book as much as he does in Selected Literary Essays, and Chesterton called Dickens “the last of the Great Men.” Surely Lewis agrees!

Surely!

Selected Literary Essays, part I

In 2002, I had the great privilege of attending and presenting at the two-week C. S. Lewis Summer Institute in Oxford and Cambridge, England. I could talk to you for two weeks about the experiences I had. I could mention meeting Barbara Reynolds – Dorothy L. Sayers’s secretary – for the first time, when she walked up to me without knowing me, put her hand on my chest, and asked, “Have thought about what your legacy should be?” I could tell you about the more-than-disappointing showing at my session, in which all three people present simply sat at a table, and I read to the session chair and the other presenter, after which the other presenter read to the chair and me.

But for today’s purposes, I just want to say a bit about two dramatic presentations by the marvelous David Payne. One evening we enjoyed Mr. Payne performing his one-man C. S. Lewis show in a two-act play written by himself called “An Evening with C. S. Lewis.” The stage was set with two chairs and a little table. Lewis said hello to us and welcomed us all in to his sitting room at The Kilns and apologized that his brother Warnie had just stepped out to the pub to buy some beer to bring home. (Warnie never got back.) For about forty-five minutes, Lewis told us various details of his life, concentrating on his conversion to Christianity. After an intermission, he came back, apologized about Warnie taking so long, and proceeded to tell us the story of Joy Davidman, whom he married while she was in a hospital battling cancer. For some reason, I had trouble seeing Lewis clearly starting about halfway through this second act; his face wouldn’t hold still but seemed to wave as if I were seeing him through water. Must have been the humidity. I’ve said somewhat recently on a post here that there was a time in my life when I considered Lewis my only friend. After the show, I went up to Mr. Payne and thanked him for letting me spend an evening with my friend.

On another occasion, Mr. Payne went to the pulpit in St. Mary’s Church, Oxford, to deliver the inaugural address that Lewis delivered upon starting his second job, as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. The speech, entitled “De descriptione temporum,” or “On the Description of the Times,” spent a bit exploring the sense in which the Middle Ages and the Renaissance indeed go together without a great dividing point between them and then proceeded to look for actually dividing points in western history. Lewis posited that the greatest historical division lay not between Roman civilization and barbarism, not between a medieval “Age of Faith” and a modern “Age of Science” or “Age of Reason,” but somewhere between Jane Austen and the time of the speech, 1954. The division, he says, lay between a culture of belief and a culture of disbelief. His argument was so startling and yet so clear, there was one moment when several people in the audience (congregation?) audibly gasped, not, as people usually gasp, in reaction to the scandalous, but in shock as the scales fell from our eyes.

When I got home I immediately went to the library and checked out a collection called Selected Literary Essays, which begins with “De descriptione temporum” and includes several other of Lewis’s professional essays, none of which, I believe, are included in the collections of essays put out by Christian publishing houses (God in the Dock, Christian Reflections, etc.). I was excited to dive into this part of my friend’s life, but found that, since I didn’t know enough of the literature he wrote about, I couldn’t understand much. So I read the essays on Austen and Shakespeare and returned the book.

Last month, twenty-three years later, I read the whole volume. I’m pleased to report that I’ve read quite a bit more and as a result understood quite a bit more of the book this time – not everything by all means, but more. As this introduction has taken up enough space, I’ll call it “part I” and go into more details on the book in the next post.

Conversations with an Old Friend

I don’t think I’ve ever explained in these posts the significance of C. S. Lewis to me. I first encountered Lewis in a comic-book version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that appeared serially in a Sunday School magazine I once subscribed to. I was about twelve years old, and I wasn’t sure I liked the book. I was, however, sure that the title was the worst I’d ever heard!

My deeper contact with the professor occurred when I went to college and saw all the pastel-colored paperbacks from Macmillan on the bookshelves of all my Christian friends. The uniformity of the set appealed to me as much as anything else, and under the confidence that I could in fact judge a book (or set of books) by its cover, I bought a copy of the set for myself: The Problem of Pain, The Abolition of Man, and others.

Now to take a step back, while many young products of Christian homes turn sixteen and discover that they don’t believe anymore, I turned sixteen and discovered that my pastor didn’t believe anything. Churches were then divided for me into Those With Pastors Who Believe and Those With Pastors Who Don’t. Somewhat naturally thinking, “What’s the point?” about the second category, I looked for a church from the first to attend. Here were unwavering believers, and I felt more comfortable in that way. But they were also a bit . . . underinfluenced by education. It was a routine occurrence, for instance, for someone reading the Bible aloud to stumble over names and (the inevitable sequel to the tongue twisting) for everyone to join the reader in laughing the problem away breezily.

Everyone but me that is. I couldn’t figure out how people of The Book could laugh about illiteracy. But I remembered that God chose the foolish things of this world to confound the wise, and I went on, genuinely admiring their childlike faith while silently ruing their contempt for the medium through which God chose to speak to us.

But to be fair, they couldn’t figure me out, either. They were constantly telling me to get out of my head, quoting Colossians 2:8 at me, and telling me I was too educated and too knowledgeable to lead worship music.

But then I went away to college and met those new friends. These were smart people. They loved and respected education. They had interesting books on their bookshelves. Heck! They had bookshelves! And they loved C. S. Lewis. So I started reading him. And I loved him! I didn’t always agree with his theology, especially when it countered the tenets my friends at the home church drew out of the two dozen verses they knew well, but I admired him because he was intelligent.

After just three semesters I left that university (it’s an ugly story that has to do with a girl – ekkh!) and came back home. And then there I was back at the old church, with the old friends – and my new books. When I asked questions trying to deepen some common facile understanding, my friends continued to look at me as if I were from Mars and kept telling me that things were simpler than I was trying to make them and that I would be Free Indeed if I would only quit thinking. So I learned to stay quiet (well, less vocal), and at times I felt that Lewis was my only friend.

C. S. Lewis was my only friend.

There. I could have said that up front and gone on to talking about recent reading. But I needed to tell that story so that it would make some sense when I said that I’ve had good, edifying conversations with my friend over the decades. I read one of his books, think about things he says, live a Christian life, raise questions, grow in knowledge, and then come back to the same book ten or twenty years later, when I’ve forgotten the details of what he said to me in the first place. And then I find that Lewis responds to some of my new ideas. It’s a slow conversation but a good one.

No doctrine caused me more trouble in the 1970s than prayer. I’ve gone into enough detail for one post, so I’ll just say that (1) I had bad teaching in the 70s that nevertheless seemed unanswerable at the time, (2) I disagreed then with much of what Lewis had to say about prayer, especially in Letters to Malcolm (at last! the real subject of today’s post!), (3) after decades of wrestling, I came up with a better view of prayer (aided by, of all things, a football analogy?!), and (4) Letters to Malcolm made much, much more sense when I reread it last week.

Topics in this fascinating book include reasons for and against prayers written by others, places to pray (a train is good because it has just the right amount of distraction), problems with saying that our prayer changes God’s mind, how big or small an issue should be in order to be brought to God, “festoonings” of the Lord’s Prayer (is this why I did my own back in the 90s?), people thinking wrongly that it is automatically more spiritual to have transactions “opened with prayer,” determinism, the impossibility of knowing if an occurrence is an answer to my prayer or was just going to happen anyway, the good of anxieties as sharing in the sufferings of Christ (“We are Christians, not Stoics”), demythologization simply being a matter of a new mythology, the difficulty of dropping people from prayer lists as we age (that one sure strikes closer to home now more than it did fifty years ago!), holy places as reminders that every place is holy, and more.

Eventually he starts talking about the problems of prayer for people “in our condition,” i.e. intellectuals who can never take things simply. I don’t know if I thought of myself as one of the people in Lewis’s “condition” when I first read it. I may have thought his intellectual status was a quantum leap above mine with a gap between us as wide and unbridgeable as the river between the rich man and Lazarus. Now, while humbly admitting Lewis’s superiority over me in many facets of the intellectual life, I’m comfortable putting myself in the category of people “in our condition.” I mean, if Malcolm with all of his problems can be part of the in crowd, so can I! (Although I don’t believe there ever was a Malcolm corresponding with Lewis about prayer or any other topic.)

I will talk like a fool, though, and say that, for what I believe was the first time, I knew more than Lewis for one brief, shining moment. He says at one point, “We must aim at what St. Augustine (is it?) called ‘ordinate loves.’ ” Yes! I say to my old friend. Of course it’s Augustine!

Experiencing the Past

I’ve written about Edward Rutherfurd’s multi-generational novels a few times before. They can’t be considered classics or Great Books with a capital G and a capital B. But they get me thinking about history and large themes, and so, on the whole, I’ve enjoyed reading them and rereading them. The first of his books that I read was Sarum, which centers on the U.K. area around Stonehenge and the town of Salisbury. I’m rereading it now and don’t like it quite as much this time, and I’m not sure why. I reread London a couple of years ago and loved it. Perhaps my problem lies in the fact that I’m listening to all 50 hours of Sarum in the car, an experience which has taken months. Perhaps it’s simply a consequence of it being Rutherfurd’s first book, before he learned how not to lose the character trees in the historical forest.

But I liked Sarum enough the first time to read several of his other offerings, and I do remember what tickled my fancy so much fifteen or twenty years ago: I’m a sucker for novels that give a sense of a sweep of history, with characters having to deal with, in this case, Saxon invaders, the Plague, the reign of Bloody Mary, and other people and events I’ve read about in histories. C. S. Lewis tells us that what he calls a myth is the only way of getting the reader inside a world so as to feel what it’s like to see things, do things, and believe things beyond our ability to experience. Think about the difference between reading a clinical description of love and the experience of being in love. Huge, right? The shelves are full of descriptions of historical settings, but, without time machines, how can we experience any of those times with an intensity the lover feels? Through stories we can. I can read a history of the Wars of the Roses, but what was it like to live at the time, with neighbors and family taking different sides? Through Rutherfurd’s fictional account of the Wilsons and Shockleys of Salisbury, I can get a taste.

I also enjoy little mentions of things like the source of the name Charing Cross or Shakespeare visiting the town with a group of players. But herein lies the problem. Sometimes in Sarum there are too many mere mentions and not enough storytelling. And sometime the storytelling takes the form of dry narrative exposition rather than that of an interaction of characters. Take the chapter I’m in now, which covers the eighteenth century. We’re told at the beginning that Samuel Shockley lost all of his money in the South Sea Bubble, but then the details of the investments and the crash are all given in past-perfect narrative; we learn practically nothing about Samuel and don’t get inside the story of the ruin by seeing how it affected an individual. (When a novel presents me with more than a couple of sentences in a row in past-perfect tense, I start to get bored. Why is the book telling me about a previous event from the outside instead of placing me in the middle of it?) A little later in the chapter we learn (in the past perfect again) that Thomas Arne has written “Rule, Britannia”; but what was it like to sing that anthem? We learn narratively that the characters read Pope and Johnson and Voltaire, but we don’t experience a scene in which characters talk about this contemporary literature. Did they like it? Agree with it? Understand it? Without the experience, the mention of these authors just seems like name dropping.

OK. So much for me trying to change The Way Novels Are Written. Even if Sarum might have too much exposition, the parts that tell stories about characters do exactly what I want historical fiction to do. The chapter on the first century, for instance, gets me a sense of the experience, like no other book I remember, of what it felt like to live in a Roman outpost town. The chapter about the fifth century sets me down in the middle of a civilization that has a Roman legacy but that has largely accepted Christianity, although the Roman-British Christians in question debate the legitimacy of the theology of Pelagius. And debate it they do. Here Rutherfurd doesn’t just inform us that Pelagius had ideas and Augustine had other ideas; he gives us believable conversations between characters that show how diverging doctrine affected relationships. So maybe the novel isn’t a Great Book with a capital G and a capital B. But experiencing the life of a fifth-century citizen of Roman Britannia is kind of lower-case great.

Moving Wrap-Up

You thought I was promising that this post would be moving? That I was going to jerk tears from your eyes by announcing the wrap-up of the blog? Or the wrap-up of my life?

Nope. It’s a moving post in that we’ve been packing and moving from one end of the country to the other. I’ve barely kept up with my book plan.  Note-taking has mostly fallen by the wayside, and I certainly haven’t had time to arrange my thoughts into a form suitable for public consumption. But I didn’t want to let October go by without a post. So here’s a quick summary of the last six weeks or so.

Because Bruce Schulman keeps putting off the completion of his volume of the Oxford History of the United States, I had to go out of chronological order this year. I jumped from 1896 to 1939 and read David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear. This history of the Great Depression and World War II was excellent: one of the best offerings of the series. If I want to nitpick, I’d say that writing about a period with two “all-time biggest” events left Kennedy little time to talk about movies, literature, radio, schools, sports, etc. I do remember one interesting but brief note about clothing: that is, that skirts themselves became more interesting and brief during the war because of cloth shortages.

On one level, you could say that Trollope’s The American Senator is really about the English characters in the book. The Senator is only there to learn English customs, gather evidence to prove that American customs are superior in every way, and to give a speech in England trying to show its residents how misguided they are in all things. As an observer, he acts outside the main plot(s) and provides a bit of comic relief. But then Trollope did name the book for the Senator. Maybe the author was in a critical mood and thought his compatriots needed a fresh perspective. I also recently read three short stories by Trollope, all involving less-than-proficient writers submitting their creations to magazine editors. Funny and touching.

I loved reading C. S. Lewis’s letters, but I can’t recall many details right now. I know he told several people writing for advice on living as a Christian that they shouldn’t worry at all if their feelings aren’t in line. I’ll try to ignore my feelings about forgetting so much.

I wouldn’t call Zane Grey’s Lone Star Ranger great literature. I think I could call it an exciting adventure if it were cut down by about 20%. But I like Grey’s books because he’s taught me interesting things about the views of Americans at that time concerning the way men and women should act out their gender roles in order to keep America strong. Having just read a detailed account of the Depression, I can’t agree with Grey that city life is an easy life that makes people weak. But I’m in sympathy with him when he says that living in the rugged conditions of the West develops strength. I’m moving to a city in the West. I wonder if Grey would approve.

Recommendations

It’s hard for me to fit in a new book. Once upon a time, I had so many books to read, I made a ten-year schedule. Then another. And then another. Right now I’m honing my fourth ten-year reading plan. When someone recommends a book, when am I supposed to read it? Often I just don’t.

But what if one of the books I read makes a recommendation? Lewis’s Surprised by Joy has added several things to my list. (In fact, I had to remind myself after rereading it the last time that this spiritual and intellectual autobiography was the inspiration for my whole reading project thirty years ago.) Seven years ago I read a history of Victorian literature that showed me there was a whole lot more to the era than Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot; I devote a large portion of my Fourth Decade plan to Ainsworth, Kingsley, Oliphant, Gaskell, and others of the time.

Boswell and Dr. Johnson, of course, incessantly talk about literature, much of which I want to add somewhere in the plan. A couple of times in Boswell’s classic, he recommends Edward Young’s Night Thoughts – recommends it highly. He calls it “the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced” and says that its lessons are “solemnly and poetically displayed in such imagery and language, as cannot fail to exalt, animate, and soothe the truly pious.” I noted his effusive praise during my second ten years of planned reading and put the book on my third yen-year plan. And this month, its time finally came round!

I had a lot of trouble understanding the opaque grammar of this lengthy poem at first. After many pages I came to realize that Latin influenced Young constantly. Many sentences and clauses leave the verb “is” implied. Many compound sentences using the same verb in each clause omit it from the first clause (where a more modern elegant form would omit it from the second clause). With these two notes in mind, the poem became much clearer, and reading became smoother.

Young had lost his wife, step-daughter, and step-son-in-law and wrote Night Thoughts in answer to an infidel called “Lorenzo” in defense of faith in the light of tragic death. He offers views of death as nothing to be feared, proofs of immortality, expositions of Christian faith in a future state of both individual self and the world, an answer to the person who wants to be a “worldly” man, and much more. Altogether, Night Thoughts offers a thorough philosophical guide to the Christian who wants to think rightly about ultimate concerns.

I noticed in the poem three passages that certainly must have influenced Lewis: one gives an argument of immortality from desire (all the physical desires of my soul – hunger, thirst, sexual desire, etc. – find their object existing in the real world, so I may believe, based on my desire for ultimate happiness, that that object also actually exists), another outlines the benefits of pain, and the last, in a survey of the planets, asks, “And had your Eden an abstemious Eve?”

Fortunately, as regards my future reading plans, Night Thoughts is not like Lewis in one key feature. Where Lewis continually makes reference to books I want to read (or reread), Young recommends only one book: the Bible.

Watching the Wheels

I begin today following up on the last post with one more comment about the Sun in C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Since the character of each traditional planet is presented by Lewis as a “splintered fragment of the true light,” i.e. as one part of the character and nature of Christ, then we can easily see Christ in Lewis’s conception of the Sun since our Lord is the source of knowledge and of transformation. And since Christ is our exemplar in all things pertaining to life and godliness, where we find ourselves in positions (professional and otherwise) of teaching and transforming, we follow and learn from Christ.

Next in the Narnia series (following the original order, of course) is The Silver Chair. The mention of silver in the title provides our link to the moon. As Michael Ward points out, in medieval and Renaissance cosmology the moon divides creation into the changeable, transient things below its sphere and the perfect, eternal things above. You’ll remember (I hope) that a large portion of the story takes place underground and involves debates with the witch about the differences between the world below the ground and the world above. The moon also affects mental health, providing another division, this time between sanity and luna-cy, a division whose effects are seen in Rilian as he passes between those two states each day. Are you a health-care worker? Whether you’re providing therapy to the mentally ill or just putting a band-aid on a child’s knee, learn from the Great Physician. (I don’t know what it has to do with the moon, but I want to mention my favorite allegorical image from the whole series, which appears in this volume: Eustace and Jill are looking for a message carved in the stone, but it doesn’t occur to them that the writing might be sized appropriately for the local giants, and they fail to recognize the smooth, closed canyons they walk through as the letters they’re seeking.)

The fifth of the Chronicles is The Horse and His Boy. Mercury is present everywhere in the book as rapidly traveling children and horses and lions merge and separate like beads of quicksilver. Human followers of the god of speed include traders and carriers. In his aspect as messenger, Mercury is a type for journalists and messengers. In his work of dividing and joining, he guides people who work in mathematics and analysis. If your line of work falls within any of these areas, learn from Jesus, the Word who will return traveling as fast as lightning across the sky.

In The Magician’s Nephew, we read of the creation of Narnia. Ward links this book with Venus. Our sex-crazed culture thinks only of Venus’s association with eroticism, but Lewis concentrates more (or totally) on her beauty and fertility. Anytime you make things, especially where you produce beautiful things, whether that means children, crops, or works of art, learn how to do this from the One through whom all things were made, remembering that “He has made everything beautiful in its time.” (Anyone squeamish about the whole idea of comparing Jesus to the planets worshiped by ancient pagans will do well to remember that He refers to Himself once as the Morning Star and is in many biblical passages compared to the Sun.)

There’s one book left and one planet, and as it turns out, The Last Battle and Saturn go together very nicely. Saturn is often depicted holding a scythe, an instrument which suggests among other things, agriculture. Lewis has already assigned the notion of growing things to Venus, though. Biblical references to the true God holding a sickle remind us that the scythe is used at the end of the agricultural cycle: at the time of reaping, the time of death. Having trouble associating the Way, the Truth, and the Life with death? Remember who holds the keys to Hell and to Death! And remember that for the faithful, death is but a transition; we might even say death is a Door. Honor Christ who holds both your life and your death in his hands. And thank the good Lord for all who work in professions of dissolution, decay, and closure. Buildings need great expertise when it’s time for them to be demolished. Bodies need tender, skilled, respectful care when they lie lifeless. And the trashman? The trashman should be paid four times what he makes now! Christ is the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End. Learn from Him to bring everything to its fitting end at the proper time.

A few short blog posts won’t convince you of Michael Ward’s theory. But if you’re on the verge of believing, consider that Saturn is often equated with the Greek Cronos, the god of time, and then think of Father Time waking up to signal the end of all things in The Last Battle. If you need more convincing, read one of Ward’s books. If, on the other hand, you’re sure you can’t be convinced of this theory . . . well, I don’t think you would have read this far if you’re that sure.

Here Comes the Sun

When I first read The Chronicles of Narnia fifty years ago, most of my friends who were fellow fans of the series called The Voyage of the Dawn Treader their favorite of the seven books. I didn’t understand; it was my least favorite. People sailing around finding weird islands with no thematic connection? My 16-year-old self wasn’t having it. (The 2010 film’s attempt to provide an overarching plot with its green mist and seven swords didn’t work and, while it presumed to save Narnia the land, brought about the tragic downfall of Narnia the movie franchise.)

During my most recent rereading of the book, though, I kept thinking that I couldn’t see how I had missed its now very obvious meanings and messages. Even without Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia theory, couldn’t I have seen the unifying warp thread of Knowledge (with its inevitable woof of Ignorance) running through the whole web? Making maps of unknown lands is almost the cardinal symbol for learning and knowledge. But I was as blind to it as Lucy was to the Dufflepuds at first. Oh yeah! Seeing what was invisible before: that is actually the leading metaphor for learning and knowledge! Ah! Now I see!

Ward associates this third volume of the series with the Sun (one of the classical “planets,” a word which referred to the bodies that moved with respect to the stars), and surely no one can argue with that claim. The sun shines on the gold in the lake; it disappears in the sea of darkness that drives people mad by making all their dreams come true (ALL their dreams); and its rays edify, encourage, and guide Lucy when she stands in them. If you haven’t read Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed” and you’re the kind of person who would read this post (as I suppose you are!), you should read it. It’s available online. You can probably even listen to it on YouTube, unless the publishers find it and take it down.

OK, you’re back. In that essay, as you know since you just read it, Lewis talks about the difference between seeing a beam of light coming through a crack in the door and then looking along the beam of light at the world outside. He takes the analogy in various directions, but they all have to do with types of knowledge based on how we see things. And Lucy looking along the beam of the Sun is surely Jack Lewis in that toolshed.

The main symbol of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the Sun, the Sun gives light, and light is a metaphor for knowledge. So what is it that Lucy knows in a new way while standing in the beam of sunlight? Among the things she sees is an albatross that looks like a cross, so even my teenage mind could have figured out that Lucy was learning to know Jesus better. And where ultimately are they all sailing? To Aslan’s land. Every Christian reading this book should also be on a voyage to Aslan’s land where, after seeing in a mirror dimly for so long, we will finally see Him face to face. “Thou hast said, ‘Seek ye my face.’ Thy face, LORD, do I seek.” If thinking about the symbology in the book didn’t get me to understand that the voyage is one of getting to know God better and better, I could have learned it when Aslan explains it in plain English near the end: “There [i.e. in our non-Narnian world] I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

I think I probably just needed to live more of my own voyage to understand what Lewis had to say through the Dawn Treader’s voyage about getting to know Aslan better. There is a time and place for everything, a time for Narnia to be at war, and a time for Narnia’s prince to enjoy peace and seek knowledge. But the journey to know God better in this life has been traveled before. In the book the trailblazers are Lord Octesian and Lord Rhoop and . . . oh, I can’t remember them any better than Caspian can. In our world they are the saints, whether that means people whose names get on calendars or family members and mentors who inspire us. Along the way, Caspian, Lucy, Edmund, Reepicheep, and Eustace find some of their forerunners, who have been distracted from pursuing their journeys to the glorious end; but surely we can learn as much from the errors of those who go before us as we do by their successes. And, thank God!, we can also learn from our own errors. On that journey we have times of darkness. We encounter Dufflepudlian mysteries that become clear only slowly. We sometimes have to peel off layers of dragon skin. But with all the wanderings, the overall trajectory is still one of becoming closer to God by knowing Him better and better.

The subtitle of my blog is “one Christian’s journey through literature.” So really my reading plan and my blog are also voyages of the Dawn Treader. See? How did I miss it before?

Jupiter and Mars Are All Right Tonight

In the summer of 2008, I was privileged to attend a three-day seminar with Michael Ward in which he talked about his view of C. S. Lewis’s organizational scheme for the Chronicles of Narnia, a view then recently published in his book Planet Narnia. “I know I sound like a conspiracy theorist,” he said, “but I believe I have discovered the secret to these books, a secret Lewis seems not to have shared with anyone during his lifetime.” Ward was sitting in bed one evening studying Lewis’s Poem “The Planets” when he read, in the section on Jupiter: “Of wrath ended / And woes mended, of winter passed / And guilt forgiven, and good fortune / Jove is master.” He sat up suddenly and thought, “That’s the plot to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe!” He then started thinking of whether the other six classical planets corresponded to the other six Narnia books.

I highly recommend Ward’s book if you like Lewis’s children’s series. If you don’t care to read a somewhat lengthy rendition of an Oxford dissertation, you could also try Ward’s condensation of the ideas in The Narnia Code, which was, I believe, written for use in adult Sunday School classes. In any case, I have used it in adult Sunday School classes.

In his capacity of professor of Renaissance literature, Lewis had professional interest in the symbolic history of the planets. As a lay theologian, he regarded the gods associated with the planets as conveying partial truth. As his friend J. R. R. Tolkien told him, “Myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light.” (Quotation from Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien.) So Jupiter’s qualities are only some of the qualities of Jesus Christ, and insofar as we can see Jupiter, the king of winter passed and guilt forgiven, as worthy of respect, we must realize that Christ is worthy of honor and praise for this and for so much more.

Prince Caspian is heavily influenced by the myths of Mars. There’s more war in that book than in any of the other six. We are meant to lionize (pun very much intended) Caspian and all the Old Narnians who win the battles in that book; in doing so, we honor the image of Mars in them. So, too, we honor Christ as the Lord of Hosts with a sword in his mouth. 

Mars’s martial qualities are well known to all of us. After all, those "martial" qualities are named after him. Much more surprising to me is Lewis’s indication in his poem of a connection between Mars and trees. However essential that aspect might or might not be to the common understanding of the myth of Mars, Lewis notes it, and sure enough, Prince Caspian is full of woods and forests.

Michael Ward has convinced most people in the world of Lewis scholarship of the validity of his theory. He has thoroughly convinced me, and he has certainly changed the way I read and think about those books. Essentially, Ward says that rather than waiting for Aslan to show up, we are to recognize Christ’s presence on every page.

In turn, my altered thinking about Lewis’s Narnia books has improved the way I think of Jesus. Seeing Him as the synthesis of seven mighty mythical gods (and more!) make me more able to see Him at a glance as grander and more awesome than I normally do. And understanding more about Lewis’s desire to have Aslan permeate the very atmosphere of each of the Narnia books helps me to see Christ permeating our world. In other words, Michael Ward has helped me, in biblical terms, to magnify the Lord.

I’ve also come to see more clearly Jesus Christ as an exemplar of all that we might do for a vocation. In what situations or jobs do you follow Jupiter? Are you a government official? A boss? A parent? Any kind of authority figure? King Jesus shows you how to be a righteous leader. In what contexts do you follow Mars? Are you in the military? A police officer? A firefighter? Jesus shows you how to be courageous. Or turning to the relationship between Mars and trees and carpentry, do you craft or build anything? Jesus shows you in the wonders of the physical world how to craft with loving attention to detail.

Enough for now. More in a few days about the other books in the series.

Influences and George MacDonald’s Sermons

I’ve been reading George MacDonald’s novels for many years. This year I set aside the fiction in favor of two sets of sermons. I don’t remember who recommended that I read some of his sermons, but I’m glad that person did. MacDonald writes clearly and passionately in these “unspoken” addresses, a difficult combination to pull off. And his lessons are quite good. Some examples: Life has many daily questions the Bible doesn’t answer, which is why we must daily rely on Jesus for guidance. Each follower of Christ will receive in Heaven a new name written on a white stone, unique and secret because each believer can worship God in a way that no one else can. We could not hate our cruelest enemy except for a shred of humanity in him that makes us think he could be different, and that shred is what we can love. Jesus gives the rich young ruler things to do in order to receive eternal life rather than things to believe or things to be partly because when someone asks how to reach the top of a mountain, you don't say, "Put your foot on the peak."

I know of MacDonald only through C. S. Lewis and read him at Lewis’s recommendation. And although I don’t always understand why Lewis admired him so deeply, here in the sermons, I see the influence of MacDonald on Lewis very clearly. Why does God even have his children ask for things if He knows what we need and can give it? Because prayer is the thing we need most, says MacDonald, and I hear the echoes of that excellent point reverberating throughout Lewis’s work. Miracles show the hastening of natural processes, says MacDonald, an idea repeated by Lewis a few decades later in his book on miracles. And when MacDonald says that God will strip away our sin layer by layer, I can’t help but think of Lewis’s Edmund having his dragon skin peeled from him.

Strangely, I also saw influences of Hegel on MacDonald. Hegel, the ultimate philosopher of progress in the century of progress, essentially taught that the purpose of the universe was to evolve to the point that some part of it understood it as a whole. In other words, according to Hegel, the purpose of the universe was to produce Hegel. I see Hegel’s influence where MacDonald talks about progressive revelation as God’s working toward humanity’s comprehension of Him. I see it again where MacDonald says, “Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.”

I’m far from alone in seeing Hegel as a big problem. Right now, I’m also reading Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (more on that book in a later post), in which protagonist Joseph Knecht blames Hegel for the world wars of the twentieth century. As Lewis said that MacDonald baptized his imagination, I could say that MacDonald baptized Hegel’s ideas, Still, two months ago, I would never have imagined a line of influence from the pagan Hegel to the Christian C. S. Lewis with only one stop in between.

Top 100 – Part VII

What?! 700 posts on exlibrismagnis.com?! Yes, even with my slower pace over the last few years, I have made it to my seven-hundredth contribution to this blog. Every hundred posts, I’ve departed from writing about current reading to offer moments from my past reading, ideas and stories and images that I think about often. My original idea for the subseries was to outline my hundred favorite books, but that idea quickly changed. These books are not necessarily in my top 100 books, in spite of my misleading title. In fact, if I were ever to put such a list into black and white, at least four of these titles wouldn’t make it. (I don’t even remember one of the titles.) Maybe if I get to 1000 posts I’ll actually try to decide what my favorite 100 books are.

• Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy. At Thanksgiving a few years ago, a distantish relative (the exact description of our relationship would involve the phrase “in-law” three times) wanted to talk at me about the Commedia. Knowing my education, he still assumed I knew nothing of this greatest of all classics, and tried to explain to me that no one reads anything but the Inferno because the other parts aren’t enjoyable. I told him that I read all three parts every few years and actually preferred Purgatorio and Paradiso. He corrected my pronunciation of commedia and moved on to his next topic. I think of many passages from all three parts of the epic poem often, but for now, I want to mention just one moment, when Dante gets to the empyrean heaven and sees all the concentric spheres of the heavens turned inside out so that God is at the center while everything else revolves around Him in a dance of love. I fail in all my attempts to put the image into words, and yet the topographical oxymoron shines clearly and distinctly in my inner eye. It is the master image in my mind of the God who encompasses all things, is at the center of all things, and yet stays separate from all his creation, the God who rules by orderly love. I love Dante, and I love God more because of Dante.

• John Milton, Paradise Lost. While we’re on the subject of epic poetry about Heaven and Hell, let’s talk about Milton a minute. In book IV, Satan visits Paradise. Many readers have thought that Milton makes Satan too sympathetic in these passages. Perhaps the poet, seeing his own antimonarchical bent in the archfiend who rebelled against the Divine Throne, injected too much of himself into the character. In any case, Satan’s sympathetic moment (“Warring in Heaven against Heaven’s matchless King! / Ah, wherefore? He deserved no such return / From me”) works for me and makes his next scene even more powerful. The Deceiver now takes the form of a cormorant and sits on the walls of the Garden of Eden, viewing first the flowers, the fruit, and then our first parents. “Ah! gentle pair,” he says, “ye little think how nigh /  Your change approaches, when all these delights / Will vanish, and deliver ye to woe.” An unforgettable turn!

• H. W. Brands, TR. President Teddy Roosevelt is visited by a French ambassador and takes him on his daily rugged walk. After crossing a river, the President looks back to see his visitor, still on the opposite bank stripping naked except for a pair of pink gloves. “Why did you remove your clothes?” asks Roosevelt once his fellow hiker completes the crossing. “I do not think we will meet any ladies out here,” replies the Frenchman. “Then why did you keep the gloves on?” “Just in case we do.” I hope the story is completely true.

• John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University. I love Newman’s description of the properly educated mind and aspire to approach its condition. “It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation.” Without the “almost,” the description would be heresy. With it, it is merely overly optimistic: I believe in the vision of this mind, but how could even the best university ever produce it?

• Malcom Gladwell, Blink. Forget careful, prolonged judgment of new people and situations, advises Gladwell. The human mind is equipped to make reasonable judgments in the blink of an eye. In one example, he cites a study showing that students viewing fifteen seconds of video of each of several professors rate them essentially the same as do other students after taking entire courses with the same professors. I thought about times I made decisions to hire people as soon they walked in the door; I no longer feel privately ashamed to have done so. (Not one that I chose in this way gave me any cause for regret.)

• Isaac Asimov, A-story-that-has-a-title-which-I-have-forgotten. In the future, everyone uses calculators. One day one person shows his ability to add up a couple of multi-digit numbers, and everyone else is amazed. Thus does new technology diminish traditional skills. Have we already reached this future?

• Michael Ward, Planet Narnia. Michael Ward, admitting that he sounds like a conspiracy theorist, says that he has discovered the secret organizing plan to Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, a plan so secret that no one – not one friend of Lewis, not one professor, not one faithful reader, not Warnie, not Joy, not Douglas – no one suspected it. And yet his evidence is totally convincing not just to me but to apparently all C. S. Lewis experts. Each of the volumes in the series corresponds to the Renaissance image of one of the seven planets. (OK, more exactly, each corresponds to Lewis’s image of the Renaissance image of one of the planets.) And each is ultimately about Christ, displaying Him not only in the person of Aslan but in the pervading atmosphere of each book, the very medium through which each plot swims. Christ is Jupiter, the jolly King with a red spot on his wounded side (LW&W). He is Mars, Forger of iron, Master of courage, Lord of Hosts (PC). He is the Sun of Righteousness, our Light, more precious than gold (VotDT). He is the Moon, Reflector of God’s glory, Mediator between Earth and Heaven, Great Physician of health and sanity (SC). He is Mercury, the Word, He who sunders and unites (HaHB). He is Venus, God of Love, Creator (MN). And He is Saturn, End of Desire, Keeper of the keys of Hell and of Death (LB). Is this a favorite book? I don’t know. It is a book about other books. All of its virtue cultivates love but directs all that love away from itself. And yet it has changed my thinking more than any other book I’ve read in the last twenty years or more.

There you have it. Seven more bits from my reading that I think about often. If I make it to post 800, I’ll have seven more. I hope you stick with me until then.

Book Awards – 2020

This year began with my son and grandkids living with us for a month. It ends with the exlibrismagnis book awards. Between those wonderful extremes, things were mostly pretty crummy. And I’m not even talking about coronavirus or the economy or political news. But. Hey! Book awards!

Mentor Who Is Always Standing in the Spirit at My Elbow: Charles Dickens
This year I read David Copperfield for the fourth time and only now noticed just how many struggling authors populate the pages. I also enjoyed the new film version of DC starring Dev Patel. (I’m still not sure whether I love or hate the postmodern ending of Dora’s story arc.) I read A Christmas Carol aloud to my family for the first time in many years. And I was introduced to some delightful farcical plays by the Great Man, one involving an astrologer who thinks he knows the day and hour at which his daughter will meet her future husband, and another involving mistaken identities in a hotel – complete with a hallway of doors hastily opened and shut by characters who many times narrowly miss seeing each other and ending the confusion. How can anything beat that? Fortunately for other authors, like John Larroquette with the Emmys, the father of David Copperfield long ago asked that he not be considered for an award at these ceremonies.

Best New Read in History: Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought
I talked to everyone in my family about something or other in this wonderful history every day I was reading it and for many days afterwards. Every story – Jackson’s Bank, the Mexican War, the invention of the telegraph – was familiar, and yet Howe provided nuances that gave each a new shape.

Best Reread in History: Herodotus, The Histories, book I
Cyrus takes Croesus from the burning stake to ask him about the wisdom of Solon – and then keeps the conquered king around as a political advisor. Why is Cyrus known to us today and Croesus all but forgotten?

Best New Novel: John Galsworthy, White Monkey
The skewering of modernism and consumerism was delicious. But the best part of the book involved a subplot reminiscent of Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” involving the Bickets, who are nothing like Galsworthies.

Best Reread Novel: Frank Norris, The Octopus
TV Series Must Be Made.

Best Theology: Cyprian, Treatise 7
How to show faith and love during a pandemic!

Best Poem: C. S. Lewis, “Dungeon Grates”
No, it wasn’t Coleridge. It was Lewis. And no, it wasn’t one of his Christian poems. It was a dark brood about life as a prison. And yet there are grates . . . .

Book Most Changed on Rereading: J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Having read longer versions of some of the stories, The Silmarillion now sounds very much like a summary. But still, the heartache and beauty and goodness and truth of this constructed mythology is unmatched in my experience. This time, I was especially struck by Tolkien’s wisdom in making the Noldor the tribe that rebels against the Valar. The Vanyar stay close to the angelic beings and sing to them constantly. The Teleri don’t even travel all the way to Valinor but stay offshore, just enjoying the light of the Blessed Realm shining through a gap in the mountains. But the Noldor make their home in Valinor and build a city and make jewels. Aren’t the troublemakers always the ones who make a good show but end up thinking they can improve on God’s work?

Best Play: Tom Morton, Speed the Plough
Every character, every scene is funny, and the farcical plot builds smoothly and coherently. How is this play not still known, staged, and loved?

Best Short Story: Dorothy L. Sayers, “Murder in the Morning”
I had come across Montague Egg in Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries before. But to see him and his confident, rhyming sales pitches take the center spotlight was a treat indeed. And, what do you know? Even without the intense efforts of his more famous sleuthing buddy, Monty can also solve murders!

Well, that’s it for 2020. Tomorrow, we’ll all wake up, everything will be better, and I’ll start reading the books for year 5 of my current Reading Plan. May we all have a Happy New Year (and quickly get over the Crummy Old One)!

Poetry by Young C. S. Lewis

This year’s literary itinerary included stops at two volumes of poetry by America’s favorite Anglican, C. S. Lewis. The first, Spirits in Bondage, was composed before Lewis became a Christian and includes railings against a God the young man didn’t believe in. The other is a book of poems from Lewis’s Christian years, collected by Walter Hooper, secretary to Lewis late in his life and curator of his literary estate. Having read Lewis’s own accounts of his atheistic years, I expected to enjoy the later poems more, but my expectations were wrong.

Perhaps Spirits in Bondage presents less mature work than the later book. It’s still more advanced than any poetry I might have written. Perhaps it occasionally cries out blasphemous doubts. What Christian hasn’t struggled with doubt and left the battle with the limp of Jacob? I loved these poems because here I found deep questions, stirring emotions, and vivid images expressed by the Lewis I know and love. It’s all here: the scholarship, the dry clip of twentieth-century language moistened with the elegance of earlier eras, the piercing psychological insights, the intelligent arguments, and the humility that suggests the author would gladly sit over a pint with any reader and enjoy a conversation that wouldn’t leave the lesser one embarrassed by the chasm of intellectual ability that separated the two.

The young atheist’s poems, though, also lifted me with passages about desires for and visions of moral standards, about life after death, and about eternal peace. The same collection that contains these lines:

Come let us curse our Master ere we die,
For all our hopes in endless ruin lie.
The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.

also contains these:

When glory I have built in dreams
Along some fiery sunset gleams,
And my dead sin and foolishness
Grow one with Nature’s whole distress, [i.e., when I go the way of all flesh]
To perfect being I shall win,
And where I end will Life begin.

At this point in his life, the future Christian apologist sees God as an inevitable fly in the ointment of the eternal life of “perfect being” he foresees in those lines above. Consider this passage:

For in that house I know a little, silent room
Where Someone’s always waiting, waiting in the gloom
To draw me with an evil eye, and hold me fast –
Yet thither doom will drive me and He will win at last.

That atheist would later in his life bless the Hound of Heaven that drove him to that silent room, and he would explain that among the tools He wielded in order to “win at last” was the special sensation Lewis called “joy,” the phenomenon he first experienced as a child looking at his brother’s toy garden. His description of it in these poems is perhaps even better than his more familiar prose account in Surprised by Joy:

But only the strange power
Of unsought Beauty in some casual hour
Can build a bridge of light or sound or form
To lead you out of all this strife and storm;
When of some beauty we are grown a part
Till from its very glory’s midmost heart
Out leaps a sudden beam of larger light
Into our souls. All things are seen aright
. . . . . . .
The miracle is done
And for one little moment we are one
With the eternal stream of loveliness
That flows so calm, aloft from all distress
Yet leaps and lives around us as a fire
Making us faint with overstrong desire
To sport and swim for ever in its deep.

I don’t like the impersonal you in the fourth line of this excerpt. And I think the poem loses power by constantly affirming that the experience is something that happens to “us” rather than just describing what happens to the author. But I love reading this poem, knowing what God eventually made of these astonishing moments in this astonishing life. Lewis called the piece “Dungeon Grates,” showing that he knew that the materialistic world he moved in was only a narrow prison and that the surrounding world of the eternal stream of loveliness was a wide land of freedom. In fact, doesn’t the book’s title, Spirits in Bondage, indicate a belief in the existence of a spiritual liberty? Lewis eventually entered that liberty. May he continue to go further up and further in.

From the Mouths of Babes

For the last few years, I’ve (on very sporadic occasions) been looking for good recent Christian fiction. Now, I will confess that in my mind the desire generally takes the form of a question: Where are the C. S. Lewises of today? I say I confess it because it’s a ridiculous question. Why don’t I ask where the Dante of today is? The Shakespeare of today? Writers of this caliber don’t, to borrow a phrase from a cliche about a different subject, exactly grow on trees. Part of what makes C. S. Lewis “C. S. Lewis” is that there wasn’t one before and wasn’t one afterwards. So my search as defined by that question is futile.

But if I mean that I wish to find an author who expresses a Christian view in fiction of an eloquent prose while exploring human mysteries and philosophical conundrums without claiming to answer all questions with shallowly quoted Bible verses, I have some hope of finding satisfaction. (Now, I trust that any Christian reading this ridiculously niche blog will know what I mean. But just in case, I’ll say that if one of my children were to die, I believe that the friend who cried with me would be displaying a more Christian response than the one who told me that God works all things together for good for those who love Him and then sat silently with dry eyes.) Every time I look through the internet’s tragically small number of lists of good recent Christian fiction, the recommendation that seems to come up most is Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River. Now I know why.

Enger starts the book with a miracle. I’m sorry for the slow start on this post, but I have to interrupt myself for a bit more background on what I’m looking for. I believe that the Christian novelist faces an almost insurmountable hurdle merely from the definitions of the terms. How can a Christian outlook be shown without at least the implication that miracles are possible? And yet, how can a humanly contrived story be good if miracles solve all the problems? Enger’s solution is one of the two main factors that led me to love his book. By putting the miracles up front, he doesn’t escape any writer’s obligation to resolve conflicts without recourse to a deus ex machina. The miracles don’t answer any questions; they only raise them.

Reuben’s father walks on air one evening (without knowing it: his eyes are closed in prayer), but God doesn’t heal Reuben’s asthma. A miracle clears up some adult acne in one scene, but God allows an incident of sexual assault, a kidnapping, and a cold-blooded killing. Now isn’t this just like the Christian life? Every Christian eventually has to grapple with the question of why God doesn’t give us miraculous relief from the problems that seem most important to us. Why hasn’t God healed my hand? Why didn’t God make certain coworkers nicer to me? Why hasn’t God kept all our family holidays happy and argument-free?

Now I’ll tell you what I really think. I think God puts us here as an author populates a world with characters: in order to have stories to tell. Without sexual assault, kidnapping, and killing, Enger has no story to tell. And without weird fingers and colleagues who kept me sleepless at night worrying about their lawlessness and relatives who turned holiday celebrations into obligations, I would have no story worth telling, no life history that will one day bring glory to God in a way unique to my experience. Isn’t the point of my adversity not what God does to get me out of it but what I do in response to it? How else am I supposed to comfort others with the comfort I’ve experienced in the midst of hardship if I haven’t had hardship? How am I supposed to count it all joy when trials come my way if none come my way? (You see, I can quote the Bible, too. But the next time I have a trial, don’t tell me glibly to “count it all joy” or you may find yourself in need of comfort!) The structure of Enger’s story makes it very clear that Reuben’s dad’s bit of levitation isn’t anywhere near as important in the long run as what Reuben and his family do in response to bloodshed.

My second favorite aspect of the book takes much less time to explain. Enger pulls off an excellent trick in prose style. Reuben tells his story in first person and frequently says that he’s not a writer. His nine-year-old sister, Swede, he claims, is the real wordsmith, and he includes several extensive quotations from her overwrought, cliched, sing-songy epic poem about an outlaw in the Wild West. It’s hard to imitate bad writing. I’ve tried, and it always comes out too egregious. But Enger hits the bulls-eye with Swede. The poem is thoroughly entertaining and absolutely essential; it develops Swede’s character (develops it, in fact, both in her world and in ours), and Reuben’s admiration for it reveals parts of his. But it’s not good. As bad as his sister’s poem might be, though, Reuben believes he lacks her level of talent. And he isn’t totally wrong. It’s not that Reuben indulges in false modesty or has a fluency that he just can’t see in his own work; his grammatical stumbles and sometimes flat descriptions are right there on the page for us to see. And yet, in the end, this fellow who consistently can’t find the right words without seeking inspiration in a child’s purple doggerel ends up speaking powerfully. I’d say the effect is something like Huck Finn only different. But you really have to read the book to understand what I mean. I don’t have the words to describe it.

From the Baptizer of Imagination

Somewhere George MacDonald made the excellent observation that all mirrors are magic mirrors. Who hasn’t looked in one and thought of the reversed human image inside as the living being who sees you as the reflection? Or tried to imagine crossing the glass and moving into the unseen flip-flop world around the corner or through the door that limits your sight of Mirrorland? Knowing MacDonald’s line about magic mirrors, I sensed good things to come when his Lilith started with a magic mirror in the garret.

MacDonald wrote many “realistic” novels (well, as realistic as Victorian literature gets with all its coincidences and hidden identities and long-thought-dead spouses suddenly reappearing) and several fantasies. I prefer the novels but enjoy the riddles of his fantasies. And Lilith is chock-full of riddles. When Mr. Vane (I couldn’t help thinking of Bunyan when I discovered the protagonist’s name) ends up in a parallel world where ravens read books that are fake decorations in our world and where all the best people are perpetually asleep, the reader has to start thinking. Sometimes you have to think about when to stop thinking and just enjoy for a while since things get so bizarre. What could be called the weirdest riddles are the easiest to understand when reading Christian literature: people have to die to truly live and aren’t themselves until they give up themselves. If you still don’t understand those riddles (and does even the most faithful Christian truly understand?), at least you recognize that they come straight from the Savior’s parables.

It’s the other, more routine puzzles that make the story so murky. It’s the mystery land where our rules don’t work. It’s the string of elements that seem like connected symbols but without obvious connections or clear symbolic reference. For instance, Vane hears rumors of people with fairy-tale names: one is called the Cat Lady. Then he encounters a lot of cats, some of the domestic variety and some of the leopardous. (Hah! I just added a sixth member to the very select list of common-ish English words ending in -dous.) Then some of the larger cats change into princesses. But neither of them is the Cat Lady. I think. Other shrouded vales of mystery abound. The reader slowly meets the various characters he hears about early on and learns their names, but still without knowing who’s good and who’s bad. The characters eventually seem to fall into two camps, each of which calls the other bad. But how to decide whether Mr. Vane is choosing correctly between them or asking the right questions? It’s like a blown-up version of the two-doors-liar-and-truthteller riddle.

And yet it’s fun to be confused by this book. Today I thought about sewing while reading Lilith. My mind often wanders while reading; I’m the kind of reader who can suddenly realize that the words of a whole page have each passed under my eyes without any meaning registering on my mind because I’ve been thinking of something else the whole time. William James calls the habit a mark of genius, and I choose to agree. Usually the mental sidetracks are inspired directly by the topics in the book. But the sewing thread (see what I did there with the word “thread”?) came up because of the way I have to read Lilith. Like a backstitch (I don’t really know anything about sewing; I think it’s a backstitch), I have to go forward a bit and then back to search for what I missed, then forward again until I realize I’ve gone too far again and have to scramble back to tighten up that hem.  

One thing stood out clear as crystal right away, though. The land behind the mirror’s glass has no rivers, no ponds, and no tears. But once Lilith – Adam’s first wife according to the Talmud, and the monarch of the fairy land in MacDonald’s book – has learned to cry, the waters cascading from her eyes meet waters springing up from below the surface, and rivers start to flow. MacDonald gets to make a pretty point about remorse and repentance with this fantastic image. But the moment also struck me as the clear inspiration for Lewis’s coming of spring in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a moment brought about at the end of the reign of the White Witch, who, says the narrator, is descended from Lilith, the first wife of Adam.

Where Did I Read That?

Have you ever plagued yourself trying to remember where you read some given thing? It happens to me all the time. Sometimes I want to tell my wife about something I read in just the last day and can’t remember where I read it: News story? Novel? Philosophical work? In other instances, I look for years for the elusive source of my mental Nile. One imaginary Dr. Livingstone slashed about for about fifteen years through the densest tangle of confused memories seeking the place where I had first read about the difference between wit and judgment. He finally fulfilled his quest when I reread Thomas Hobbes in 2009. (Wit is the power of comparing disparate things, while judgment is the power of discerning differences in similar things.)

Another jungle trek came to an end in just the last few days. I really don’t know how long I had been hoping to rediscover where C. S. Lewis talks about creation as the greatest miracle. The words as I remembered them were something like these: “Creation is the first and greatest miracle because by Creation, God brought into existence what is not God.” I thought sure I’d come across it in Miracles when I revisited that book a few years ago. But I had to wait until rereading The Problem of Pain to find my rest.

It turns out that those words were all mine (except where they borrowed from Jesus talking about commandments). But the gist was accurate. Here is the actual phrasing in the inimitable style of the great professor: “To make things which are not Itself, and thus to become, in a sense, capable of being resisted by its own handiwork, is the most astonishing and unimaginable of all the feats we attribute to the Deity.”

But wait. Creation in a book about pain? Yes. In his answer to the age-old question of how an all-powerful loving God can allow evil (he’s especially interested in the pain involved in the consciousness of evil), Lewis speculates on why God made a physical universe. I don’t know of anything else like this passage, although if I told him that, he’d probably chuckle and tell me I just hadn’t read enough. Lewis then runs through his ideas on the moral constitution of humans, sin, the Fall, the meaning of goodness, the Incarnation, Redemption, Heaven, and more. Maybe this, and not Mere Christianity, is the fundamental exposition of Lewis’s view of life, the universe, and everything. Why isn’t it more popular?

Scottish and English in George MacDonald

As much as C. S. Lewis professed a debt to George MacDonald, he says (somewhere), “Few of his novels are good and none is very good.” I know that my reading project centers on the “Great Books,” but I also enjoy visiting satellites of those marvelous lights. I have Tom Clancy on my list for this year, after all! So maybe I could be allowed to write today on a nineteenth-century author whose novels aren’t “very good.”

Last year, I didn’t say anything about MacDonald, because I thought the book I read then, Malcolm, didn’t even rise to the level of “not very good.” Part of it had to do with the nearly total lack of the Wise Christian Teacher who so often features in MacDonald’s novels, a void replaced by a soap opera involving a marquis and his brother (who was also the marquis at some point), wives possibly dead and possibly alive (which makes for possible bigamy), the question of which character is whose child, the question whether two of these younger characters with a possibly budding mutual attraction might be siblings (Hello, Luke and Leia!), and the further question whether such children are legitimate – the last point depending on whether a certain wife was dead or alive when . . . . Oh, it’s all too confusing.

It’s not enough that the potboiler’s pot boileth over. Most of the answers to the mysteries of the plot are given by characters speaking in Scottish dialect. Now I’ve read enough MacDonald to have a good familiarity with the language of his rustic Scottish characters, but here we have a character, a piper, with a stranger than usual patois, a linguistic idiom whose origin I can’t explain. This piper might say, “She’ll pe seein’ a’,” when he means, “I see everything.” Among his quirks, he uses she for the first-person singular pronoun, future continuous verb constructions for all tenses, and voiceless consonants for all stopped consonants: p for b, t for d, etc. Add to this confusion the fact that the piper is blind and yet talks about seeing things, and I found myself almost always in the middle of the North Sea when he spoke. So why, oh, why did MacDonald place the solution to the main conundrum of the wives in the mouth of this piper?

Today, on the other hand, I finished reading The Marquis of Lossie, the sequel to Malcolm, and I’m ready to say that the joy I had in the end was worth all the confusion of the first book in the dilogy. (Dilogy? Really?) I got not just one Wise Christian Teacher, but two. I also found a nineteenth-century female character not defined simply by her degree of chastity in relation to men but by her philosophical doubts and struggles. I enjoyed a plot set mostly in London, where Malcolm did his best to speak the Queen’s. And I faced many needed challenges to my complacent Christianity, which is really why I read MacDonald. Just one example: Which is worse, to doubt the existence of God, or, believing He exists, to doubt his importance to every moment in life?

Before I sign off, a word about the 1980s editions of MacDonald novels “retold for modern readers,” complete with new titles and covers that make them look like today’s Christian romances. Of course, I’m reading MacDonald’s original versions, but I don’t look down my nose at these reworkings. I read my first MacDonald novel in a book club that used the updated, abbreviated version, and I’ll always be grateful for that introduction. Editor Michael R. Phillips, knowing his audience, shortened the books and toned down their Scots vocabulary considerably. But by doing so, he introduced a new generation to stories with lessons deeper than any found elsewhere in their section of the Zondervan Christian bookstore, even if MacDonald’s spiritual pupil, Lewis, thought the books weren’t “very good.”

Book Awards – 2018

Because Americans love awards, on this last day of 2018, as I have at the end of each of the last several years, I offer you my list of encomiums on the highlights of my twenty-second year of planned reading.

Most Deserving of His Own Category: Charles Dickens
Yes, once again, I enjoyed Dickens so much (The Old Curiosity Shop on this circuit of the merry sun), it just wouldn’t be fair to others in the fiction category if they had to compete with the Inimitable.

Best Reread, Fiction: White, The Once and Future King
And since Dickens has his own category, E. B. White is able graciously to accept this well deserved award. When I first read this Arthurian work, I thought White made up a lot of the zanier material to keep it all a little irreverently weird. After all, in the first part, “The Sword in the Stone,” Merlin lives backwards, turns Wart into a fish, and transports himself by accident to Bermuda. Oh, yeah: and Arthur is called “Wart.” So naturally I thought White made up episodes like Lancelot rescuing a girl from a bath that she had been unable to get out of for five years. But now that I’ve read so many of the original Arthurian sources, I can say, Nope, that’s right from Malory. It just hadn’t been in the children’s version by Lanier that I had read.

Best New (to me) Poetry: Horace, Odes
Speaking of Sidney Lanier, I had assumed for years that I would enjoy all of his poetry as much as I did his King Arthur and the handful of his poems I had read before. But on the whole they disappointed me and certainly didn’t stand up to the Odes by the ancient Roman. Whether singing to the gods themselves, country life, drinking, or a lowly fellow whose girlfriend no longer likes him, the activity and character and presence of the gods is always in Horace’s mind, as are geography and flora and fauna and weather. Here is a man whose mental world is made constantly richer by the ever-present context of both nature and supernature.

Best New Read, Fiction: Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister
This novel of wealth and ethical dilemma in the highest political offices seemed terribly relevant.

Best History: Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny
I learned amazing things on every page about the last two-hundred years in Italy. My only disappointment is that alongside Napoleon, schools, rebels, the Cosa Nostra, bandits, kings, railroads, poetry, Fascists, economics, and football, Duggan didn’t have much to say about food.

Weirdest Drama: Charles Williams, Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury
You’d think that Tom Stoppard would win this award with his multiple timelines sharing the stage simultaneously and his plays-within-plays that aren’t really plays. But Williams’s unique (and uniquely opaque) poetic vision coupled with a personified death wins out. In fact, it received 14 of 19 votes in this category, many of which were cast in the Stoppard plays.

Best New Read, Religion: Justin Martyr, “Hortatory Address to the Greeks”
Justin read the classics and taught Greek philosophy. Then he became a Christian and continued to teach philosophy, even opening up his own school in Rome. His basic point in the Address is that no ancient follower of Greek philosophy should have any trouble accepting the truth of Christianity since Plato and company lead us right to the brink. The Roman authorities did have trouble, though, and killed him for his faith.

Best New Read, Nonfiction: C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
Since it changed the way I think about reading, I should actually just call it the best new book, period.

Three Others Who Need to Be Mentioned Without Unfairly Competing for Prizes
(1) Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers: Beautiful, heart-wrenching, funny, exciting, and inspiring.
(2) Jane Austen, Mansfield Park: Beautiful, heart-wrenching, funny, exciting, and inspiring, except here all the swashbuckling adventure takes place within Fanny Price’s heart.
(3) Dante, The Divine Comedy: Beautiful, heart-wrenching, funny, exciting, and inspiring, except here all the adventure takes place literally everywhere in the physical, spiritual, and moral universe.

Who will receive awards in the coming year? Robert Louis Stevenson? Isaac Asimov? Evelyn Waugh? Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? Abu ‘l-Qasim Firdowsi Tusi? Come back in a year, and we’ll find out together!