Questions for the Durants

 Will and Ariel Durant spent over forty years of their lives together traveling the world, visiting art museums, reading old books, and writing an eleven-volume history of western civilization (with one volume covering the East) that won a Pulitzer Prize. Sounds perfect to me. Some years my reading in this epic saga has been thrilling and inspiring (the high middle ages, for example). In other years, they’ve left me saddened by humanity’s evil, shown even in the pursuit of the ultimate good (religious wars during the Reformation, for example). This year, when I read the end of The Age of Louis XIV and the beginning of The Age of Voltaire, I just felt instructed. I wonder how much the cool emotional reaction simply has to do with the pandemic situation. For many years, I read Durant at lunch on welcome breaks from work; now reading is just one of several activities I engage in while sitting at home. Whatever the reason, my experience this year is more purely intellectual than usual, and I’m left with some questions for the Durants.

(1) You say that the theme of your multi-volume work is the emancipation of (European) thought, government, and social structures from superstition into a freedom of reason and conscience. Thank you, first of all, for spending so many wonderful pages on the development of religion in the west, and especially of Christianity. For people who celebrate its future humiliation, you certainly lavish elegant and fair praise on the Church of middle ages and show where reason did take its place in theological discourse. Would you be willing to concede that the Renaissance, Reformation, and scientific revolution, more than just freeing Europe from the Church, also freed the Church itself from a superstition or two and brought it to more reasonable stances?

(2) Thank you for including Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in the Enlightenment rather than calling them, in typical fashion, British forerunners of a properly French movement. You say that the early eighteenth century, after the influence of these great opponents of superstition and the weakening of the Church, was the most corrupt era in English history but that it also saw the rise of public charities like the foundling hospital and the public workhouses. (And, by the way, thank you for acknowledging the charitable aspect of the workhouses in spite of the unredeemed Scrooge’s famous attitude toward them.) Might you concede that the Church, with all its flaws, must prior to this time have had a positive effect on English society by limiting drunkenness, providing honest, healthy work for unwed women, caring for the poor, and other virtuous programs, and that the charitable societies and institutions begun in this period were primarily the work of Christians? In other words, is it possible that the road from blind faith to reason does not necessarily follow a steady ascent?

(3) When I was about 20, I read Francis Schaeffer say that if I were to study David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature in college, the professor would skip the part called “The Conclusion to this Book.” Several years later, I did indeed study that philosophical work, and the instructor did indeed skip the “Conclusion.” Thank you, Durants, for not only including the Conclusion in your discussion of the book but taking Hume at his word that the name of the section refers not just to its position at the end of the book but to its presentation of the main point of the argument. During the bulk of the Treatise, Hume shows the reader by logical argument that I have no reason to trust my senses and thus no reason to believe in the objective existence of the world around me, of laws or of cause and effect, or even of my own mind. But in the Conclusion, he says that he dines with a friend and plays backgammon and then cannot believe his own reasoning. Therefore, he says, reason cannot lead us to truth. I don’t think the sudden shift was just a weaselly dodge, an insincere blanket of comfort thrown over the cold bed of extreme skepticism so readers wouldn’t hate him, and I’m glad you agree. But, I ask, since Kant (not to mention all those professors Schaeffer and I knew) ignored the Conclusion, wouldn’t you say that Hume’s primary influence on philosophy lay in the bleak skeptical tail and not the sentimental dog?

I think the Durants would concede all my points. I believe that moral humanism described their own conscientious view of the Way the World Is. But I don’t think the emergence of the rational, modern world they so valued really was the theme of their lives’ work. No, as historians they were too honest to shoehorn their subject into their one story. I think their true purpose was simply to tell a sweeping tale of troubled humanity’s attempts to negotiate existence, to weep at and learn from our too frequent, execrable failures, and to celebrate our best achievements.

Trollope’s Understanding of Human Variety

OK, what am I supposed to write about when I open Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now in 2020 and read about a very rich man who decides to enter politics. At least, everyone believes Mr Augustus Melmotte is richer than Croesus, although he never actually pays for houses and the contractors who improve them. But no one believes in Mr Melmotte more than Mr Melmotte himself. When the newspapers disagree on their suspicions, the contradiction is taken by Mr Melmotte’s followers as a sign not only that the papers are lying but that their champion is as pure as snow. He makes some gestures toward blocks of Christians in order to court their vote. He’s fascinated with the leader of China. Really! What am I supposed to write about?

Well, I won’t write about it. Instead, I’ll focus on Trollope’s amazing ability to write well about all sorts and conditions of characters. Poor and rich. Female and male. Rural and Urban. Virtuous and vicious. Pious and profane. Indigent and opulent. Common and aristocratic. Somber and hilarious. Trollope portrays them all so well!

My first experiences with the great postal clerk turned novelist were all set in small towns and rural estates. The old porter in Orley Farm, the dissenting minister in The Vicar of Bullhampton, and Mr Harding, the title character in The Warden – all are such wholesome, charming characters, and their stories evoke fully dimensional, five-senses pictures of a simpler time when being a good Christian was, if not easier, at least a more straightforward proposition. God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world when these characters are in the scene.

But then in the fifth number of the Barsetshire Series, Trollope introduces us to the marvelous Johnny Eames, who finds himself engaged to two girls at once. Yes, Johnny is deeply flawed, though he remains sympathetic. But my point is that this kind of scrape doesn’t happen in a rural English village; no, Johnny takes the story to London. The subsequent series, centering on the Palliser family and Parliamentary politics, takes place mostly in London, and here, life is not so straightforward. Political activity leads to financial scandal, lies in the newspapers, gun violence, bitter resentment by lonely wives, and much, much more. The salt of the earth is so hard to find on the streets of the city, the creator of the angelic Mr Harding finds himself in later books giving outright deplorable characters the starring roles at times.

It seems Trollope wrote The Way We Live Now upon returning to England after an absence of two years and noticing a decline in public morality. Instead of beginning with a good girl in the village who takes an entire novel to reconcile herself (or not!) to the idea of moving “above her station” by marrying the local baronet, Trollope starts off this tale with Lady Carbury. Lady Carbury is a widow with a definite preference for one of her two children and is also an author who flirts with newspaper editors in order to persuade them to write positive reviews of her terrible books. But Trollope is just as familiar with and faithful to this narcissist as he is with (and to) the altruistic Doctor Thorne from Barsetshire. TWWLN is Trollope’s longest novel, and in its many hundreds of pages, he finds the time to unfold two love pentagons. Pentagons. And yet our author treats the whole cornucopia of motives, intrigues, doubts, insincerities, jealousies, and deceptions involved in these complicated webs with as much understanding as he brings to the wholesome courting of a good country girl by the village vicar.

Some people wonder how Shakespeare became so proficient at portraying both royals and ruffians. (I don’t suppose it could have anything to do with being a member of a dramatic troupe that both ate at dives and performed for a certain queen?) Their doubts sometimes reach the level of claiming that the Bard’s plays actually came from the pen of Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere. Trollope’s achievement in displaying the broad spectrum of human character seems just as monumental as Shakespeare’s, and yet no one that I’m aware of has ever proposed a theory that his novels were actually written by Benjamin Disraeli.

Annie Dillard and Seeing

 If passing people say anything when they see me reading while I walk, it’s usually to ask me how I’m capable of such bizarre behavior or to tell me I have a gift or some such thing. But every once in a while, someone asks, “Why aren’t you enjoying the beautiful day?” Really?! Just outright judgment? One woman pointed to the trees above us as she asked the question; I took her gesture to mean that the proper way for civilized humans to fulfill the categorical imperative known as “enjoying the day” is to stare constantly at the leaves. I am enjoying the day when I walk. I’m out experiencing the light, the temperature, the fresh air, the exercise, and the endorphin rush. And I do look up from my book from time to time to catch a tree or a bird or a squirrel or a weed or a rock. Or a curb. After all, the idea of walking while reading for the ADD brain is that it limits the booming shouts of the periphery for attention; it doesn’t eliminate them altogether.

These days, my morning constitutional usually involves a stroll along the parkway skirting the north border of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. And I feel really good about concentrating on a book while walking along at the feet of grandeur and not, you know, guilty at all or anything. Lately, I’ve been reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which – and I find I’m not alone in this at all – reminds me of Thoreau’s Walden. And when she talks about taking a stroll every morning to the creek to look at frogs and fish and insects and grass and wildflowers, I keep looking at her book while walking by my lovely mountain stream, and I suppress the irony without any difficulty at all. Because the conflict only pops up in my mind two or three times every sentence.

But then I remember that Thoreau’s heir entitled one early chapter, “Seeing,” and I have to confess that the guilt catches up to me. (I’ve never been one to run very fast from that particular huntsman.) She talks about relearning to interpret what she sees in order to catch things that ordinary people miss. I, on the other hand, don’t see any eggsacs on tree trunks; I don’t usually even see the tree trunks. She describes the experiences of people born blind who receive sight through medical procedures and then outlines her own attempts to see the flat patches of color the newly sighted report. The patches at the corner of my eye may technically seem flat, but only because they’re at the corner of my eye and not in the center of my vision. No, I spend my time walking along the woods with my nose in a book – a book that tells me to point my nose at the woods.

OK, Guilt, fair enough. But now let me present my defense, paltry though it may seem (at first). As Dillard explains it, the point is not to let the previous training of your eyes dictate what your mind engages with. She even mentions mystics who teach the ADD in all of us to acknowledge the constant distracting chatter of the senses and mind and to look “above” the noise with both active commitment and passive receptiveness. Well, while I walk, I engage with the mountains in my own way. I take in the colors of the leaves, the sound of the water rushing over rocks, and the feeling of the negative ions producing extra seratonin, and I make these the foundation above which I look with intention. And these mornings, what I see above that horizon are Dillard’s ideas.

Does Galsworthy Sell Out?

 John Galsworthy’s novels are sometimes known collectively as The Forsyte Saga. But properly, the title only applies the first three of the stories about the Forsytes and their descendants. Galsworthy wrote a trilogy of trilogies; the second he entitled A Modern Comedy, and the third, End of the Chapter. The mad plan for my third decade of planned reading includes reading one of the installments in this grand series each year for the first nine years. So, this being year 4 in the plan, I just started the second set of three: A Modern Comedy. And since I had passed to a new act in the drama, I looked up some information just to get some context, see when books 4 to 6 were written, and garner some spoilers on what generation I might read about these next three years.

I was sorry to find in multiple places that critics thought the quality of the books declines at this point. I didn’t agree; after a slow first few chapters, I enjoyed book 4, The White Monkey, as much as or more than any of the preceding offerings. I was especially surprised to find that the critics’ problem centered on the character of Soames Forsyte. It seems that the consensus – did my feeble research really uncover widespread, well recognized consensus? I wouldn’t count on it – that the consensus is that Soames changes from being loathsome to inciting our sympathy, and it appears that they condemn Galsworthy for giving up his critique of the rich and turning conservative. And, as my tenth-grade English teacher taught me to do, I have three paragraph-long responses.

First, I didn’t read the first three books as critical of the rich per se. It seems clear to me that what Galsworthy opposes is not wealth but a certain relationship to beauty. For a Forsyte, all beautiful things are nothing more than commodities. Whether the beauty in question is found in a painting, a literary movement, an author, a wife, or a daughter, the Forsytes can only see the practical side of it. Soames has some legitimate critical skills when it comes to artworks; he recognizes a beautiful painting when he sees it. But he isn’t attracted to the beauty itself; he only sees an investment, never understanding that the price only goes up if somewhere along the line someone actually likes the picture. Authors are prizes to be collected and shown off at dinner parties. A Forsyte isn’t attracted to a beautiful woman as a woman, only to her beauty as an achievement and mark of success. It’s a fascinating, tragic, and sadly common trait, and I’ve known Forsytes who weren’t particularly rich. So I reject the premise that Galsworthy abandoned his critique of wealth, because I find my stubbornly logical mind can’t think that a man can abandon a position he has never held.

Second, doesn’t finding the sympathetic in Soames just make the character more human and the author more humane? Yes, Soames became more sympathetic in The White Monkey. But I saw that as a strength, not a weakness. And I mean a strength in the art of the book, not just a strength in Soames. Isn’t Othello better as it is, with the Moor’s tragic regrets at the end, than it would be if he just killed his wife and then got hauled off in a rage? And it’s not like Soames Forsyte is suddenly a good guy. But he is a deeper and more interesting character now. I have to add that Galsworthy’s decisions challenge to me to search for the human depth in the Forsytes I know, an exercise that would be good for me.

Finally, how can any book that tells the story of the Bickets be conservative? If Galsworthy is sympathetic to Soames, he’s absolutely in love with the Bickets, and the Bickets are anything but rich. Mr Bicket works in the distribution room of a publishing house and steals books in order to help pay for his sick wife’s care. (Brilliant! The purloined volumes of poetry have only monetary value for Bicket, yet how much his attitude differs from that of a Forsyte!) He’s caught and loses his job, but he can’t bear to tell his wife that he was fired and does his best to assure her that selling balloons on a street corner actually represents an improvement in their condition. But Mrs Bicket has a secret herself. After she recovers, she makes some money by posing for a painter in, well, in a way that she doesn’t wish to admit to her husband. I won’t say more about the plot details of this story that reminded me so much of “The Gift of the Magi” except to say that its climax includes the line, “Never mind, as long as you’re fond of me.” But, again, how can Galsworthy be accused of hard-hearted conservatism when he so movingly reveals the plight of this couple destitute in everything but love?

And, by the way, are Dr. Johnson and Kipling bad writers just because they’re conservative?

In any case, that’s what I think about the idea that Galsworthy sells out around book 4. Of course, I’m not trained in literary criticism. I’m just a guy who reads to learn as well as to be entertained and who finds that John Galsworthy, in the manner of a prophet, made his world better by pointing out its faults.

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.

The Road Goes Ever On and On

I love J. R. R. Tolkien. And I join others similarly enamored in saying that the only problem with The Lord of the Rings is that it isn’t long enough. So I extend my deepest admiration and thanks to his son Christopher for devoting his life to working through the good professor’s mountains of notes and palimpsested drafts in order to give us more of Middle Earth. The Silmarillion is my second favorite book, so for that alone I owe Christopher Tolkien a huge debt of gratitude.

I don’t need everything he’s published in the last forty years, though; the two volumes of Lost Tales, which promised to give me a longer Silmarillion, only confused me by the variant stories and names. And I don’t begin to want to read the most recent additions to “The History of Middle Earth” providing early drafts of The Lord of the Rings. But the world is a better place after the publication of the extended version of the tragic saga of The Children of Hurin. And what Tolkien fan wouldn’t treasure the fragments of The Lost Road, in which the medieval Saxon Ælfwine discovers the Straight Road leading to the Blessed Realm (hidden from mortals after the Valar made the world round at the fall of Númenor) and writings that show the connections between Sindarin and Old English? I’m blessed just to know that Elendil = Ælfwine = Alvin = elf friend.

This month I reread the first of Christopher’s collections of fragments and drafts after The Silmarillion: the Unfinished Tales. It was published in 1991, long before Christopher started numbering his volumes with roman numerals as if they were Super Bowls or Chicago albums. It had been, as the math tells me, twenty-nine years since I read the book, and I had forgotten almost everything. The memory that stood out the most clearly was mostly inaccurate. But I was in a the bliss of Valinor all over again as I reread it.

First of the many highlights in the book, I have to mention the extended version of Gandalf’s explanation for why he sent a hobbit with dwarves to kill Smaug, and what exactly any of it had to do with defeating Sauron. The little story was Tolkien’s means of retrofitting The Hobbit, which he wrote before he had ever conceived of the importance of the ring Bilbo obtains from Gollum, let alone imagining the Lord of said Ring, into the narrative logic of the great trilogy. Did he ever mean to publish the fragment, or was it only for his own satisfaction?

The book also contains such gems as an essay on the background of the Wizards, which reveals some of the reason Radagast the Brown had so little to do with anything everyone else saw as important. There’s also a geographical description of the island of Númenor and a story about the origin of the palantiri. Confusing but fascinating were the many versions of the tale of Galadriel. Apparently, Tolkien tried late in his life to work out the details of a story in which Galadriel’s struggles with conformity were revealed. Whether she merely refused to cooperate with the elves at the end of the First Age or actually committed some perfidy, Tolkien developed the idea that she had lived for centuries afterwards with guilt and shame and self-doubt. The touching scenario, in any of the five or six versions offered, explains so much about the scene with Frodo at the scrying pool! The story of Aldarion and Erendis is beautifully melancholy, but what I remembered as the central image of Erendis staring hopelessly out to sea doesn’t happen until the last sentence of the last editorial endnote. (Women should not marry sailors – or musicians.)

But this time, for me, the best part of Unfinished Tales was the extended story of Tuor. This hero gets far fewer pages in The Silmarillion than his cousin Turin, but I think his story is even better. Tuor befriends Ulmo, the Vala of the Waters, and is led by swans to find a magic shield. He’s given a divine task of warning Turgon. He lives incognito with bandits for a while. Maybe it’s all the ways in which Tolkien draws from the Arthurian legends here that attracts me so much. Sadly, though, this Unfinished Tale ends just when Tuor gets to the hidden city of Gondolin. (The description of the hidden path’s seven successive gates is by itself enough to sell me on this truncated story.)

But, like discovering the warming appearance of Eärendil in a cold evening sky, I now find that Christopher Tolkien, still hard at work, has only two years ago published a polished version of the complete tale of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin. I’ll start hinting to my family now that I will be as happy as a hobbit with a full larder if I could start reading that book on December 25.

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.