Over the River

I’ve achieved a milestone: I’ve finished Galsworthy’s nine-volume Forsyte Saga. In some ways this last entry, Over the River, was the least satisfactory of the nine. Along with the interesting characters and mundane-yet-urgent conflicts, I’ve enjoyed the series most for the way each book critiques the old ways and then, in a surprising twist, critiques modernity. Over the River certainly had the solid characters and the poignant conflicts and the critiques of humanity’s ways, but it didn’t surprise me with a clever philosophical twist. Still, as a final volume, its main business was summarizing, I suppose, and it did that fairly well.

Dinny Cherrell took a prominent position again, which suited me just fine since I really like that character. But the main plot involved her sister, Clare, who has left her husband in India because he has experimented with the sadistic use of a riding whip. The case ends up involving a trial, which I read both literally and metaphorically. Clare has spent a platonic night with a male friend in a broken-down car out in the countryside on a dark night, and the rejected husband uses this event as the basis for a suit of divorce, since adultery remained at the time the only grounds for divorce among non-royals. Sadism isn’t on trial since Clare refuses to testify about the issue. The old rules for divorce are certainly on trial since both parties want to be free from each other and can only achieve their end by convincing a jury of a lie. (As far as this main point goes, I think Waugh did a better job skewering the practice in A Handful of Dust.) If modernity is allegorically on trial in the literal trial, it is only in its acceptance of a casual friendship between a young man and a young woman, and Waugh doesn’t seem to think the new social norm very bad, if only people aren’t so careless about it as Clare and her friend have been. 

Of all people, Dinny’s Uncle Adrian sums up the critique of modernity at the end of the novel and the series. Society changes with time, he says, and this is inevitable. Humans are imperfect, so change is always needed. Modernity sees to have changed too much too fast, though, throwing out everything without pausing to distinguish the baby and the bathwater. People need some of the good things from the nineteenth century (I agree!) and they need continuity. But he doesn’t give details, and then he apologizes for being too philosophical. So it’s not the powerful commentary I so enjoyed in earlier volumes. I’ll share just a couple more quibbles. The characters go to see Cavalcade on the stage a few times, and I think Galsworthy lets this other artwork do a little too much of his work. (I sympathize with what I take to be his dislike for the show, though; I hate the movie.) Then there’s the confusion over the metaphor in the title. At one point the narration says time is a river and we can only go along with the flow, we can’t go over the river. But later Dinny is said to have gone over the river by getting married. Confusing. It seemed to me that Galsworthy would want to have said that she was moving against the flow of time’s river by participating in a traditional institution, not crossing over it. OK, a third quibble: Dinny marries a man she admires but doesn’t love just because she thinks she needs tradition as a shield against modern times. She, the series, and the philosophy deserve a better end.

I’ve achieved another milestone: exlibrismagnis.com now has over 300,000 views. I wish I could say they were all actual human visits, but I can’t. I had a lot of Russian bots back in 2016. The eager blogger, in hopes of being internet-famous, would check the list of referring URL’s and, hoping to find a mention of this site on some other blog or message thread, would click the sites on the list trying to see some actual referring link. Alas, I mostly got sites in Russian that seemed to be inviting me to gamble online. Blogspot’s host learned to block them soon after that, and then for many years I had only a handful of visits every day, which seemed like a legitimate representation of what a world of 7 billion people might do with my rambling thoughts. But in the last month or so, I’ve started having hundreds of views per day again. Yesterday 40 visits supposedly came mayo clinic dot org. (I spell it out in an attempt to protect against a robotic search.) Forty more came from what purports to be another healthcare organization. What’s that about? I understand the bots from nine years ago tricking me into clicking their link in an attempt to catch a fool ready to separate himself from his money. But why would there be a link for my blog on the Mayo Clinic’s site? On the other hand, why would a scammer pretend to be the Mayo Clinic? The link didn’t take me to a donation page or anything. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. Anyway, if you’re reading this because a healthcare site (or a Singaporean university’s site) had a link to me, write to let me know. Or if it’s a scam and you understand it, explain it to me, please!

Quick Roundup

In between mini-trips, I’ll just drop some short notes on recent reading.

I continue my plan to read Finnegans Wake over the course of fifteen years, the time it took Joyce to write it. After having consumed my annual slice of Finnegan Pie for 2025, I can say that it remains as wacky as ever with its nonstop wordplay and elusive sentence structure. But I think the man (who has several names and stands for several people, I think, or maybe all men) goes to an inn, has a drink and a meal, and then hires a woman. If this is the passage that got the book banned for pornography in some places, then I’m pretty sure neither the boards who did the banning nor their kids – assuming they even read this far – understood it or got any excitement from it. I don’t see anyone ever reading Finnegans Wake and then thinking, “Oh, now that I’ve read that, I can’t wait to commit adultery!”

George MacDonald’s Heather and Snow is the first of the Scottish pastor's novels I’ve really enjoyed in at least three years. There is no wise old man this time, the kind that in other books me wonder if MacDonald saw himself in these lofty characters. There are no polemics in which some leading character decides that anyone who disagrees with him (i.e. with George MacDonald) isn’t doing Christianity right. The protagonist is a young rural woman who understands God the best she can, which is to say that she understands Him better and more biblically than her mother or silly neighbor. But then all of them understand and serve God the best they can, as well. There are no judgments, just discussions and respectful attempts to explain or to persuade. The differences are nothing as compared to the difference between the belief of the faithful and the disbelief of the local baron’s son. There’s also a brother with some kind of mental developmental issues and a big snow that causes some deaths and a neighborly intervention before fornication (which didn’t involve reading James Joyce!), and all these events lead to very interesting thoughts and discussions about life in all its complexities and how best to live it in service of God and neighbor.

Finally, I will merely recommend Anthony Trollope’s short story (with eight chapters it could really be called a novella) “Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices.” 

I’ll have more after the next trip!

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! 

So Does Obscure Mean Wretched?

I had read that Jude the Obscure was the most shocking and controversial of Hardy’s novels. Then I found in the last couple of weeks that it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. (Dreading?) I guess I forgot all these years that the people shocked by it were Victorians, who were, as we know, somewhat easily shocked. Yes, Jude slowly rejects the Christianity of his youth. Yes, he gets divorced, falls in love with another woman and entices her away from her marriage, has sex once with his ex for old times’ sake, has a little trouble understanding why his fiancé is upset about that, and . . . OK, you get the idea. Yes, clearly Silas and Eulalia were scandalized. And I would have hated it forty years ago, too. But at this point it seems to me that the story is the kind of story that happens in real life and that Jude is just a person that I might know. 

I noted in a post back in May that I’ve learned to be less judgmental even about fictional characters. And I find myself less judgmental about authors. Hardy had an admirable talent for writing compelling fiction, and in Jude it seems to me he finally became completely honest with the public about his doubts – doubts about the Church, doubts about the Bible, doubts about society’s judgment on people who didn’t fit the mold (Jude loses his job as a manual laborer because of his marriage to a divorced woman, and Sue’s first husband loses his teaching position because he lets his adulterous wife have a divorce instead of teaching her a lesson and making her stay). And it’s not like he can’t see anything right about the Church or faith or social norms, either. So since he was so forthright and so able to outline his characters’ positions sympathetically and so willingly to look at both sides of all issues, I was able to go along with him, agreeing sometimes, disagreeing at other times (probably more often), but respecting him always. I will warn you, though, any of you who think you might read Jude the Obscure based on this short review, that it is probably the saddest book I’ve ever read, with one unforgettably, gut-wrenchingly tragic scene.

By the way, I don’t think even Hardy had sympathy for his character Arabella, so is it all right if I’m a little judgmental about her?

A Star is Born – and a Heart, and a Black Misery Drop, and a Green Book

I have an exciting announcement to make to my readers today – so exciting that it calls for the first-ever embedded image on exlibrismagnis! How exciting is that?

Forty years ago I thought of designing a board game based on the novels, novellas, and stories of Dickens. The idea was that each player would play one of the lead characters from a novel – David Copperfield, for instance, or Florence from Dombey and Son – and would slowly acquire acquaintances, employers, friends, love interests, and enemies in the form of cards representing other characters from perhaps other novels or stories. Each card would correspond to a page in a book that told all the possible actions that that character might take, the current action being determined by a die roll.

Twenty-five years later, the card game Dominion appeared, and the deck-building game came into the world. I was ahead of my time in conception but abysmally behind my time in practical application. So the creative thoughts began flitting again: maybe, as in these new deck-builders, all the necessary information and possible actions could be printed on the card itself. But still, what information would I need? What would a card look like? How would this game go? How could I test anything without cards? But how could I make cards without knowing what the game was like? How could I do any of it without beginning to reread the novels while taking careful notes on every character that appeared?

Three years ago, I realized that if I didn’t get started soon, I would get a chance, long before any game actually materialized, to ask Dickens himself face-to-face how he would have designed it. (It’s highly probable that, in that blessed state, neither of us will care enough about board games to hold the conversation.) So two years ago, I worked for a while and came up with a card design, based on measurements and specifications from a custom game printing company. Last year, I took careful notes (all arranged systematically on a spreadsheet) while reading Great Expectations and filled in a few cards. This past winter, I reread some more and added a page in my spreadsheet for almost 100 characters from Our Mutual Friend. Then I laid out card designs for about 30 of those characters and filled out a few more from Great Expectations. A couple of months ago I uploaded the designs to the printer, and a few weeks ago they arrived. And now, my friends, like a very proud papa, I show you a picture of a sample of this first draft!

Almost all the illustration come from nineteenth-century editions of the books. I had to borrow a few from novels by Trollope and Thackeray, but their all Victorian. The mechanics of the printed text aren’t very consistent: remember that I don’t really know how this game is actually played. But essentially, most characters provide either red hearts (love and emotional support), yellow stars (action and practical aid), black drops (misery), or green books (eccentric qualities). Some characters just do what they do, but many will attempt to do useful things only if you have the hearts or stars to pay for the action. Some Dickens characters don’t provide exactly love and don’t make practical contributions but are absolutely essential to the atmosphere of a Dickens story; these provide the green books, which a player can spend to improve the chances of success on any heart or star action.

Speaking of atmosphere, it’s important to me that every card have a description taken from the original text, which should be read aloud whenever the card is first acquired, and, if possible, a quotation of something the character says. Sometimes you’ll play a card and find that all you get out of it is being able to read the quotation aloud. Take John Podsnap, for instance, one of the cards featured in the picture. Podsnap never attempts anything; he simply is what he is. So his actions cost nothing; the player simply rolls two dice whenever the card is played. Should no “successes” be rolled (a success being defined as a 4, 5, or 6), the player reads the quotation: “We know what England is. That’s enough for us.” If one success is rolled, the player should read aloud (and preferably act out, as well) the indicated action – also taken from, if not exactly quoted from, the original text: “He clears the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him with a flourish of his right arm.” Actions like this have nothing to do with winning the game and everything to do with enjoying the game! Should the player be so fortunate as to roll two success, he takes a green book token, a benefit indicated on the card as “+1P.” For right now, I’m calling the green books Plot Points, hence the P, and yet that’s exactly what they aren’t because these eccentric characters do nothing to propel the plot toward either conflict or resolution!If one success is rolled, the player should read aloud (and preferably act out, as well) the indicated action

How does one acquire these cards? Each player will have a personal character board that outlines specific needs of one leading hero or heroine from one of the novels. Are you an orphan who needs to go to school? Go through the draw deck, looking at the backs of the cards, on which is printed some essential generic information about each character, until you find one that says “Teacher,” and then add that card to your private deck. You might be lucky and end up with the kind Mr. Mell from David, or you might be very unlucky and draw Wackford Squeers from Nicholas Nickleby. I say “unlucky,” but what’s life, or a book, or a game without some challenges, right?

And speaking of challenges, what exactly are the goals of this game-in-the-making? Each main character has problem to overcome; Bella Wilfer, for instance, has to get over her mercenary view of life. Each main character has a secret to find: Pip has to find out who is providing him with money. An orphan must end up with a kind protector, while all heroines and adult males must end up married with a steady, reputable source of income, however small. (A penitent Bella will actually score higher if her husband’s income is small!) All grief tokens must have been removed by hearts. (Esther from Bleak House forms an exception to this rule since she, more than others, gets wisdom from sorrow.) All a player’s enemies must be caught or dead. Most of a player’s friends must be alive, happy, and preferably married. It’s essential to me that the game can have 0-to-n winners. If no one meets the goals, no one wins. If two of three players meet their goals, the two of them win, while the third has to be satisfied with a Pip-like ending to his story. 

There’s a lot yet to do. For one thing, I have to play with these cards and figure out how the game goes. How does one play through one’s private deck of characters? How many cards are in play at a time, and how can a player manipulate which cards stay and which go away (so as to get advantageous combinations in play together: a detective and a criminal, for instance, or a couple of young, eligible friends that really do need to fall in love)? Is there a map to move around? My original conception, as innovative as it was, was forged in the era of board games in which choices were limited and fates were determined by the roll of dice; the game that emerges from these last few years of thought and effort must present the player with a lot more choices. All of that means that I have to change some of the cards I already have, because I haven’t put real choices on enough of them. And, of course, I need to read a lot more and make a lot more cards – once I truly know what to put on them. Right now I have 53 cards in my little draft deck, but I envision that the game should end up with something like 800.

But right now, at last, I have a draft copy of some cards to play with!

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.