May’s theme for the classics was “Adventure”, as I paired Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain with The Swiss Family Robinson. Twain’s former is a collection more than a monograph, as he presents together his recollections of growing up on the Mississippi as a pilot in training, parts of Huckleberry Finn, and a telling of a late re-visit to the river when he was an accomplished author. It’s certainly educational, especially when read in conjunction with a tool like GoogleMaps. Commenting on the mercurial nature of the river, Twain explains how often the river shifts its course, and points out that one town (“Delta”) which used to be a harbor town now sits inland. Delta is now a ghost town, but a nearby oxbow lake shows where the river once ran. (Just for curiosity, I traced the Mississippi all the way from the gulf to its headwaters in search of similar cases. I had to stop counting the oxbow lakes after a while.) The demands placed upon pilots to memorize the river, its daily variances, its every crossing – are almost too much to believe, but Twain insists that it was so. By the time he visits as an adult, the pilot’s job has been made much easier through bouys and signals and the like. The second part is more forgettable.
On to The Swiss Family Robinson. Believe it or not, I have never seen any movies based on this, or read the book; beyond a family crashing on a remote island and building a treehouse, I knew nothing of the subject. The book was penned in response to the popularity of Robinson Caruso, hence the name; it follows a family of survivors rather than a solitary outcast. Although the family will spend over ten years on the island before a ship encounters them, they’re extraordinarily lucky. Not only were they able to salvage the holdings of a colony ship for their own use, but the “island” they land has such a staggering abundance of improbable life (fauna from other hemispheres, even) that after a while one must conclude it was the private game reserve of some distant millionaire. This south seas island does not merely have the usual suspects like colorful birds, monkeys, and turtles. It has pretty much everything but a moose, and those in the mood for venison can just go after some of the buffalo. The island is similarly well set for fauna and other resources, between the salt caves, the India rubber trees, and the potato fields. Even more lucky for the family, their father is a walking encyclopedia on animals and engineering, so not when he's not building bridges, winches and the like, he’s telling the children all about the wildlife. It’s very informative, and would be enormously fun to read as a kid, I think, but the amount of creatures running around defies belief.
The Whale, alternatively called Moby-Dick, is a comprehensive 19th century guide to whaling and whales from a novelist who decided to take a hand at writing nonfiction. Such a thing was not unusual in those days, as many people were amateur naturalists -- Darwin, for instance, originally intended to be a country parson who dabbled in geology. Melville used his prior whaling experience and considerable passion for the subject as the basis of his research, though -- novelist as he was -- he could not help but insert a splash of narrative into the scientific survey. It's an interesting distraction, of course, but even the spectre of an obsessed captain with a pegleg in search of revenge doesn't cover over the fact that Melville, for all his interest in the subject, is still...off. He insists that whales are fish, for instance. The fictional element is quite interesting in its own right, of course, featuring an young chap with a hunger for adventure befriending a strange man from the far corners of the world, and then being thrown into the rough and tumble world of whaling while the ship sails towards its doom, badgering every other ship it meets with queries on whether they've seen The Whale or not. This fictional aspect has a mythic quality about it, especially given the origins of the name Ahab -- a king who angered God by turning to idolatry and who was later destroyed and his body tossed to the dogs in judgment. Returning, however, to the main course -- whales, their behavior, the hunting of them -- I wish Melville had imposed more organization. While there's a great deal of information here, I don't quite understand why it's still regarded as a classic of scientific literature, alongside The Origin of Species and On the Motions of the Heavenly Spheres.
Please note that the above paragraph is a thoroughly tongue-in-cheek ribbing of Moby-Dick, a book that would be as short as The Old Man and the Sea if the voluminous content about whales, whaling, whale-boats, and Wales were removed and the story left alone I enjoyed this book and this review for all the wrong reasons!
This week I've finished two books of interest, the first being a classics club entry (Invisible Man), and the other a book on big data and statistics. Everybody Lies played true to its title, opening with ways that analysis of data gleaned from Google searches and such shows that people lie to both one another and ourselves (claiming one thing in surveys and demonstrating quite another in what we search for) before shifting to the uses of 'big data' in general. Very amusing and interesting at first, but after it shifted I wasn't quite as enthused.
Invisible Man marked my first classic for the year, and follows an un-named narrator as he moves from a southern college for promising young black students to 1950s Harlem. He is effectively forced out of college after giving a college trustee an inexplicable tour of local areas that the school administration would prefer weren't so close to the college, and becomes an activist in a generic movement in Harlem, which fights for the mob's attention against a black nationalist group. The narrator is constantly being manipulated by those he interacts with, and power, or influence, drives everyone. There's a fair bit of absurdism here, so much so that many of the characters seemed insane at times. What stood out most was the tortured relationships between blacks and whites, laden as they were with conceits and psychological games. For instance, one character urges the narrator that lies are always the best way to handle 'white folk' -- tell them what they want to hear. It's not difficult to imagine circumstances where whites then regard blacks as inherently treacherous and use that to justify further marginalization. It's all incredibly unhealthy.
“If you are not sleepy, tell us one of your lovely, little tales to while away the night.” Shahrazad replied, “With the greatest pleasure”:
Tales from The Arabian Nights proved an interesting challenge, because most collections of them in English are only selections, and their contents are highly variable. The first set I started didn't mention Aladdin or Sinbad, the two stories which have the most name recognition in the west. My reading of the Arabian nights was thus divided between two volumes, the respective translators being Hussein Hadaway and Edward William Lane.
The Arabian nights open with the framing story of two brother-kings in Persia and India visiting one another and discovering that both of their wives are cheating on them. After retreating into the country to think things over, they spy a demon who keeps his human wife locked in a box buried in the desert in an effort to keep her faithful, only to have his efforts spoiled by her finding other men to sleep with anyway. The brothers sleep with her before lamenting the unfaithfulness of womankind, and return to their respective realms, where one resolves to never keep a wife. Instead, each day he marries a virgin, sleeps with her, and then kills her after the fact. This goes on for quite some time until his vizier's daughter, Shahrahzad, volunteers herself for marriage with a plan in mind. Using her extensive knowledge of literature and poetry, on her wedding night she begins telling a story that so ensnares the mind of her husband that he begs her to continue, and night after night puts the thought of killing her away until he can hear the end.
The tales of the Arabian nights are not one long story with many chapters like War and Peace; instead, one story will unfold to have many stories inside it, or a character introduced in one story will then be followed in another story, ensnaring the reader in a multitude of threads. They're replete with magic, of course; demons are as common as cattle, but I suspect the translation of that particular word is awkward because the demons are not necessarily servants of a great evil power. The first one we meet is just a fellow burying his bride in a glass box in the middle of the wilderness, nothing diabolical there. In the first collection I read, once the caliph Harun al-Rashid shows up in a story, most of the stories that follow involve his court. (al-Rashid threatens his vizier Jafar with death every time they discover something untoward going on in the kingdom. Not exactly the happy little man from Disney's Aladdin.) There are a lot of surprises here: Aladdin is set in China, of all places, but I suppose he could have been one of China's distant western minorities, like a Muslim Uyghur. Some of the stories are also far more salacious than I would have expected, given the image of Islam as straitlaced, but these stories emerge from popular culture which eludes heavy state censorship by its oral nature.
The Arabian Nights will probably rank among my favorite, or at least the most memorable, books in this Classics Club challenge. The stories are rich in odd scenarios and characters, like the chance meeting of three one-eyed dervishes, or the discovery that the colorful fish in a pond introduced in one story are actually the citizens of a town which was cursed, and the stories-within-stories trick gets amusing, almost like a running joke. Of course each dervish, characters in a story, has to tell how they got there, and one of them has another story inside that story -- Shahrazad's ability to weave all these together is amazing.
Italy, circa 1500, was a rough neighborhood. Divided between powerful city-centered states and frequently threatened by outside empires, few rulers could rest on their laurels and enjoy a prolonged peace. Even if someone outside didn't want to take over, someone inside might want to effect a little regime change. In such an environment, Nichola Machiavelli chose to present his newly-acclaimed ruler with a gift of advice. The Prince is a brief, grimly realistic review of how states work and how best to manipulate them, drawing on Italian or Mediterranean history for case studies.
I've grown up to associate the term Machiavellian with sinister calculation, usually of the wheels-within-wheels kind, and especially with cold-blooded calculation that doesn't hesitate to burn bridges, step on toes, and secure pointy knives in the back of friends who have outlived their use. The Prince doesn't quite do that reputation justice, but it's easy to see where it lies. Most of the beginning advice is analytical, as Machiavelli reviews different types of states and ways to rise to power -- He argues that a feudal state like France is relatively easy to compromise and invade, but nearly impossible to consolidate because of the heavy local basis of government.. An autocratic regime, on the other hand, where the weight of the state is on the ruler's shoulders and not supported or drawn from civil society, is harder to invade because of the central power but relatively easy to subdue thereafter. He appraises different sources of effective defense, from the best (a native, professional army) to the worst (foreign auxiliaries). It's later on, though, that things get....interesting.
Machiavelli argues that morality has little place in politics; politics is about what is rather than what should be. He does not equivocate: men are wicked. You cannot account on their affection, because it evaporates quickly. You cannot count on loyalty, because everyone looks instinctively to their own interest in the pursuit of power and wealth. It is better, then, to be feared rather than loved -- so long as one is not hated. Rulers should make and break their word with the same ease of a mechanic breaking down equipment to replace or mend its parts. This should not done flippantly or obviously -- it's always important to maintain the appearance of virtue if not the substance of it -- but a prince is judged by his results and nothing else. The best way for a prince to solidify his power, in fact, is for him to make himself indispensable, a man whose fall would cause more trouble than his continuing in office. In weighing the virtues of generosity and parsimony, Machiavelli concludes that it is far better for a prince to be faulted for stinginess than liberality: recipients of gifts are never as grateful as they should be, and the giving of gifts and favors only spurs resentment among those who do not benefit, induces greater expectations for future, more fulsome giving, and empties the state's coffers. In a worst case scenario, the liberally-giving prince can earn the hatred of the people by taxing them to give them gifts they do not regard as favors but rather as entitlements. All this advice is not intuitive: while one might expect advice to a dictator to urge disarming the rabble so they don't protest, Machiavelli instead maintains that keeping the population armed is a wiser choice. A ruler who disarms his subjects broadcasts his distrust of the people, and so cultivates their contempt. The strength of the ruler lays in his ability to defend against threats, and an armed populace is the best means of doing so.
The Prince has all kinds of related advice in it, from choosing wise-but-not-too-wise counsel, to squelching conspiracies. Some of the advice has modern application which anyone would applaud, like the avoidance of sycophants and foreign auxiliaries (how much money did DC waste in Afghanistan trying to create a native security force?). Some of this is material which I think we all suspect but rarely want to admit -- like the necessity for leaders to appear decisive and strong even if they are internally conflicted. That can easily lead us into folly if leaders focus too much on appearances rather than reality, but it is possible to change one's mind in light of growing evidence and still appear decisive. None of us would want to live in states where leaders lie and manipulate the people, but judging by the popularity of shows like House of Cards, we suspect we do already. Although I would not advocate The Prince as a way to government -- I put personal stock in virtue, honor, truth, all that dated and impolitic stuff -- I suspect even good, well-intentioned people who come into power find themselves enacting its lessons as they settle into office. The Prince has enormous value for me in its naked view of man the political creature, admitting as it does the limitations of building societies from the crooked timber of humanity.
"Please, sir, I want some more." I had never read or otherwise encountered Oliver Twist before this month, but I immediately recognized that quote. Something about little Oliver sticks in the minds of other readers, just as it stuck in the mind of many characters who encountered him. Oliver Twist is the story of an orphan who seems to escape and again from the clutches of uncaring or malicious adults, only to find himself right back in trouble. It was trouble that started before his birth, for as this narrative follows young Oliver's birth until he is about eleven or twelve, its happenings eventually reveal a more elaborate family drama. While Oliver is passing in and out of the hands of hostile adults -- first uncaring taskmasters, then criminals, who capture him after he escapes -- the arrival of a man with a mysterious past heightens the mortal danger to the boy, far beyond that of ordinary neglect and abuse. The novel is replete with memorable characters, particularly Nancy -- a teenage girl associated with a gang of criminals, who helps them kidnap him for labor but regrets her actions, later laboring to atone for them. Although this story is more grim than anything else I've read of Dickens, I appreciated the earn-your-happy-ending type conclusion, in which Oliver finally finds happiness but at the cost of a dear friend.
"Shall I respect man when he contemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness; and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union. Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a care: I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your birth."
An attempt to reach the North Pole is interrupted by the sight of eerie figures chasing one another upon the ice, and they have a tale of misery to recount. The man rescued by the ship, Victor Frankenstein, was an enthusiast of natural philosophy, and specifically the the power to create life. Captain Walton of the polar exploration vessel had been yearning for the friendship of someone who wanted to probe nature's darkest mysteries, but Frankenstein's story proved to be one of warning rather than encouragement. After relating his early fascination with occult figures and scientists alike, Frankenstein describes the horror he experienced when he succeeded in actually bringing a cobbled-together man to life, and how it pursued him across Europe, driven by despair and wrath at having been created. The monster himself also appears in the story, both through Frankenstein's recollection -- the two have a confrontation in which the monster recounts his pitiful life thus far and charges Frankenstein with giving him a companion that he can flee into exile with -- and aboard the ship as the last, before he disappears in a wintry haze.
I read Frankenstein in one sitting, which I hadn't expected to do. The monsters of Halloween have never had a great appeal for me, so most of this -- besides the scientist making a man -- was completely new. This Norton critical edition proved highly readable, supported with annotations to explain period-specific references or vocabulary which now borders on archaic. There's no getting around this book being a warning about the reckless pursuit of knowledge at any cost; beyond Frankenstein's attempt at creating life, which only resulted in a string of bloody murders and the destruction of both creature and creation, there's also the frequently-mentioned destruction of native American societies, specifically Mexico and Peru, as a result of enthusiastic exploration. Captain Walton himself proves to be someone who can learn from other's mistakes, as -- faced with hostile polar conditions that threaten his ship and crew -- he retreats to England. There were certainly surprises here, like the description of the creature as "beautiful" -- save for his eyes. (I wonder if, given that eyes were regarded as windows to the soul, if repulsive eyes hinted at the beast's depravity or brutishness.)
This Norton critical edition is particularly helpful in understanding the book. While I only read the story proper, it also contains a short essay on different versions of the story -- one edit implies the monster dies, another leaves his future shrouded in a storm -- as well as period responses and related poetry.
You are my hiding place; You preserve me from trouble; You surround me with songs of deliverance.
Psalms 32
When Corrie ten Boom turned in her family radio to the Nazi officials who had taken control of her town and her country and was asked if anyone else in the home had another set, she looked him square in the face and said "No". As she departed, she shuddered -- not from the fear of encountering an agent of tyranny, but from how easy it was to lie. The ten Booms were a deeply religious family whose watchmaking business opened and closed it day with the reading of Scripture, and even lying for the good did not come easy to the ten Boom sisters. But it would have to, because as the Nazi consolidation of power in the Netherlands began, and their Jewish friends fell under duress, the tiny watchmaking-shop became the hiding place for a group of resistance fighters and Jewish citizens seeking refuge from the government. It was last until late 1944, but even when the family had been seized by the SS and imprisoned in camps, there still remained one hiding place more. The Hiding Place is both a wartime memoir and a work of Christian testimony, declaring and demonstrating that light can shine in the darkness.
From the beginning, the hiding place was not a great secret. The hidden compartment was physically well-concealed, but no one could miss the sheer amount of people entering and exiting the building, and the neighbors had to ask (very quietly) if they couldn't keep the Hanukkah singing down just a little bit. The local police also knew, but had no interest in helping their grey-uniformed bosses in persecuting the innocents. Someone did want to help the Germans, however, as the family was betrayed and imprisoned. (Their wards, however, escaped notice!) Eventually Corrie herself would travel to Ravensbrück, the notorious women's concentration camp. But that's where the memoir comes something else altogether, as the ten Boom sisters are isolated from one another and forced to rely on nothing but their faith to keep them sane -- and not just sane, but human. The Gospel stories kept hope alive in the face of brutality -- and kept them from sinking into despair and deadened souls. The camps destroyed many who survived, inflicting long-lasting psychological trauma, but ten Boom emerged from the war as a more fervent Christian missionary. Remarkably, she and her sister refused to hate those who abused and humiliated them, and killed their father; they constantly expressed thanks for whatever small mercies they can see, and even when Corrie is being interrogated by an SS official, his skull-and-crossbones staring her down, she urges him to turn away from the darkness and look to the light.
In their darkest hours, the ten Boom sisters shared hope for the future -- dreams of what they would do when they were released. They wanted to turn their home into a refuge for those who had been crippled by it. This was not new to the ten Booms: even during the war they sought to shelter and teach the mentally infirm, who were left without resources by the Nazis and threatened with euthanasia. ten Boom shared a vision of having a place where former collaborators could redeem themselves by serving those whom they'd previously oppressed. This, she admits, did not work out well: there were too many fights between both sides, each holding the other in resentment. Even so, her shelter was one of the few places open to homeless former collaborators. The ten Booms' refusal to give in to hate is utterly inspiring in a day when spite and contempt saturate every political argument, when old hatreds are constantly given new life and the bleeding sores of politics never allowed to heal.
"It was a day for memories. A day for calling up the past. How could have guessed as we sat there -- to middle-aged spinsters and an old man -- that in place of memories we were about to be given adventure such as we had never dreamed of. Adventure and anguish, horror and heaven were just around the corner, and we did not know. Oh Father! Betsie! If I had known would I have gone ahead? Could I have done the things I did?
Believe it or not, I have been reading books without a Star Trek label appended to them this week. Just recently I finished off Don't Go There, a short collection of travel pieces that interested me with its mention of visits to Turkey, Chernobyl, and North Korea. The actual collection contains these along with trips to Israel, Ghana, China, and a few other places deemed 'interesting'. The first piece, a visit to Istanbul that threw the writer and his girlfriend unwittingly into street protests and clouds of tear gas, sets the stage: the narrator has no idea what he's doing or why, and seems to stumble into catastrophes just to get a good story to write about. None of Fletcher's trips had any reason or planning to them, most developed miserable complications, and when his girlfriend threatens to leave him, the reader must be sympathetic. If one endures his laughable ignorance in visiting places like Jerusalem (he is annoyed by religious people and religious references, which would be akin to going to DC when one hates politics), and similar episodes, eventually he ends up in North Korea. It's about what you'd expect, but he comes away believing the hostages of Kim are not as brainwashed as is commonly held, and that they would be more expressive if they could get away with it.
My other read during the last few weeks has been a volume called From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics. Markos opens the book with a remonstrance against the Protestant attitude that anything that predated Christ, or anything outside the Bible, is value-less. Although a Protestant himself, he regards the Catholic church favorably for its integration of the classic western tradition into its own tradition, in effect building upon and continuing the queries of Aristotle and Plato into the nature of the cosmos, ethics, beauty, etc. Markos' conviction is the same of CS Lewis' as expressed in The Abolition of Man, namely that while Christianity is the ultimate truth, basic truths are also available in other traditions. The aim of Markos in this volume is to see the truths which the Greco-Roman myths express about the nature of man and meaning. He then guides the reader through the works of Homer, selected works by Greek playwrights and historians, and ends with the Aeneid. As someone who has been removed from Western Literature I and II for far too long, I was interested in this chiefly as an accessible look at Greek literature, a reminder of its stories and writers. Markos reflects on the themes present in literature, like the struggle between familial duties and loyalty to the polis. Because the Greek dramatic tradition is in fact a tradition, Markos notes how differently the same myths might be use by different authors, and examines how the Aeneid is a deliberate Roman tribute to the Illiad and Odyessey, using its structure, locales, and elements. It was not a Latinized copy of the Greek epic, however, but one written with Rome's own history in mind -- and not ancient, but recent, as Aeneas' story can be read as a tribute to Augustus' victory over Marc Anthony and Cleopatra. Markos also connects the classical heritage to Christianity when he can, argue at times that the Greeks are foreshadowing the advent of Christ. This is similar to Luc Ferry's approach in Wisdom from the Myths, in which he argues that the Greek myths and plays constitute a coherent worldview -- a Stoic one. Markos isn't as insistent as Ferry, however, and the core of the book is merely in seeing what truths the old stories still tell us about ourselves and our relationships to our own polis and the cosmos.
When some future Gibbon writes of the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, he will have to devote a great deal of attention to the Great War. However more numerous the deaths of its daughter, the Great War’s damage was more foundational, destroying as it did not only an entire generation of young men and leveling empires, but in derailing the western dream of unstoppable progress. Western faith in itself and its ideals was fractured, and more damage would follow in the decades to come. The generation that followed was understandable cynical and lost, believing in nothing and pursuing only fleeting pleasures; a war opened with religious zeal ended in despair. A Wardrobe, a Hobbit, and a Great War examines the lives and work of two young men who fought in the war, but who survived it with their spirits intact -- who neither entered it as a crusade, or came out of it as jaded warriors.
The book is effectively a brief history of the war as experienced by Lewis and Tolkien, expressed as a two-part biography that focuses on how the war shaped their writing. The primary difficulty in supporting the authors' thesis, that Tolkien and Lewis developed ideas about heroism amid their war experience and later applied it to the worlds and stories they later created, is that neither man wrote a great deal about their war experiences. What few references exist in their letters from the time, and their recollections later, are connected by Jenkins to passages or themes in their stories: Lewis' descriptions of combat in his own life and the depiction of the same in his Narnia stories; Tolkiens' description of Mordor and the corpse-filled bog around it are connected to the horrifying spectacle that was a trench warzone -- where men lived among the dead and the engorged rats that fed on them, sometimes seeing past battles' dead unearthed by artillery strikes.
Loconte's general thesis is that Lewis and Tolkien both rejected the 'myth of progress', that society was growing Better and that men were evolving to become superior beings. They did not counter this with a theory that things were growing worse, but rather shared the conviction of GK Chesterton that things simply were, that the nature of fallen man was such that he could never become anything new-- he only exist to make his choices day by day, for good or ill. Heroism, as described by Jenkins and illustrated through the Narnia and Middle Earth novels, meant ever pushing to do the right choice, even when it was not easy, wise, or safe.
Ultimately, I don't know that there's enough evidence to support the authors specifically being inspired by the war to create the kinds of stories they did. However, I also don't know if there's an upper limit to how much I can read about Tolkien and Lewis, because they were old fogeys in their own time and thereby my countrymen. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this.
”The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets.” - The Last Battle
Christendom and Narnia are never far removed from one another, and in Further Up and Further In, Joseph Pearce takes us through the thin veil between them. He pores over the literary and theological references that deepen the world of Narnia, relying on his previous research into the life of Lewis, as well as his work on Lewis’ influences, Tolkien and Chesterton. Both are companions not just of Lewis, but of the reader here, as the three dwelt in the same moral and literary universe.
Most anyone who has visited Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe realizes its Christian connection. Aslan’s deliberate self-sacrifice to destroy the power of Death and revive not only Narnia, but redeem the withered soul of young Edmund, makes that obvious -- as does the Garden of Eden story seen in The Magician’s Nephew where the same white witch leads to the corruption of Narnia seven hours into its creation. And if anyone was missing the point, then in Voyage of the Dawn Treader Aslan explicitly tells the children that he is known by another name in their world, and that they were brought to Narnia so that they would know him better there.
Although Pearce expands on the multitude of links to Christian culture -- Aslan’s repeated use of “I am”, a la God’s reply to Moses in the desert, his treble use of the same phrase and other sets of three to bring to mind the Trinity, and so on -- Pearce also understands Lewis as a man deep in history, and particularly in medieval history. He points out Lewis’ allusions to other figures, like El Cid and Charlemagne, based not on dry history but on legends about these men, like “The Song of Roland”. Commentary stretches to the modern age, too, as Pearce points out how Eustace Scrubbs’ parents are caricatures of George Bernard Shaw, who loved “humanity” but disliked most people, and believed in progress for its own sake, rather than people for theirs.
More than anything else, Pearce shines a light on the moral universe that was Lewis’ made ‘physical’ in the land of Narnia. There delivered were his convictions about heroism and temptation, of the self-defeating nature of evil, of the dignity of creatures both great and small, both simple and clever. In The Magician’s Nephew we see condemned the will to dominate; in Voyage of the Dawn Treader we experience again Tolkien’s “dragon sickness”, the madness brought on by fixating on materials -- gold, in Eustace’s case, and secret knowledge in Susan’s. Each book has its lessons, and those who have experienced Narnia’s story and loved it will almost surely appreciate his look deeper into the wardrobe.
Every attorney has problematic clients, but few can claim an actual monster. Such is the case with Count Dracula, as young lawyer Jonathan Hawker discovers to his dismay and horror when he arrives at the mysterious count's manor in Transylvania. The trip was just a bit of business --- finalizing the papers for the count's purchase of land in England. But the Count is a man who the locals fear, who can command the beasts of the earth, and who is never around during the day. Hawker quickly finds himself an effective prisoner, shut up in a foreboding castle full of locked doors and secrets, and when he stumbles through one into the other -- discovering that the Count is a vampire, who subsists on human blood -- Hawker realizes both he and the City of London are in peril.
For a century-old gothic thriller, Dracula stands up very well. It uses an unexpected format, its story rendered in the letters and diary entries of the participants, who occasionally pool their notes to get the bigger picture. This epistolary approach allows the reader to piece the story together, instead of having all the work done for us by the narrative. (A good bit of the characters' work is done by Dr. van Helsing, who has a tendency to lecture.) Modern readers of vampires will recognize the creature here, but books like Twilight and In the Forests of the Night divorce the monster from his background. Stoker's vampire is a creature of Hell, experiencing a corrupted and bastardized version of eternal life; his association with the devil is not merely one of hyperbole, but real to the point that Dracula and his victims are completely disabled by the presence of a Eucharistic wafer. (Not included as vampire traits are a tendency to say "Bleh!" and an obsession with counting. Sesame Street lied to me!)
From its beginnings -- the dread-laden arrival in Transylvania, the creeping horror as Hawker and others piece together the truth -- until the chase at the end, Dracula remains a very effective thriller.
When Azar Nafisi taught literature in Iran, she dreamed of America. Not the United States, the government of which had been making itself decidedly unpopular in Iran, but "America" -- an idea, a dream, where people were free to pursue their own lives, to grow and flourish without a shah or a thought-police militia's interference. She discovered and explored this America via its literature, an experience which is partially shared in her Reading Lolita in Tehran. When she came to the United States to teach literature, another Iranian immigrant disgustedly told her that these people were not what she was looking for. Americans weren't passionate about literature the way Iranians were -- not even their own. Although Nafisi rejected his resignation, the fate of the humanities - literature, particularly -- weighs on her in writing this, and the experiences that she and others have had wrestling with American literature are offered here as proof of what serious engagement with literature can provide.
Nafisi's subtitle, America in Three Books, takes reader through Huckleberry Finn, Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, and Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Nafisi describes all of these as subversive, and links them as Individualist experiences -- the individual against conformity, consumerism, and their own lonely anguish. My own experience with American literature has been so paltry that I haven't read two of the three books mentioned, but Nafisi's strikes me as a fair take on Huckleberry Finn -- both because he resists being 'sivilized' and shut up in doors, and because his instinctive human sympathy for a friend of his outweighs the dictum of the day that his friend is a slave who should be punished for escaping. Nafisi's intent is to connect themes in literature with our lives, so amid the literary discussion are events from Nafisi's life, and conversations (or arguments) she has had with Americans and Iranians. Those who have read Lolita in Tehran will remember the style from that book. Nafisi's deep love of literature puts her slightly at odds with the political currents she is otherwise sympathetic to: she abhors the knee-jerk reaction the academy has to classics, of automatically dismissing them because they are old and by the wrong people. Literary criticism has missed the point altogether; instead of embracing works like a friend or lover to relate with, the books are beaten to death and the corpses picked at.. (To borrow from Douglas Adams: “If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.") Similarly, she is not a friend of the 'common core', and its sterile treatment of education as nothing more than mounds of Gradgrind facts to memorize.
When I first heard this title, it resonated with me, making me think of both the Greek cosmopolis -- an ideal republic admitting all with reason as citizens -- and another republic, one that absorbing a tradition makes us a member of, allowing us to learn and fight with a lecture from Cicero, or an argument from Aquinas or de Montaigne. Nafisi's conviction that literature unites people across political boundaries led me on, however, as her republic of the imagination is a little more ethereal. It's a place where people escape to -- a place where people can find connection even if they live in a dehumanizing state. But it's not merely a place of escape; in her epilogue, Nafisi admonishes those who demand trigger warnings on books and cry out for safe places. The world is not a safe space. Even if you live in a perfectly bland place, a Pleasantview right out of 1950s television, you may fall in love or lose a parent or find yourself facing some other emotional storm. Literature, Nafisi argues, prepares us for these storms: it fixes our feet, steels our spine, clears our mind. We must embrace its challenges, not shrivel away from them.
While I suspect anyone reading a book subtitled America in Three Books would already regard fiction as important, for me this was a welcome exposure to a couple of books I've only heard a little about, an encouraging reminder about the universality of good literature.
Such was my desire to read The Gulag Archipelago that when I found it on the shelf and observed that it was not one big book, but three big books, I didn't pause to reconsider. It's not just an entry on a list for me; I've heard too much about the book and about its author to shy away. Because it's a multi-volume work, each collecting several 'books', I will be posting about the volumes as I read them, and then attempting a general review at the very end.
Let's begin with the very obvious. The Gulag Archipelago is vast survey of the Soviet prison state -- a state within a state, an internal empire. Its property is not contiguous, but consists of islands of security buildings and camps connected by processing hubs and the roads themselves. Solzhenitsyn was born the year of the revolution, and became an officer in the Russian army during the "Great Patriotic War". Although strongly encouraged to apply for NKVD training, Solzhenitsyn demurred, increasingly uncomfortable with the morality of the state's actions. His timid research into the means and methods of the gulag system would grant him immediate first-hand evidence, as Solzhenitsyn himself was arrested and subjected to interrogation.
This is not merely a prison memoir. In his opening chapter, Solzhenitsyn renders a complete history of the Gulag system, with every wave of mass arrests chronicled in term. These arrests were not effected simply to purge out heretics to Soviet dogma, or to punish wicked peasants who resisted the seizure of their farms. Whenever the state encountered a problem -- failing infrastructure, ruined crops -- it found someone to blame it on. Quickly given a label -- "limiter" for instance, for those who dared to suggest that rail lines only had so much carrying capacity, and that trebling loads would ruin the rails -- the traitors would then be dispatched away. Problem solved! Another brand of nogoodniks were the "wreckers", who were responsible every time machinery broke down. Sometimes, the wreckers were responsible even if they did precisely what they were told, like sowing seeds in the snow because Lysenko believed exposed seeds would increased their yield. (They rotted, instead.)
The book's opening chapters have incredible interest, some of it dark. Solzhenitsyn details all of the various methods of torture and interrogation he and his fellows were exposed to; the methods were not meant so much to provoke truth as to elicit a confession, as official dogma made truth relative. So long as there was an angle to pursue, a faint argument to make, a man could be hung with his own words. "Give us the man," said the state police, "and we'll make the case." Particularly of interest is Solzhenitsyn's chapter on the "Bluecaps", the state police themselves, and his thoughts on good and evil. It would be wonderful, he writes, if there were simply evil people, and we could separate them from the rest of us; but the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, and who among us would cut out his own heart? This isn't woolgathering on Solzhenitsyn's part, as he remembered his own moral compromises just as an officer of the army -- his easy arrogance, his thoughtless actions. Later on in this volume, Solzhenitsyn chronicles the history of show trials and the developing legal codes that would allow official sanction for arresting and executing anyone whom the state saw fit. In the last part, book two, he follows his own journey to the work camps themselves by writing about the transit camps and the elaborate transportation system; here, as more prisoners are mixed in together, we see spontaneous pecking orders, with the actual criminals (thieves and such) taking the best and sneering at the politicals. This is quite the change from the Tsarist regime, in which politicals were a minor class of detainee who enjoyed far fewer restrictions than the criminals. (Of course, the nature of prison-keeping changed from the Tsars: when Russia was on the eve of evolution, the jailers were regarded with such contempt that gentlemen wouldn't even shake their hands. After the revolution, jailers were regarded with fear and trembling.)
A third of the way into this epic, I am already beginning to appreciate why Solzhenitsyn's work is regarded so highly; the amount of information collected and ordered here is rendered to the reader in a very human voice, one which recounts all this in sometimes comic, sometimes sad, disbelief.
"...little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever."
Edmund Burke, on the execution of Marie-Antoinette
In the tenth volume of Will Durant's Story of Civilization, we now approach the latter half of the 18th century. This is an age of titanic personalities, in every field. Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Bach, Schiller, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Voltaire -- what an age to be alive in! For those unfamiliar with Durant's epochal series, his approach was a symphonic history that covered politics, economics, religion, architecture, music, and literature. This particular volume opens with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's critique of reason, and -- amid all the politics -- examines the influence of the Romantic reaction on the arts and politics, ending with the storming of the Bastille.
This is an age of enormous change; the industrial revolution has spread beyond England, and its social consequences are brewing political revolution, especially in France. It is an age of war, like most ages; Russia, Austria, and Turkey bicker incessantly over the Black Sea, and western Europe sees several wars of succession. The most influential conflict, however, is the Seven Years War. This saw most of Europe allied against Prussia and England, with from some instability on Russia's part. While the consequences in Europe were minimal, this was the war that made England an superpower. While everyone invaded (and was rebuffed by) Prussia, the English chased the French out of both India and North America, creating an incredible global empire. The Seven Years War would set the stage for the American War of Independence, removing as it did America's great opponent on the continent, and pressuring the British to make the colonies pay for themselves via taxation.
Although the Enlightenment has already provoked its reaction in the form of the Romantic movement in the arts, the 'age of reason' itself is not yet spent: it is only now beginning to enter some subjects, like economics. Irreligion among the intellectual caste is de rigeur, although in the Protestant north, a few individuals (Boswell and Gibbon, for instance) get their subversive kicks by embracing Catholicism, if only temporarily. Writers like Voltaire and Rousseau write constantly of novel approaches to old problems: Emile, for instance, is ostensibly about the proper education of a human being. (A curious subject, given that the author sent his own children to an orphanage on their birth.) In the decline that which had been sustaining public morality, the Church and faith in general, people tried to find new ways of justifying a moral life. Some, like the Marquis de Sade, didn't bother; they rejoiced in the fact that without God, all things were permissible. Much of the philosophy here, skeptical as it was of the old authority, also rebelled against reason; this was an age of Feeling, of sensibility -- hence a larger role here for literature, theater, and other arts in the history. Rousseau in particular is used to epitomize the beginning of the romantic age, for his writings condemned cities, civilization, and material learning as corruptive elements leading the inherently good hearts of men astray. (Burk's comment about sophisters and economists almost echoes him there.) His emphasis on humanistic morals, however, did not make him a traditionalist; he regarded the Church with suspicion because it threatened patriotism, being an institution which transcended nations. (This was an age of French literature, Italian opera, and German music -- every nation had something to be extremely proud of.) Rousseau is most remembered for his political philosophy, which emphasized the 'will of the people'. While sometimes cited as an inspiration for the American revolution, Rousseau did not believe that representative legislatures truly served the will of the people; that had to be effected through full democratic assemblies, and so genuine democracies must remain small. Rousseau's emphasis on popular will and republics put him at odds with Voltaire, who distrusted the populace and smiled upon enlightened kings. In general, Durant noted, the revolutions of the 19th century would follow Rousseau in politics and Voltaire in religion.
Rousseau and Revolution is, like all of the books in Durant's series, formidable in its size but not in its writing. Durant, when he shows his personality, is utterly amiable. He is not as personal with his pen here as he was in The Age of Faith or The Reformation, but at times we witness the human being behind the pen, mindful that he is not writing of abstractions but of real people. He cautions the reader to never lose sight of the individual people whose lives were creating what we perceived as larger trends. Accordingly, Durant writes not just of big things -- the epic novels, the epic personalities -- but of passing affections, like fashion and frivolities, the concerns of the flesh and blood creatures who then walked abroad. The Durants are gentle and humane authors, students of the very history they write, forgiving of their subjects' sins and excesses. We'll see if that lasts throughout the French Revolution, for this book ends with the storming of the Bastille.
We move now to Napoleon and the end of civilization; or at least, the end of Will and Aerial Durant's Story thereof.
Why did Cain kill Abel? East of Eden explores that question via a family saga, one that stretches across North America, spanning the continent as well as the generations; a story that begins at the end of the Civil War ends only at the end of the Great War. It's the story of two families and one individual, a woman who bares more resemblance to the apocryphal Lilith than to Eve. When I approached East of Eden, I did so only as a story about brothers; I had no idea that Steinbeck mixed in his own family history, let alone that he regarded the book as his magnum opus. Only time can tell if I will remember this story as vividly as I do that of the Joads ,in The Grapes of Wrath...but I wouldn't bet against it.
Readers who retain a familiarity with the Hebrew bible will remember that Genesis is essentially a family epic, particularly following the line of Abraham: he has a son, Isaac, who has two boys, who fight, and the victor thereof (Jacob) creates an entire litter of boys with more fighting ensuing, taking the family story to Egypt and back, until the family has become a nation. East of Eden begins with a man and his two sons, who fight, and their story will take one brother not to Egypt but to the Salinas valley of California. That brother, Adam Trask, wants to build a life and farm for himself in the west, but his ideals and dreams are shot when he himself is shot by a woman he shrouded with lies and hope: his wife. Adam's sons grow up, bearing the names Aaron and Caleb, and their own dram
East of Eden leaves a great deal to mull over. There is a very obvious aspect of siblings vying for their father's affection; Adam and Charles do this with their father, Cyrus, and Adam's sons Aaron and Caleb echo it with him. The homage to Genesis is deliberate, as several characters frequently ruminate over the meaning of the story in Genesis in which Cain grows distressed after his sacrifice to God is snubbed in favor of his brother's; that distress takes the form of murderous jealousy sentences later when Cain kills his brother and becomes an outcast, sojourning east of Eden. Of particular interest is the fact that God "marked" Cain so that others would see him and not slay him-- saving judgment for God's own hand. Several characters in East of Eden are 'marked', not through liver spots or birthmarks, but scarred through their own actions. These characters struggle with darkness; one is saturated by it, possessed by it -- and others live in fear of themselves, wondering if they are doomed to persist in their vices. That question is the great theme of the book, the question of destiny: is our fate in our hands? For the characters it all comes down to a single word, a word that fixates rabbis and Chinese wisemen and frustrated farmers alike.
What I appreciated most about East of Eden, is that every character save the sociopath was conflicted. The "good", doted-on brothers frequently made mistakes, and their failures provoke the plot as much as the failures of the ''Cains'. Of course, this is a character-driven drama; relationships here are all-important. This was definitely a novel to savor..
If you've ever glanced at my Classics Club list, you'll see Canterbury Tales sitting there, and I've regarded it as one of the tougher ones on my list -- in the same tier as the Russians, April is the ideal month for reading the Tales, in part because it's set during April ("Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote ..."), but mostly because April is a month I've dedicated to England for the past several years. With its girth in mind, I began early, on March 1st. (That marked the first day of Lent, and I was amused by the thought of reading about a pilgrimage during a time inspired by pilgrimage.)
I will note from the beginning that I did not read the tales in Chaucer's original English. My library, happily, has a 900+ page volume that presents a column of Chaucer alongside one of 'modern' English, and it was the modern English which I largely read. I often compared the two columns, reading as much as I could of Chaucer before having to take a peek at the meaning of words, and I saw enough to realize -- based on the fact that certain words were suppose to rhyme - -that Chaucerian English really did sound much different from ours.
I assume most people are aware of the general premise of The Canterbury Tales, but just in case: a large group of people on pilgrimage to Canterbury (intent on honoring Thomas a Becket) converge on an inn. Since they're all headed the same way, they decide to engage in a little friendly competition: each person will spin a couple of tales there and back again, and when they all return to the inn they will decide who gave the best story, and all pitch in to give that person a free meal. Such is the General Prologue, after which various personalities step forward to give a story. The stories vary in length and in mood, as do the storytellers; some are noblemen, like Knights; others are commoners, some are women, some are members of religious orders. Some of the stories are noble, some tragic, some sad, and some very silly.
Rather than reviewing Chaucer (rather like reviewing Homer!), I want to share a couple of general comments and then recap some of the more memorable stories from the first half of the Tales, when I was still taking notes. I was surprised by the varied settings of the stories; some are set as far afield as Russia, Syria, and Greece. As with The Merrie Adventures of Robin Hood, there are grievances aplenty against the landed nobility, including the church. Lastly, while I've heard much about the medieval cult of courtly love, I never appreciated how fantastically silly medievals were for romance until I read through some of this preposterous goings-on.
And now, recaps of a few more memorable tales, complete with a moral:
Knight's Tale: Two cousins imprisoned together fall in love with the same woman, and are violently jealous even though they're in a tower and there is zero chance of them courting her. Naturally one escapes and the other is pardoned, and upon pursuing the girl they meet in a field and start fighting. Who should discover them but the king who imprisoned them in the first place, who -- persuaded by the girl, who turns out to be his sister -- allows them to meet one year hence, with their respective armies, and enter into trial by combat to see who shall win her hand.
The moral: Finders keepers.
The Miller's Tale: One woman is pursued by two men while still married to a third. The story involves two occasions of rear ends being kissed by mistake.
The moral: Wait until daylight to kiss people.
The Clerk's Tale: A King is pressed by his people to marry and decides to marry a beautiful and virtuous peasant. Despite her character, wisdom, and beauty, the King is constantly suspicious of her and inflicts a series of Job-like tests upon her which amount to (1) making her believe he's killed her children, (2) making her believe he's going to annul their union and marry someone less controversial, and (3) having her PLAN THE NEW WIFE'S WEDDING. When the wedding guests arrive, and lo! The "bride" is actually her long-lost daughter, with long-lost son in tow, everyone enjoys a happily-ever-after moment. (Instead of "What the heck, Dad? moment.)
The moral: What seems like psychopathic behavior may, in twenty years, turn out to be a convoluted plan with a happy ending. So uh, have patience.
The Wife of Bath: After entirely too much information about her five husbands, the Wife of Bath tells the story of a Knight who raped a woman and was brought on trial to the King's court, whereupon the Queen gave him one year to solve the question: What do women want? Having queried high and low to no avail, the Knight resignedly begins returning to the court to meet his death, only to chance upon a horribly disfigured old woman who will give him the answer if he promises to anything she wants. He gives the answer to the Queen and is promptly confronted by the old woman, who bids him marry her. He resists by recounting her faults (poverty, age, etc); she rebuts them by praising poverty, age, etc, and finally he relents to marrying her. She then asks him: would he rather she be old and faithful, or young and tempting to others? He leaves the matter to her, and she -- happy that he has ceded his judgement to hers -- decides to become both young and faithful. (Oh, and the answer to 'what do women want?' is 'to be in charge'.) Hurrah for...resignation...?
The moral: Rape is evil, but if you find a witch who wants a husband, you might get away with it.
Sense and Sensibility is the story of two sisters, Marianne and Elinor, who are left to live on a fixed income after their father perished and the law forced him to leave all of his money to their stepbrother – with the promise that said stepbrother would support the sisters. Unfortunately for the ladies, said stepbrother has all the moral backbone of a worm, and his “support” – after taking over their home – was the promise to send fish or game when they were in season. The sisters and their mother, made to feel like outsiders in their own home, take up residence in the country for a long spell of talking, playing music, talking, dancing, painting, talking, walking, and worrying. Far from their old home they find new friends, each with their own promise and limitations – and this being an Austen novel, romance is in the air. Both Marianne and Elinor have beaus who prove or seem inconstant, but the two women respond to their social anxiety in very different ways. Marianne is a leaf from the Romantic era, full of intense passion, surging hither and yon like tides crashing on a beach; Elinor is more reserved, more pragmatic. She feels quite intensely, but she is the image of the expression that still waters run deep – the picture of self-government, It is she, not her mother or sister, who truly manages the house, and who cares for her sister then things go off the deep end. Another opposing pair are Edward Ferrars and John Willoughby; one is rooted in honor, the other in self-love.
Sense and Sensibility defeated me the first time I attempted to read it (one year ago), in part because I only tried it because of its Classic status. The story didn’t interest me, but – having recently watched the film for my Read of England celebration -- I approached the novel this time with genuine appreciation and interest in the story, particularly my appreciation for several of the characters. One of the best moments of the novel is when Elinor expresses admiration for a fellow whose behavior seems to deny her happiness. As much as it pains her, she can look beyond it and see its virtue. Otherwise, Marianne and her beaus steal the show completely, I think, as Book-Ferrars is largely absent and appears only to stand awkwardly in a corner, mumbling his apologies before he wanders off again.
Incidentally, this experience tested a theory of a friend of mine. He claims that if a person watches the movie first, then reads the book, he will enjoy them both; if he reads the movie, and then watches the movie, he will only complain about how much the movie left out or added.
1995 trailer, with actors such as Alan Rickman and Kate Winslet. Hugh Laurie also appears.
Years ago in a ninth-grade literature class, I chose to read a book by William Faulkner for a class project on the basis that he was a southern writer. My teacher cautioned me against trying The Sound and the Fury, warning me that it was difficult -- a challenge out of scale for a minor paper. Well, dear readers, I persisted -- for about a chapter. Then, faced with Faulkner's bewildering narrative style --,a torrent of words with few marks of punctuation, flowing ceaslessly like the Mississippi -- I returned to my teacher with tail between my legs and asked for something else, and thus read The Old Man and the Sea for the first time. Ever since then, the memory of Faulkner has haunted me. I associate his writing with both brain-melting difficulty and with embarrassment, and yet...still I've wanted to read him. The prevailing reason is the same: William Faulkner is a southern writer. He is not just a southern writer, though, he's one of The Southern Writers, always mentioned with Flannery O'Connor as though the two were manufactured as a set, like a pair of pants.
The Unvanquished is the story of a young boy (Bayard Sartoris) who comes of age amid the Civil War and reconstruction, along with his close friend Marengo ("Ringo"). Ringo begins the novel as a slave, but the narrator mentions early on that he and Bayard were so close in age that they suckled at the same breast, and both lived in dread awe of The Colonel and Granny. While The Colonel (John Sartoris) is off at war, fighting to keep the damyanks out of Vicksburg, Granny is the boss. Actually, I almost suspect she remains the boss when The Colonel is home, for this is a woman who trucks into the middle of a warzone to demand the Yankees return her stolen mules, her slaves, and her chest of silver. Fearless, she uses fabricated requisition papers to steal and sell livestock to the invading army -- not growing rich, but using the proceeds to support her community of Jefferson, burnt-out by the war. Shady business brings forth shadier persons, though, and soon death visits the Sartoris family. In the collection's conclusion, young Bayard -- who is now a twenty-something law student -- must confront the man who robbed him of his father upholding the family's honor but heedful of the consequences should he make the wrong choice.
If you have never read Faulkner, The Unvanquished is a promising work to test the waters, It's one of his shorter pieces, and the stories' length allow an unfamiliar reader to dive into Faulkner without chance of drowning. That style of writing, the torrent of consciousness ("stream" won't do for Faulkner), is present here, but not nearly as overwhelming as I remembered from Sound and Fury. Although these stories are filled with death, as the State's armies lay waste to the South, Granny's confrontations with the Yank officers always have humor about them, as the officers regard her with astonished admiration. One of them thanks God that Jefferson David never thought to draft an army of grannies and orphans, for a regiment of Sartorises would be the Union's undoing.
"When I first read Chesterton, I did not know what I was in for. God is, if I may say it, quite unscrupulous."
Mention the name C.S. Lewis and the image of a prolific author comes to mind, secure in reputation as a scholar of medieval literature and author of Christian apologetics. Surprised by Joy reveals a Lewis far removed from the pedestal of memory. A brief autobiography, it tells the story of how he came of age, losing and refinding faith as the world destroyed itself around him. Here is a Lewis outside the university, unguarded by coats of tweed; he is a man, struggling with fear and doubts, spurred on by hope and far more entertaining than I would have ever expected.
The Lewis of expectations is here; an introverted, bookish, and supremely thoughtful boy with a rich imagination fed by a love for classic and mythic literature. Lewis’ gift for storytelling is not limited to fiction, evidenced by the side-splitting account in which he recounts his father -- an orator who could be intoxicated by verbosity once he’d gotten started -- subjecting five year old boys to momentous speeches full of pomp and storied prose, all for ordinary errors like getting one’s shoes wet in the grass. Beyond the story of an early-20th century English childhood, however, this is the coming of age of a profound man, who sees his life as driven on by a search for "Joy", which he experienced in brief stabs of ecstasy at various points in his young life. Such joy was not to be found in his childhood religion, which as as badly taught as everything else. He experienced shades of ecstasy when stumbling upon the Nordic myths, and despite his later materialism had a strong interest in the occult. Later, he would come to see these experiences as momentary glimpses of something greater, and the book ends with his return to theism. He doesn't make arguments to the reader, only outlines of the philosophical questions and themes he grappled with in his youth. This can tend toward the heady, as Lewis' tipping point is the moment when he begins to understand the universe as some sort of cosmic mind, an Absolute, and another author (Chesterton) forces him to call a spade a spade. When Lewis is being philosophical about the writing can get heady -- 'thinking about thinking' always does, and Lewis' attempt to understand consciousness appears to have been a major factor in his rejection of a purely material universe. Here the difficulty is further complicated by frequent mentions of intellectual movements that Lewis was arguing with and flirting with that have since faded not only from the intellectual scene, but from memory altogether.
I've read this book several times in the last two years, partially out of affection for the author and partially to understand his experience. The latter still eludes me in part, but epiphanies aren't a mental commodity that can be packaged up and transferred from brain to brain. However much some of his experience may elude me, there's still so much about him to appreciate: his contempt for authority, his imaginative passion and curiosity, his dogged efforts to wrest understanding from old books and new friend, and his utter delight in simple things like country walks and stolen mornings spent with a pipe in the library. He's one of those authors who I spot on a bookstore display and have a sudden burst of affection for, as though I'd spotted a friend out of the window. (Wendell Berry has a similar effect, but Lewis has that old-fashioned Oxford don aura about him.)
