Quotation of the Week (51/2010)

Advent Calendar / 20 December

‘The White Witch? Who is she?’
’Why, it is she that makes it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!"’
’How awful!’ said Lucy.

---

‘Come on!’ cried Mr Beaver, who was almost dancing with delight. ‘Come and see! This is a nasty knock for the Witch! It looks as if her power as already crumbling.’

---

And on the sledge sat a person whom everyone knew the moment they set eyes on him. --- Everyone knew him because, though you see people of his sort only in Narnia, you see pictures of them and hear them talked about even in our world – the world on this side of the wardrobe door. But when you really see them in Narnia it is rather different. Some of the pictures of Father Christmas in our world make his look only funny and jolly. But now that the children actually stood looking at him they didn’t find it quite like that. He was so big, and so glad, and so real, that they all became quite still. They felt very glad, but also solemn.

‘I’ve come at last,’ said he. ‘She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last. Aslan is on the move. The Witch’s magic is weakening.’

C.S. Lewis: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
(Illustration by Pauline Baynes)

…

I’m not sure how it works for readers who live in a warm climate, but I think Lewis catches perfectly how closely connected Christmas has come to be with Winter for us who live in the North. Christmas is celebrated at Midwinter; it is the turning point, when we can begin to say things like “at least from now on the days will be getting longer again…”

Quotation of the Week (48/09)

Swedish Whitebeam Trees, November

"You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down."
C.S. Lewis

Oh Deer, I Won!

(No, it's not a spelling mistake!)

This has been a tough week for me in many ways, computer crash included. Yesterday, however, in spite of "only" having my laptop... I made an attempt at the Blog Anniversary contest at Dan's blog Wood and Pixels, which he generously kept running for four days (Tuesday-Friday). And I WON! Three other people also came out winners, on the other days. For an extra special reason, though, I am especially happy that Thursday got to be my lucky day. The special reason has nothing to do with the prize, because we will each get a photo print of our own choice. Which of course would make me happy any day! :)  No - the extra special thing for me about Thursday had to do with the picture to which the clues were pointing on that day - a white deer. (Click on the I WON link above to see Dan's photo.)

Dan provides a link to the Native American folklore about the white deer. However, the white deer or stag is also special in Celtic folklore, which I have been interested in ever since my first visits to Britain in my early teens.  In Celtic mythology it represents a closeness to the Otherworld. For example, "the white stag or hart often appears in the forests around King Arthur’s court, sending the knights on adventures against gods and fairies". The deer is also used in Christian /Biblical symbolism, to represent the human soul's longing for God. Modern fantasy writers have made use of the deer/stag symbolism, too. Two examples:

In C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, what brings Peter, Edmund, Susan and Lucy - by then grown up and Kings and Queens of Narnia - back to England at the end of the story, is the rumour that a White Stag has been seen in the Western Woods of Narnia. They go on a hunt and they see the stag and they follow it. This brings them back to the lamp post, and from there back to the wardrobe, and their life in this world.

In J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter books, a white stag, and towards the end also a white deer, also have very important guiding roles to play.

As I said in my comment on Dan's congratulations post:
Some things in life can really make you wonder about coincidence vs "meaning".

And as it happens, that very topic has been appearing in different shapes to me more than once over the past couple of weeks. Now here it was again, through the white deer...

Not Just Narnia

Looking through my email files, I found one I had sent to myself and forgotten about!

I think it is a post I originally wrote for some subforum at the Harry Potter discussion forum Leaky Lounge, in answer to someone asking for more info on books by C.S. Lewis, other than The Chronicles of Narnia.

I read most of C.S. Lewis's works. A good place to start if you want to get aquainted with his basic theology is Mere Christianity. A more personal touch on his conversion can be found in his autobiography Surprised by Joy.

I haven't heard of a "complete works" edition but I think most of his books are getting reprinted every now and then.

The Space Trilogy consists of Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. These are not children's books but intended for more grown-up readers. Like the Narnia books they deal with good and evil, and stretch from creation till the end of the world themes. In the first two the main character Ransom, travels into space and lands on other planets, where evil is not yet found. But evil is introduced into these worlds by two other humans, Weston and Devine. The last book takes place on Earth but with "intervention" from otherworldly beings that Ransom has met in the previous books.

Lewis manages to intertwine ideas from for example Greek and Roman mythology with Christian theology; he also manages to combine speculations about life on other planets with classical Christianity. His God is God of all the Universe, whether there are other worlds and other kinds of creatures out there or not.

After Lewis's death, an unfinished manuscript was also found where the character Ransom is involved. This story was never finished by Lewis (He probably started it after the first space novel but abandoned it for other ideas). It contains ideas about time-travelling. As far as it goes, it has been published posthumously in The Dark Tower And Other Stories, together with a few other fragments and short stories, edited and with a preface by his friend Walter Hooper; who has also written a biography about Lewis together with Roger Lancelyn Green.

Another work of fiction is Till We Have Faces. It is a "reworking of the myth of Cupid and Psyche". I read it a couple of times but found it hard to understand. Maybe I should reread it again now when the internet makes it so much easier to look things up.



My own photo, taken through plexiglass window at the zoo.
(Also published not long ago at Soaring through the World)

Quotation of the Week (44/09) - What's Important

If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life or a state or a civilisation, compared with his, is only a moment.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 1

... I'm still rereading this book, slowly...

Mere Christianity

I think few readers of this blog will have missed the fact that I'm a C.S. Lewis fan. (Hello! My blog title and my blog name are both his inventions!) In case you did miss it - now you know, because I'm telling you.

I don't think I actually read even the Narnia books until I was in my late 20s; but then I read almost every one of his books, theology as well as fiction, and a few biographies about his life as well. In my third term of college English literature studies, I wrote my essay on the concept of good and evil in the Narnia series. I think I can safely say that no other writer has had as big an impact on my overall understanding of Christianity as C.S. Lewis. Books by and about him (most of them in English small print pocket editions) occupy approximately 50 cm of my shelfspace. (He shares a shelf with Tolkien and J.K Rowling.)

I have kept returning to his fiction frequently; however, it has been a while since I properly reread any of the theology books. Some weeks ago I took out Mere Christianity to look something up. I got caught. The book has stayed on the shelf next to my bed since, and I'm reading it slowly. I'm rather fond of the picture on the cover of my 1979 pocket edition, so I scanned it for you:

The following quotation has been lingering in my mind this week. It's begging me to share it. Lucky me - when I googled, I found the whole book availabe as e-text. I can copy, don't have to type! It also means that if you urgently want to read more of the surrounding context, you don't have to go find the book...

The contents of this book were first given as radio talks. Lewis kept that style in the printed version. If he had lived today, I think he'd have been a great blogger!

'A "talk" on the radio should, I think, be as like real talk as possible, and should not sound like an essay being read aloud. In my talks I had therefore used all the contractions and colloquialisms I ordinarily use in conversation.' (Quote from the Preface)

From C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Chapter 2:

Very well then, atheism is too simple. And I will tell you another view that is also too simple. It is the view I call Christianity-and-water, the view which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all right - leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption. Both these are boys' philosophies.


It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not. The table I am sitting at looks simple: but ask a scientist to tell you what it is really made of - all about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and what they do to the optic nerve and what it does to my brain-and, of course, you find that what we call "seeing a table" lands you in mysteries and complications which you can hardly get to the end of. A child saying a child's prayer looks simple. And if you are content to stop there, well and good. But if you are not - and the modern world usually is not - if you want to go on and ask what is really happening - then you must be prepared for something difficult. If we ask for something more than simplicity, it is silly then to complain that the something more is not simple.


Very often, however, this silly procedure is adopted by people who are not silly, but who, consciously or unconsciously, want to destroy Christianity. Such people put up a version of Christianity suitable for a child of six and make that the object of their attack. When you try to explain the Christian doctrine as it is really held by an instructed adult, they then complain that you are making their heads turn round and that it is all too complicated and that if there really were a God they are sure He would have made "religion" simple, because simplicity is so beautiful, etc. You must be on your guard against these people for they will change their ground every minute and only waste your tune. Notice, too, their idea of God "making religion simple": as if "religion" were something God invented, and not His statement to us of certain quite unalterable facts about His own nature.


Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect. ---

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity.

Lions

You get amazingly close to the lions at this zoo.
All that is between you is a plexiglass wall and a thin wire.
And for a change, it is the humans who are in the "cage",
while the lions are outside, looking in...




'Then he isn't safe?' said Lucy.
'Safe?' said Mr Beaver; 'don't you hear wthat Mrs Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.'
'I'm longing to see him,' said Peter, 'even if I do feel frightened when it comes to the point.'
From C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe

Quotation of the Week (35/09) - just and unjust

"But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?"

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book 2, Ch. 1)

A Doorway From Nowhere Into Nowhere

I fell in love with this sculpture, walking round and round it, taking lots of shots from different angles. It reminded me of "doors to other worlds" in fantasy literature and Celtic mythology.

Of all the pictures I took, I chose the one above for the Soaring Through The World photo blog, because of the double effect with the birdhouse on the tree - which also has a door, through which not everybody can enter!

The title, A Doorway From Nowhere Into Nowhere, is a quote from Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis:

"At the end of the glade Aslan had caused to be set up two stakes of wood, higher than a man's head and about three feet apart. A third, and lighter, piece of wood was bound across them at the top, uniting them, so that the whole thing looked like a doorway from nowhere into nowhere."

Some of the people whom Aslan gives a choice to pass through the door say: "We don't see any other world through those sticks."
But those who do trust Aslan go; and they do find another world waiting...

Below you find more pictures of the same sculpture, from different angles - and what you can see through it! I have also been experimenting using different frames in Jasc Paint Shop Pro.

Dream come true...?

Two of my very first readers here have both commented on "the island of dreams". (See initial post, and interview.) In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis, the island where dreams (not daydreams, but the nightly kind) come true is called the Dark Island; it is surrounded by darkness, and the man who managed to escape from it calls it a horrible place.

As I have already hinted, I find dreams and dream analysis interesting. Just recently, I had a very odd experience of déjà vu connected to a dream I dreamt many, many years ago.

Not so long ago, I moved to a new neighbourhood. Not completely new to me, and not very far from where I lived before. But new enough to make a change. One day, while walking along a road that I have walked along quite often before, I was suddenly hit by this déjà vu feeling connecting back to a dream which I hadn't thought about for quite a long time. But I did work with that dream quite a lot around the time I dreamt it, and I also used it as inspiration for a poem. What I never did before, however, was to connect the scenery in the dream to a real place. Now, suddenly, out of the blue (or maybe the grey), it struck me that I was walking along the road from my dream.

Here is a translation of my poem based on the dream (originally written in Swedish):

rain is streaming down
someone offers me a lift
no thanks, or yes please
if it's not out of your way
why can't I make up my mind


let me off here, please
not far from the town centre
I know the way now
I have seen this place before
I know where I am going


but took a wrong turn
lost again, not the first time
made the same mistake
before, in another dream
but I can correct myself


stone wall on the right
encloses the old churchyard
half an avenue
with trees on only one side
empty field on the other


darkness is falling
but now I'm on the right track
right here in between
the things buried in the past
and the future awaiting


The thing is - the place where I live now is right across "the empty field" of the dream...

Coincidence? Or did my subconscious remember the dream when I chose my new home?

Just for fun, I looked up "churchyard" in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Dreams. ("Gustavus Hindman Miller's Dictionary of Dreams first appeared in 1909, ten years after Sigmund Freuds pioneering work The Interpretation of Dreams", they note on the back of the cover.) I don't really put much trust in standard interpretations - I believe each person carries their own keys to their own dreams - but this definition did actually connect rather well to my own thoughts:

To dream of walking in a churchyard, if in winter, denotes that you are to have a long and bitter struggle with poverty, and you will reside far from the home of your childhood, and friends will be separated from you; but if you see the signs of springtime, you will walk up in into pleasant places and enjoy the society of friends.

I don't really recall the time of year in my dream, only that it was raining. Also, in my dream I was not walking in the churchyard, but alongside of it. But the dream/poem does sort of contain both winter and spring, in the sense that it contains both a sense of separation, and at the same time ends in hope.

Quotation of the Week 7/09

I seem to have C.S. Lewis on every other page in my Quotation notebook... Here is another one, not from his works of fiction this time, but from Mere Christianity:

(The devil) always sends errors into the world in pairs - pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Interview from one island to another

As promised in an earlier post, I have continued to randomly explore the Sea of Blogs. One of the places I enjoyed coming across (jumping from one blog to another) was another brand new island - Pan's Island - started the very same day as mine. What's the odds of that, I wonder?

So when on that blog I found a challenge to be interviewed, I accepted, and here is the result. Question's by Pan's Island, answers by me:


1) If you could take a one night trip to the island of dreams and nightmares in C.S. Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and be guaranteed that you would only be there for one night - would you go and why? if not, why?
For just one night at a time, we all go there, every night - don't we?!

During one period of my life, I actually grew quite friendly with my dreams, nightmares included. The trick is bringing them out from under the bed at dawn before they disappear, and then getting them to repeat the message in broad daylight.

Write down what you remember, save the notes, and go back and compare them when you've gathered a few. If you have a literary mind, use the same kind of analysis as you do with poetry, and you will probably be amazed at your own mind's skills in coming up with images and parallells and wordgames.

Dream interpretation does involve quite a lot of active work, though, so often it seems easier when you wake up to just let the dreams slither away…


2) What is your favourite childhood memory?Some people seem to have their childhood all sorted out in a series of stories. For me it's more like scattered snapshot images and I think they often involve something that seemed a bit unusual or new to me at the time. Quite a few early images are connected with visits to other people's houses.

The surroundings where my maternal grandparents lived changed dramatically while I was growing up. When I was little, their house was one of just two in an otherwise rural surrounding, with a view overlooking fields with cows and haystacks. As I grew older, the town kept coming closer and closer - blocks of flats towering up in the late 60's and early 70's, shopping centres and villas added, until the house my grandfather built back in the 30's was just one among many other houses in a suburban street.

Other people own that house now since many years back. But whenever I am in that neighbourhood, a series of memory snapshots from the late 50's or very early 60's pop up in my head. Me walking with my grandfather over the fields on a sunny summer day, with an old-fashioned metal milk can, to fetch milk directly from a farm in the neighbourhood - "straight from the cows". (This was unusual to me, because in town, the milk in those days came in brown glass bottles with soft metal caps on top.) Opening wooden gates and shutting them. Stopping to pick wild strawberries. On the farm, two huge carthorses inside the stable (I see them from behind, standing in their boxes, towering up high above me - it's dark inside the stable with just some light coming in through the open door). My grandmother (who died when I was six) in their big kitchen, skimming the cream off the milk in a bowl on the workbench by the window overlooking the front garden. Tasting the luke warm milk - I didn't much like it. Grandma making small pancakes in a special iron on the stove - no one else I knew made those. (My parents are not in the picture, I guess they had gone on a short summer holiday on their own and left me with Grandma and Grandpa.)



3) If you found the one ring would you take up the quest yourself or wait to find someone better suited and aid them? And why?
I'm not sure it is always just a matter of choice. Often it seems (in the stories) that it is the ring that finds the bearer, as much as the other way round. Another point of a heroic tale is usually that the true hero does not think of himself as one, at least not from the start. Even Moses reacted with a "Who? You can't seriously mean me!" attitude when God spoke to him out of the burning bush. ("Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh? Who shall I say sent me? I've never been a man of words! Please send someone else!") King Arthur, Frodo, Harry Potter - the sword, the ring, the wand... The essence of the story is the same: They were chosen; in a way you could question whether they even had a choice; and yet their personal choice was of utmost importance…

Myself I'm not the kind of person who goes around looking for rings of power and I don't see myself as a hero(ine). Judging from the stories, that seems to be a very dangerous position! I think I'll just go into my wardrobe and hide - oh, wait - perhaps that's not the safest place either...


4) If you found a portal into another world what would you do? Would you take the risk and go through by yourself? Would you ask someone to go through with you? Would you tell the world or keep it a secret?
I actually didn't have to think very long about this one because it hit me that I'd already "been there, done that"…! I went through by myself, and told people afterwards, and my experience was much like Lucy's after coming back out of the wardrobe: Those who hadn't seen the other world for themselves were very reluctant to believe! I was 16, and my "portal" a simple prayer, no other people present at the time. Neither was I thinking of Narnia back then, because I never read those books until years later. Still, a door was opened to new thoughts, new adventures and new friends.

With Celtic-inspired fantasy now in mind, I'd still say that the thing about otherworldly portals is that if you happen to find one, you can never be quite sure how long it will remain open, or if anyone else will be able to see it. So if you hesitate and go ask someone else first, you might miss the opportunity.


5) If you had a choice between being alone for all of time or never being alone for all of time, which would you choose and why?
Even God started talking to himself after a while and decided he wanted company! ("Let us make man in our image, in our likeness..." Genesis 1:26)

I can often spend quite a lot of time by myself without getting too bored, but total independence of the rest of humanity is always an illusion. Even Defoe's Robinson Crusoe on his island only survived because of things made by other people that he salvaged from the wreck. Books, pens and ink among them…! ;-)

---

Thanks to Pan's Island for the questions, I quite enjoyed answering them!

---

If anyone who reads this would like to be interviewed by me in turn, let me know in a comment where to send the questions.

Quotation of the Week (5/09)

Another C.S. Lewis quotation, from The Last Battle, Ch. 13:

"Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out."

(This is Aslan's remark about some Dwarves who think they are still inside a "pitch-black, poky, smelly little hole of a stable", although they are really in the open air, surronded by sky, grass and flowers.)

Quotation of the Week (4/09)

I found the gadget "Quotation of the Day", linked to The Free Dictionary, and have inserted it in the margin of this blog. Now at least something on this page will be changed every day! ;-)

However, I have also collected a number of quotations myself over the years, and my intention is to add a Quotation of the Week from my private collection.

Since I started the blog with a quotation from C.S. Lewis, why not continue with another one by the same author, from the last of the seven Chronicles of Narnia:

"Of course, Daughter of Eve," said the Faun. "The farther up and the farther in you go, the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside --- like an onion: except that as you go in and in, each circle is larger than the last."

C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

The Dawn of a New Year and a New Blog

After some trial and error, it seems I have created a blog!

In choosing the title, I had in mind the Island of the Voices in C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Lucy enters a Magician's House to find the Magician's Book, and within that book A Spell to make hidden things visible.

She read it through to make sure of all the hard words and then said it out loud. And she knew at once that it was working because as she spoke the colours came into the capital letters at the top of the page and the pictures began appearing in the margins. It was like when you hold to the fire something written in Invisible Ink and the writing gradually shows up...

I really have no clear idea yet what hidden things I want this blog to make visible. But maybe if I start writing, I will find out...