C.s. Lewis - Blog Posts

Here is another little musing for this week! Do you like my more thought-based mini comics? 👀 Remember that you're special and that you are loved! God bless! I hope you enjoyed this week's installment of 'Slices of Gremlin'! I am going to continue updating every Tuesday, and if you would like to support the comic and get early access, you can sign up to be a member of the 'Little Creature Club' on Ko-Fi!

So though it is true that Narnia and Tolkien do have Christianity written into them, the main messages are not inherently religious. The ideas of good and friendship and fighting for what you believe in, whether religious or not, are for everyone, not just christians. I am an atheist and I still relate to the main themes in these works because even if I don’t believe in god I believe in other things such as love and loyalty, which are also themes in these books. So even if the authors were christian, the stories can still be relevant and relatable to all.

So stop gatekeeping. The stories do not belong to a specific religion and can be enjoyed and interpreted by all.

Non-Christians should not be allowed to touch Narnia or Tolkien/LOTR. Those were made for us and belong to us.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness—they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.

—C.S. Lewis

ok, like I get that casting Meryl Streep as Aslan is a weird choice and, perhaps, even a bit troubling, but I truly don’t believe that the most important qualification for an actor voicing Aslan is “have a penis”. Not overjoyed about it but also I know the movies will not stand or fall based on this one casting decision

tolkien: all the war and death in lotr has nothing to do with the war i was in

tolkien: just like how all the morals/good vs evil/everything my characters believe have nothing to do with my morals/beliefs/religion

tolkien: and that character that comes back from the dead has nothing to do with my religion which is based on someone coming back from the dead and uses coming back from the dead as metaphor literally constantly so don’t get any ideas

tolkien: and none of those giant evil spiders have anything to do with the tarantula that bit me either

clive staples: jirt youre literally so stupid

tolkien:

clive:

tolkien: that really slow grumpy tree who takes forever to get to the point or make up his mind is definitely you though

“As long as you are proud, you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see anything that is above you.”

— C. S. Lewis

You can't go back and change the beginning but you can start where you are and change the ending.

— C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis once wrote,

"I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief"

And I think we all needed to hear that.

i read CS Lewis’ A Grief Observed one time years ago and i’m still not recovered from it

A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis

Not Sims 4 CC related but something I just saw and it's so true and inspirational. I hope it's also to you all. 😊

You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.

C.S. Lewis

well i meant to reblog the voyage of the dawn treader post to my main but this works too lol. god's claws peel me out of myself every week

"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again." - C. S. Lewis

“Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive”

— C.S. Lewis

Out of the trees wild people stepped forth...

one of the little details i've noticed about the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe specifically—book AND movie both!—is the implicit implication that the white witch's spell did more than just make it always winter and never christmas. i think it froze everything there, including time. for instance, tumnus talks about narnia before things were frozen as though he lived it himself, and by his own admission, that was over a hundred years ago. (he does this in book and movie both iirc but it definitely stands out in the movie.) and you say, okay, well do fauns just live a long time? maybe, but then tumnus is referred to as now being "middle-aged" in hahb, implying he ages more normally once narnia is no longer frozen. the beavers, too, speak similarly, but more than that, in the book, think about the dam. if he built it after the river froze, it wouldn't be properly dammed, but the river there is described as being frozen very specifically after being dammed, as well as looking like it froze all at once (due to magic). and beavers, even Talking Beavers, wouldn't live a hundred years, especially considering our knowledge of how bree and hwin aged fairly normally for horses in hahb. so like. imagine everyone in narnia is just as frozen as the land. never aging. never dying. only being turned to stone. imagine your dam has been unfinished for decades. imagine there hasn't been a child born there for a hundred years. not until the sons and daughters of our world brought hope and magic and spring again.

So cool my favorite author read my other favorite author.

forget Susan and Lucy (don’t) but please don’t tell me Lewis didn’t like female characters when Polly “don’t touch the obviously cursed bell, you absolute walnut” Plummer, Jill “my litigious bestie and I are here to fight the Antichrist” Pole and Aravis “‘I did not do any of these things for the sake of pleasing you’” Tarkheena exist

the pevensies discovering the treasure room in the ruins of cair paravel must have been like stepping into their own tomb. here is the ruin of what you were. here is the remnant. here is where they took what you left them with and laid it to rest. here is your funeral shroud, daughter of eve. the skirt is too long for you now. here is the cordial, half-full. they dared not use it to save anyone without your hand to do the saving. here is your bow, still strung, and your arrows, unshot. here is the sword your hand still remembers, and here is the face you have forgotten. you did not die here, and yet still you were buried. what is a legend but another kind of ghost?

"Travellers Among The Stars" by Mark Karvon, link

"On February 20, 1962 astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in Mercury Spacecraft Friendship 7. At one point during the flight, John Glenn described some mysterious illuminated particles traveling in the company of his spacecraft. As the spacecraft flew over Australia, he saw thousands of little illuminated particles, floating around outside the capsule. He momentarily felt the illusion that the spacecraft was tumbling or that he was actually viewing a star field. Looking outside of the spacecraft window John Glenn could see that the "fireflies", as he called them, appeared to be streaming past his spacecraft from ahead. The partial transcript describes his observations as follows:

'I am in a big mass of some very small particles, that are brilliantly lit up like they’re luminescent. I never saw anything like it. They round a little; they’re coming by the capsule, and they look like little stars. A whole shower of them coming by.'

'They swirl around the capsule and go in front of the window and they’re all brilliantly lighted.'

'They’re very slow; they’re not going away from me more than maybe 3 or 4 miles per hour. They’re going at the same speed I am approximately. They’re only very slightly under my speed.'

'They do, they do have a different motion, though, from me because they swirl around the capsule and then depart back the way I am looking.'

The mystery of the 'fireflies' was resolved in May of the same year on the next Mercury mission, Aurora 7, with astronaut Scott Carpenter on board. Scot Carpenter also saw the fireflies, or snowflakes, as he called them, and was able to determine the source from which they originated - they were tiny bits of frost from the side of the spacecraft. As the spacecraft passed from the night side to daylight condensation formed on the outside of the spacecraft and then froze again thereby creating a layer of frost. As the spacecraft once again came into daylight the frost began to flake off and float around the capsule. The bright sunlight illuminated the flakes which made them appear “luminescent.” Banging on the side of the spacecraft caused more flakes to come off came off.

My artwork is a depiction of Friendship 7 as the craft orbits in the company of the mysterious 'fireflies'.

Prints are available through my website: www.markkarvon.com."

The Magician’s Nephew

Not a fan of Narnia, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardobe. It was ok, nothing as great as the first thou. Harry Potter is the book that I call home, but the first book that I became obsessed with, that I feel completely in love with, where the pages became warm, was the Magicians Nephew--and the beauty, intricacy and originality I felt for lost.

The Magician's Nephew was first great because it was real, it wasn't a story where they went on a grand adventure. These were two regular kids with regular lives that had death, greed and were just doing normal fun activities and were then forced on a "grand adventure".

This also was my first adult book, while wrote for children the adults and characters who were the antagonists weren't just evil or villainous, they were just normal. Filled with selfishness and greed, they weren't one dimensional, they showed the real consequences of human actions and loss of moral. This was a great novel, a great children's novel and a great story about humans, kids and human nature

i read CS Lewis’ A Grief Observed one time years ago and i’m still not recovered from it

C.S. Lewis is one of the most culturally relevant and important authors for western society and Christians in general and i will die on this hill

I always kind of laugh when people get into the “Susan’s treatment is proof that C.S. Lewis was a misogynist” thing, because:

Polly and Digory. Peter and Susan. Edmund and Lucy. Eustace and Jill. 

Out of the eight “Friends of Narnia” who enter from our world, the male-to-female character ratio is exactly 1/1. Not one of these female characters serves as a love interest at any time. 

The Horse and His Boy, the only book set entirely in Narnia, maintains this ratio with Shasta and Aravis, who, we are told in a postscript, eventually marry. Yet even here, the story itself is concerned only with the friendship between them. Lewis focuses on Aravis’ value as a brave friend and a worthy ally rather than as a potential girlfriend–and ultimately, we realize that it’s these qualities that make her a good companion for Shasta. They are worthy of each other, equals. 

In the 1950s, there was no particularly loud cry for female representation in children’s literature. As far as pure plot goes, there’s no pressing need for all these girls. A little boy could have opened the wardrobe (and in the fragmentary initial draft, did). Given that we already know Eustace well by The Silver Chair, it would not seem strictly necessary for a patently ordinary schoolgirl to follow him on his return trip to Narnia, yet follow she does–and her role in the story is pivotal. Why does the humble cab-driver whom Aslan crowns the first King of Narnia immediately ask for his equally humble wife, who is promptly spirited over, her hands full of washing, and crowned queen by his side? Well, because nothing could be more natural than to have her there. 

None of these women are here to fill a quota. They’re here because Lewis wanted them there. 

Show me the contemporary fantasy series with this level of equality. It doesn’t exist. 

I’ve been wanting for a while to do a comparison of Dante’s Divine Comedy with CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce, since the latter is very much modelled after the former (with George MacDonald in the place of Virgil) and they deal with very similar concepts.

My first inpression of the difference between them is that Dante develops a very specific and granular categorization and hierarchy on sins throughout the Inferno and Purgatorio, whereas to me all of the ones that Lewis showed were variations on a commonn theme of pride, the choice of one’s own opinions and preconceptions and self-image over heaven. In Lewis’ words, “There is always something they prefer to joy.” But as I think about it more closely, I think there are more specific correspondences between the two.

As Dorothy L. Sayers discusses in the introduction to her translation of the Commedia, there are two types of allegories: ones where all the characters are representations of specific concepts (such as in Spencer’s The Fairie Queen or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress), or one where characters with their own names and identities can stand in for specific concepts: Virgil is Virgil, but he also represents Human Reason, Ciacco is an actual Florentine who existed, but he also represents gluttony, and so forth. This makes the characters more real and alive than the first type of allegories usually feel, and also allows the work to show nuances in its concepts by having multiple characters representing the same concept and so showing different nuances of it. Both the Commedia and The Last Divorce are the latter types, but they differ in how they design their characters: in the Commedia they are specific, named characters from Dante’s time, or from history, mythology, or the Bible. Lewis doesn’t do this (probably wisely; in an age of mass media, if he was sending MPs to Hell, any conversation about the books would be about that, and not about the book’s themes); instead he gives them epithets like the Big Ghost, and Hard-bitten Ghost, and Ghost in a Bowler; I will sometimes give them other names in this post. One of the thinfs this lets Lewis do is to deliberately subvert the prominence of famous religious and historical figures in the Comedy by having his celebrated and beloved ‘great saint’ in Heaven be not a figure from the Bible or later Christian history, but an ordinary woman named Sarah Smith with an ordinary life who was good, kind, and loving to everyone she met.

As an example of how Dante and Lewis work similarly and yet differently: the concept of Avarice. Dante shows it in both Hell and Purgatory, in different forms - people who ‘getting and spending, laid waste their powers’ (the Ciardi translation actually puts it similarly to that’. Lewis has no one who rejects Heaven based on desire for personal possessions; what he has instead is the character I’ll call the Economist, who says that the reason everyone in Hell spreads out (because they quarrel all the time) is because there are no commodities to drive them to live closer together, and tries futilely to bring back one of the - extraordinarily heavy, to him - apples of Heaven as such as commodity. (Is Lewis deliberately recalling the heavy rocks rolled by the Avaricious? Probably a stretch.) His problem is not a personal desire for riches, but the need to see the world in exclusively material terms and the only solution to problems as material ones.

Another example. Lewis, like Dante, has an example of heresy, and the connection between them came to me because of Sayers’ line in her commentary, quoting Charles Williams, that “the heretic accepted the Church, but preferred his own judgement to that of the church…an obduracy of mind, an intellectual obstinacy.” All of those traits are seen in one of Lewis’ ghosts, a self-identified Christian who denies the Resurrection and insists that one cannot know any spiritual truths for certain and that he wouldn’t want to, because it would prevent free inquiry and intellectual broadness. (In opposition to the heavenly spirit he is speaking to, who insists that the point of intellectual inquiry is to learn what is true.) This ghost has another particular trait that recurs in different forms a few times in The Great Divorce: he expresses the, on the surface laudable, sentiment that he’s not of any use in heaven whereas in hell he can help people. The recurrent sentiment - from him, from the Tragedian, from the Economist, from an artist (sort of), from a variety of planners and improvers who are mentioned in passing - is the need to be needed, and the two former of these are explicitly told that they are not needed, though they are certainly wanted and welcomed. The very gratuitousness of heaven leads some to reject it.

As a further example: the Sullen, in Dante, are one of the more problematic aspects of Hell, as their fate seems rather excessively harsh just for being grumpy (or melancholy, in you like). Lewis takes a bit of a different tack that sheds some light on it. There’s an elderly ghost in Heaven who we only see complaining to heavenly friend about how dreadful her life was. George MacDonald explains to Lewis that if she’s simply an old lady with a bad habit of grumbling, she’ll accept heaven and be well in the end; but if there’s nothing left of her but grumbling, there’s nothing to be done. The sullenness that Dante depicts is here shown as a person who is looking joy in the face, who is standing in the midst of joy, but is unable to see it in their focus in dwelling on past wrongs.

Curiously, Lewis - unlike Dante in the eighth and ninth circles - spends very little time on those who are deeply evil, beyond saying “Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer it than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already.” Rather than Malice, the characteristic of the lowest levels of Dante’s hell, Lewis focuses on a range of forms of distorted love that, I think, we do not see equivalents to in the Commedia. The Commedia’s characterization of the roots of evil in forms of distorted or ill-governed love (or desire) is very helpful to this concept. Virgil (via Aristotle?) characterizes it in three classes: love of thy neighbour’s ill (Pride, Envy, and Wrath: desire to put someone down for your own aggradizement, resentment of someone’s rise because it dininishes you in comparison, and immoderate anger in response to wrongs), insufficient love (Sloth - which in Lewis would likely be represented by those who don’t get on the bus at all) and excessive love of earthly things (Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust).

Lewis takes his critique well beyond that to various forms of non-sexual love for people that are nonetheless harmful to them or others. (This gets into his idea, expressed in Till We Have Faces, that in the absence of grace all human loves are ultimately selfish.) There’s a woman, who in a determination to “improve” her husband socioeconomically and culturally, drove away all his friends and pushed him into a career that made him miserable until he ultimately died of sheer unhappiness, and on her visit to Heaven can speak of nothing but all the thankless work she did on his behalf, and futilely demand to be allowed to ‘manage’ him again. There’s a woman who loved her son so all-consumingly that she neglected everyone else in her life, and made them miserable after his death by reorienting her life and theirs entirely around mourning him.

C.S Lewis

“Some people read with their feet,” is a quote that’s been relevant since the day I heard it (and before that, to be so honest), and something else that’s rattling around in my brain is some post (I’ve got no hope of finding the original as I can’t even recall what website I saw it on) saying something along the lines of “it tracks that the Pevensies are British and that the moment they found themselves in an unfamiliar place they declared themselves its royal family.”

If you want to talk about colonialism, talk about colonialism, but it does frustrate me to see a point missed so thoroughly. I hate to see it missed and I love this particular aspect of the series, so I’m going to take a moment to talk about it.

The Pevensies did not declare themselves royalty. Becoming kings and queens was not their idea. This was an expectation that the people of Narnia had for them, and when the kids were informed of this expectation, they found it daunting, to say the least.

This theme recurs almost beat-for-beat with Caspian, who is very openly unsure of himself and his ability to rule Narnia. It evolves with Eustace, who begins his arc unable to even consider the possibility of himself doing something important for Narnia or vice versa. It returns with Jill, who gets angry at being saddled with a mission that feels altogether too big for her.

The premise that keeps coming up throughout the series is this concept of worthiness and capability. The takeaway is not that some people are made superior or that people can make themselves superior. The takeaway is that you will feel inferior. In fact, if you feel superior, you are probably delusional: a danger to yourself and others. You will feel inferior, but that is neither a sentence to accomplish only little in life, nor an excuse for only accomplishing little in life. You will be afraid and insecure and uncertain and embarrassed, but you can and must do great things nonetheless. We are, all of us, made for greatness.