Fiction

Wood Between the Worlds

Why has the Wood between the Worlds in The Magician’s Nephew always appealed to me? It’s a place I return to often in my own mind. I like it so much I tried to find the perfect picture to capture it, and use it as the header for my blog. But all the photos were ruined in the distortion of being stretched to fit the available space.

So I thought I’d just try to nail down a few thoughts. What is so compelling about this place in the story? Perhaps there’s a library of criticism on the subject, but I’m trying to get down to my own reasons here.

Is this wood meant as a metaphor for our world? Something in me rejects that idea, because when God made our world he pronounced it good and invited us to experience it fully. It’s not really “just a sort of in-between kind of place.” It’s where we do our most important becoming.

At the same time, though, this world is, undeniably, an in-between place: between heaven and hell, between time and eternity, between flesh and spirit. When I say “between,” I’m really meaning “both.” In Lewis’s space trilogy, I remember one villain pronouncing humanity a “revolting hybrid”–both spiritual and physical, both temporal and eternal, both limited and free. Our lives include lots of overlapping “betweens” in this sense. Plus, Lewis is a Platonist, as I recall. We live in a shadowland of the more ultimate/ideal/real truths. (Or rather, T- ruths. I think of the chess players at the end of The Great Divorce.) So all of this would back up a reading of the Wood between the Worlds as one way of looking at human life in space and time.

But I don’t know if I want to take it that far. I think for me personally the appeal of the Wood is that it’s a place of reflection. One of the first things that happens is that you forget who you are. The pools themselves are reflective, and their reflectiveness is what you must go through in order to arrive in the worlds of action they lead to. The atmosphere is quiet, drowsy, and extremely alive, though external activity is notably lacking. You can “almost feel the trees drinking the water up,” yet you feel as if you’ve “always been in that place and never been bored although nothing ever happened.” It’s a thinking place. What comes to mind is Haze Moates (right name?) in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, sitting on the front porch all day long doing nothing, yet telling his friends he’s “too busy” to join them. He’s plenty busy, but it’s all internal. He’s in the Wood. He’s “drinking the water up with his roots.”

Last but not least, you have lots of choices in the Wood between the Worlds. “Why, if we can get back to our own world by jumping into this pool, mightn’t we get somewhere else by jumping into one of the others?” Digory asks. “Supposing there was a world at the bottom of every pool.” There are as many reflective pools as there are books in the library, musical compositions to play, minds to encounter, courses of action to contemplate or embark upon, or poems to write. As long as you take precautions like Polly does, and mark your starting place for safe return, there’s plenty of room to explore and plenty of adventure to be had. As I heard often in college, “All truth is God’s truth.” There’s really nothing to fear, provided you remember that that’s the purpose of the quest–to discover and submit to the truth God reveals. If we lose sight of that, we end up like the intellectual in another of my favorite Lewis books, The Great Divorce. But that’s another pool for another day.