Monthly Archives: March 2008

Letters to Malcolm

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C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964) is a short book (only 124 pages). When I closed it last night and turned off my light to go to sleep, I felt disappointed. It hadn’t reached out and grabbed me by the throat, as I’ve come to expect Lewis’s books to do. But this morning, I begin to suspect that first response was misleading, because I’m still reflecting on some of its lines of thought. Perhaps this book is a seed, rather than a storm; its effects will be felt over time, rather than sweeping suddenly and dramatically onto the scene of my inner life.

As its title suggests, this is a series of letters, written to a fictitious friend named Malcolm. It’s the last book Lewis wrote before his death, and it was published posthumously. This site provides some interesting information regarding the book’s evolution in Lewis’s mind and pen. Notably, the book was welcomed enthusiastically by its publisher, and regarded as his best effort since The Problem of Pain. (I’ve gathered some excerpts from Letters in this post.)

Lewis defined his audience as recent converts with no regular habit of prayer. He felt that existing books about prayer were written for more mature Christians, and he tries in this volume to address what he sees as the most basic obstacles. A few examples: How do you picture God? How do your mental pictures function in prayer? Why ask for things if God already knows? How do you imagine what’s happening when a finite being talks to an infinite Being? What about emotion? Should I use my own words or someone else’s? And so on.

Lewis does a pretty good job of tailoring his ideas to his audience. I was struck here, as I usually am in reading Lewis, by his humility. For a member of the intelligentsia, and surely one of its more brilliant stars, to want to write for laymen at all is noteworthy, and his overriding desire to communicate rather than show off is always evident. He’s not preachy, though at times he tosses off Latin phrases and references to a breadth and depth of reading that, though commonplace to him, won’t be shared by his audience. And although the book is “practical” in the sense that it keeps its focus on prayer, it delves deeply into theology in the course of addressing practical questions.

In my personal valuation of the book, what I appreciate most is the way it views God and his creation (including people) as connected in an ongoing creative act. This was put forth in The Problem of Pain too. Without belaboring a long and ineffective paraphrase of Lewis’s thought, I’ll just say that he has a way of providing imaginative categories for understanding spiritual realities that has the potential to revolutionize one’s prayer life far more than any single argument on a particular point can do.

I’m glad I read this, and I would recommend it to anyone else who may have run aground in the attempt to maintain a meaningful prayer life. When all is said and done, I don’t close the book with a checklist (”The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Prayers,” or “Things to Do to Make God Do What I Want,” or “Heavenly Incantations”). I do close the book with a few very slight alterations in thinking — alterations at the deep level, where the rudder can change the course of the becalmed vessel in such a way as to pick up a whiff of welcome breeze.

The Martian Chronicles

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I read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles for the Decades challenge. It’s a collection of short stories about a colonization of Mars that spans about 30 years. In the introduction, Bradbury cites Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio as his literary inspiration, another short story collection centering around a particular locale. At some point I’ll read that, too.

What would humanity do if it could start over on another planet? I didn’t enjoy the answers implied in this book much. The view of humanity is too dark for me. (I believe in original sin, so you know it must be pretty dark.) Apparently I’m in the minority. The front flap is just one example of the more typical response to this work: “Of all the dazzling stars in the vast Ray Bradbury universe, none shines more luminous than these masterful chronicles of Earth’s settlement of the fourth world from the sun.”

Why so hyperbolic? Perhaps it’s partly because the book was published in 1950, when the dark view of Earthlings in general, and the American lifestyle in particular, wasn’t as fashionable and common as it is now. Perhaps it’s because it’s a quick read that doesn’t get bogged down in characterization or subtlety (in fact it doesn’t even make an attempt at these things). Or perhaps it’s because even such an unsophisticated sci-fi reader as I can recognize the way these stories crawl under the skin and evoke strong feelings — sometimes laughter, sometimes horror (of the pleasantly shivering variety), sometimes startlement (?) at its novelty. Some of the stories would make great Twilight Zone episodes. (Maybe some have…?)

When earthlings arrive on Mars and are greeted by a Martian woman too busy cleaning her house to be impressed, and when no subsequent Martians improve on her greeting, it makes for some pretty hilarious reading. When humans set up camp in the “New World” of Mars, their flaws and limitations are painfully exaggerated, and that makes for some horrific moments. And when Martians who relate telepathically get mixed with humans who rely on verbal exchange, all sorts of scenarios arise that Bradbury exploits cleverly.

Some of the scenes from this book will stick with me, so I guess that’s a testimony to its power. I may go on to read more Bradbury, then feel ashamed of this first impression of his work. But on the whole I didn’t enjoy it because it’s written from an essentially hopeless perspective. C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, for instance, introduces a Christian worldview and therefore a possibility of redemption for humanity in all its absurdity and vice. But here the view is bleak — at times, maddeningly so, because it preserves its bleakness by shutting out some dimensions of experience. It will be awhile before I know for sure whether this is a good book that I didn’t enjoy, or simply a book I didn’t enjoy. Based on the opinions of those better informed in the genre, I’m willing to withhold a judgment of its quality till I see how I feel about it down the road a bit.

White Stallion of Lipizza

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We finished Marguerite Henry’s White Stallion of Lipizza as a family read-aloud. I shouldn’t be surprised to be blubbering at the end, since I always do in animal stories. But I found this story extraordinarily touching – not sad, but moving. It’s a story about young Hans Haupt, a 13-year-old son of a baker in Vienna, who dreams of being a rider for the elite Spanish Court Riding School.

I liked it because the story takes us through the years of determination and hunger for knowledge and hard, often tedious work his dream involves. I liked it because Hans has as unlikely a dream as could be imagined, and he achieves it against the odds. I liked it for the illustrations, sketches by Wesley Dennis, a true seer of horses. I liked it for its educational value. I liked it for its modeling of a heroism earned through great effort and patience and humility, not just easy brilliance. Let’s face it: I liked it!

My daughter is (just barely) 7, and though the language of the story is at times technical, and is never really aimed at someone younger than probably 10 or 11, she listened eagerly to the whole thing. It’s dense with information, and her stuffed horses are now training to do the corbette and the piaffe and various other high-sounding ballet moves. (In addition to this tale, we watched Miracle of the White Stallions last week while this book was still in process, and it provided some nice historic supplementation as well as a glimpse of the Lipizzaners in action. However in all honesty, the dressage in this clip on YouTube surpasses that seen in the movie.)

I value this book for its wonderful factual content, but even more importantly because it gives us a language for talking about both dreams and hard work. That’s something she will benefit from every bit as much as those stuffed horses.

Words

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My mother gave me a book of poems she used as an elementary school teacher. “Why?” I asked. “Why not keep them?”

I think her greatest gift to me is books… She was the one who encouraged me to read early. (My father, observing me as a small child looking quietly at books on the couch, would whisper anxiously to my mother, “What’s wrong with her?”) She read me stories as a child. She gave me books at turning points in my life. She’s given me books sometimes when she didn’t feel like she had anything else to give. I understand that now.

This poem, ”Song for my Mother,” written in 1905 by Anna Hempstead Branch, captures some of the value of this gift. In the case of my mother, it was given not through flowery speech but through love of reading. Even so, I think the poem fits. How perfect that it’s in this book she gave me last week, Time for Poetry. It’s also available here, so my understanding is that it’s public domain.

My mother has the prettiest tricks
Of words and words and words.
Her talk comes out as smooth and sleek
As breasts of singing birds.

She shapes her speech all silver fine
Because she loves it so.
And her own eyes begin to shine
To hear her stories grow.

And if she goes to make a call
Or out to take a walk,
We leave our work when she returns
And run to hear her talk.

We had not dreamed these things were so
Of sorrow and of mirth.
Her speech is as a thousand eyes
Through which we see the earth.

God wove a web of loveliness,
Of clouds and stars and birds,
But made not anything at all
So beautiful as words.

They shine around our simple earth
With golden shadowings,
And every common thing they touch
Is exquisite with wings.

There’s nothing poor and nothing small
But is made fair with them.
They are the hands of living faith
That touch the garment’s hem.

They are as fair as bloom or air,
They shine like any star,
And I am rich who learned from her
How beautiful they are.

This week, when my children are sick with respiratory yuck, my daughter requested “that poem you were reading downstairs about the little girl who was sick in bed, and played with toys.”

“You mean, ‘The Land of Counterpane’?” I asked.

“Yes,” she nodded. “That would be a good one for today.”

Dare I hope the inheritance is passing on to the next generation?

The Candle In the Wind

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The fourth and concluding tale in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King went by all too quickly. I remember being frustrated by the meandering quality of the narrative in the first book of the series, The Sword in the Stone. Apparently I got used to it. The Candle in the Wind blew past in  three days. (I’m not a fast reader, so that’s pretty speedy for me.)

This story was not intended to be the last, so it doesn’t end the way White envisioned when he mapped out the series in his mind. Because of this, I can forgive the book for not rolling to the weighty and majestic halt that I would have liked. As many others before me have already discovered, it has a kind of cursory conclusiveness that works in its way. Arthur, now a very old and patient king, lives out the final chapter of his lifelong experiment in managing Might. Having lived through the eras of chivalry (Might in the service of class), Might used to advance Right, and Might turned to the purpose of a holy quest, Arthur submits Might to the concept of Justice. The “candle” of the title refers to Arthur’s imaginative picture of his long-held belief in the goodness of humanity as a candle often sheltered by his protective hand against the winds of experience. You have to read the story to find out whether the candle is blown out in the failure of his last experiment, or not.

Mordred, his son by his half-sister Morgause, turns against him decisively and uses the affair between Lancelot and Guenever to fracture Camelot by demanding that Arthur unleash Justice. There was an absurdity to Arthur’s entrapment by the letter rather than the spirit of the law. I find myself wondering whether White shares Arthur’s sanguine view of human nature, for although Arthur flatly rejects the idea of original sin, the action and narrative perspective of the story seem to confirm it. It’s almost as though the narrator and his protagonist are in debate over the perfectibility of man. Either I’m an obtuse reader, or White is a masterful storyteller, for although the narrator seems heavy-handed much of the time, these kinds of questions remain. I like that. I don’t feel strong-armed by the author, but moved by the story.

It’s been an experience, traveling with these characters from youth to old age. This conclusion revisited and developed earlier themes. Overall the series works like the tides, lapping up on the beach in the first book, then receding, and repeating the process a little further up the beach with each successive story. We reconsider Merlyn’s style of education, and his philosophy of man, both of which are depicted as both a blessing and curse for Arthur. We see Guenever reach the full flowering of the seventh sense described in the previous book. Ponderings on the nature of humanity lead inevitably to more on the subject of war, about which Guenever says, “War is like a fire. One man may start it, but it will spread all over. It is not about any one thing in particular.” Arthur too reflects that wars are “national movements, deeper, more subtle in origin” than he once thought. We revisit the disturbing Queen Morgause’s parenting and its disastrous outcome in the Orkneys. In more ways than I can develop here, the series explores a good many subjects to a satisfying depth, all wrapped up in a well-told story.  The Once and Future King is a reading experience that’s hard to classify but impossible not to love. It’s one of those books that pulls the lid back just enough to tantalize, so I have a feeling it won’t be my last foray into Arthurian legend.

The Ill-Made Knight

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I’ve finished The Ill-Made Knight, the third tale of The Once and Future King. In this story we learn about Lancelot and Guenever, watch Arthur’s England continue to evolve, and observe the ways he continues tweaking his Round Table philosophy.

It’s difficult to describe T.H. White’s narrative voice: startling, forceful, wry, deeply wise, matter-of-fact. It’s somewhere between Monty Python and… J.R.R. Tolkien? There’s a comic distance from the characters that’s achieved through bluntness, but such a sympathy for them, and such a detailed knowledge of the chivalric era he’s writing about.

There were a couple of storylines that I followed most attentively. One that carried over from the last book was Arthur’s developing theory about how to deal with Might vs. Right. In the last story he formed his philosophy of the Round Table as a way of harnessing the worship of strength and valor (Might), and using it to advance Right (rather than continuing to advance a civilization of knights knocking each other and everyone else around without any justification but sport). In this story he recognizes that the Round Table “must have been a step. Now we must think of making the next one… I ought to have rooted Might out altogether, instead of trying to adapt it.” He comes to the conclusion that the knights should fight for holy purposes: “If our Might was given a channel so that it worked for God, instead of for the rights of man, surely that would stop the rot, and be worth doing?” (Of course I was screaming “Nooo! No crusades!” But they didn’t listen…) All the knights head off in search of the holy grail. But by the end of the story Arthur is poised for another adaptation.

The other storyline is the story of Lancelot and Guenever, both of whose characters are developed magnificently and sympathetically as mixed people. I never did like Guenever much, but White makes a great effort to write about her with compassion. He writes of her aging, of her conflicted love, of her predicament as an aging medieval woman, in ways that are convincing.

Lancelot is more appealing as a truly tragic figure: ugly, moody, deeply religious, supposedly cruel but fanatically legalistic in compensation, prone to madness, superb as a knight, and full of love for both Arthur and Guenever. He’s the ill-made knight of the title, who we first meet staring into a helmet trying to see his reflection. “He was trying to find out what he was, and afraid of what he would find,” the narrator tells us:

The boy thought that there was something wrong with him. All through his life — even when he was a great man with the world at his feet — he was to feel this gap: something at the bottom of his heart of which he was aware, and ashamed, but which he did not understand. There is no need for us to try to understand it. We do not have to dabble in a place which he preferred to keep secret.

For the most part, White makes good on his promise not to chart out his characters neatly and reduce them to explanation. These three main characters are all complex mixtures of nobility and fallenness, and it was impossible not to find something I could relate to in each of them. It doesn’t return me to my life with a sense of orderliness, but with a fuller appreciation of the complicated and mysterious experience of being human. There’s one more story, The Candle in the Wind, that will complete the quartet, and I’ll be sorry to see it end.

Tribute to Dr. Seuss

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It’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday today. I chose him for the Celebrate the Author Challenge because his stories are woven into the texture of our family life in a big way: my daughters choose his books from the library; they listen to Seuss audiobooks; they invent Seussian improvisations as part of their play. What’s so appealing about Dr. Seuss? Here are the five things that come first to mind:

  1. The smallest actions can produce the biggest results. Small is beautiful; small matters. In short, you matter. The smallest Who of all turns the tide in Horton Hears a Who, adding his tiny bit to the cacophony of a Whoville desperate to escape being boiled in hot beezlenut oil. The bright moment of hope at the end of The Lorax comes when the Onceler tosses out a truffula seed and tells his young audience, “You might be the one to restore Paradise.” Mack the insignificant turtle upsets the despotic Yertle’s empire. Young Cindy Lou Who (who is no more than two) puts a human face on the Grinch’s enemies, and begins his awakening. It’s the actions performed by the least of us that redistribute the forces of the universe. So stay in the game, and do your small part.
  2. Genuineness matters. It’s the whole theme of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The Grinch has no argument with Christmas, but with the loss of Christmas when it degenerates into crass materialism and greed. His salvation comes when he realizes the Whos in Whoville are the real thing. In Bartholomew and the Oobleck, the horrible green stuff dissipates only when the king delivers a genuine apology. Horton’s true blue faithfulness produces a whole new species in Horton Hatches the Egg. And my favorite treatment of the subject of genuineness, a new discovery for me, is Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? It’s a satire on the logic of, “Eat your vegetables because there are people starving somewhere in the world.” In this story that reasoning is expounded to the enth degree of absurdity, until it becomes, “You ought to be thankful a whole heaping lot for the people and places you’re lucky you’re NOT!” It ends up looking more like a mixture of self-righteousness and cruelty than true compassion.
  3. Dreams matter. So many child dreamers emerge from the pages: the narrator of McElligott’s Pool; young Morris McGurk, with his grand vision for the vacant lot behind Sneelock’s store in If I Ran the Circus; Gerald McGrew, the amazing, entrepreneurial boy who imagines life as a zookeeper in If I Ran the Zoo. Keep that imagination oiled and purring, because it’s a valuable asset to rich living for children of all ages.
  4. There’s good in this world, but Seuss stories contain their share of evil as well. Yertle the Turtle is a megalomaniac, as is the Onceler driven by greed and a conquesting attitude in The Lorax. Horton’s mistreatment at the hands of the Wickersham brothers, the nasty kangaroo, and the bird who drops the Whos into oblivion shows some unequivocal badness at work. Maisie, the mother who abandons her egg, confirms that even a mother can be terribly selfish. In a strange way, the Grinch, who looks so ugly and mean-spirited, is really a subversive hero because he fights greed and a mercantile spirit. So don’t be afraid to look past appearances and discern what’s in people’s hearts. There’s good and evil, and it’s going to be a battle.
  5. Last but not least: the sheer joy of language. Words! More words! New words! Meanings turned inside out, endings appended and altered, fantasy language that ends up suggesting fantasy creatures and meanings. What on earth is a thromdimbulator? What’s a hippo-no-hungus or a dippo-no-dungus? It’s fun to hear, fun to read, fun to learn to read with these tales. My daughters listen to this audiobook, in which the likes of Kelsey Grammar, John Cleese, Dustin Hoffman, Walter Matthau, Billy Crystal, and John Lithgow read classic Seuss stories with their impeccable timing and inflection. It’s great fun, and highly recommended. I’ve come to appreciate the linguistic adventure of reading Dr. Seuss even more, and so have my (already quite verbal) children.

There’s plenty more that could be said, but these are the first five things that came to mind to celebrate about Dr. Seuss. It’s not as spectacular as what the Birthday Bird could serve up in Happy Birthday to You! But if genuineness matters, then perhaps my gratitude for the gift of his books counts as much as JoJo Who’s tiny voice.