13 Comments

Yes. As a child I wished so hard that Narnia were "real". As a teenager I was dispirited to realize (as I thought) that "reality" meant this boring, ugly, profane and disturbing modern world. As an adult, I've been made boundlessly glad to learn that the modern world is an illusion, while that which Narnia symbolizes is more real than anything I can see with my waking eyes, touch, taste, hear or feel.....

"What if the only way to make the magic work, the true magic, was to make an immense personal sacrifice? Would you do it then? What if it required the sacrifice of everything you have, and took the rest of your life? And you had to give up everything and go live in a completely different way, in a different place... worth it?"

Sign me up. Without it, nothing is worth living for anyway.

"every day, eight times a day, starting very early in the morning, you had been asked to open the door and sit in the doorway and look through, and as long as you have sung the proper song in the proper language, that doorway would show you the world that you have longed all your life to go to, would you do that?"

The monastic life in a nutshell--and they do it not just to delight in looking, but to keep alive the knowledge of the way to get to that country, and help for everyone else to get there too. It's the realest kind of real. I'm still stunned and delighted to realize that we are unkowingly, living within reach of glories and mysteries that surpass anything in the best of myths and fairytales.

Expand full comment

Confessions of a quickly-recovering Lewis Illiterate:

My name is Drew Royals and I'm a Lewis Illiterate.

Thanks to Hilary's constantly referring over the years to Aslan and Old Narnia and other worlds and things like that, I finally realized I'm missing out on too much if I think I can go on appreciating The Real Things barely-equipped with only the faintest memory of my one-time reading in the Fourth Grade of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Lewis came up over dinner the other night with a friend, it was the eve of Tolkein's dies natalis, we had just finished drinking in honor of JRR when it somehow came up that we both, to our shame, were Lewis Illiterates. We resolved then to fix it.

So, four days ago I started reading—or rather I paid Kenneth Branagh and Co. to read to me—all of the Chronicles beginning with The Magician's Nephew. Sure enough, I'm plowing through them and loving them. I'm already half-way through, right in the middle of Prince Caspian. Then, yesterday, with just three days of literacy under my belt Hilary posted this one (above), and to my great satisfaction, I'm picking up so much more of what she's putting down. I'm not all the way there yet, but I'm moving in the right direction. What she means by "Old Narnian" is way more wonderful than I could have otherwise supposed.

Her previous "Do the Reading" post combined with this one, with Narnia references out the wazoo, turns out to be opening up horizons I never knew were there.

I'm digging it.

One day at a time.

Expand full comment

I'm happy for you. I hope the move works out. Umbria is beautiful.

Expand full comment

Just finished Narnia. Kenneth Branagh, Derek Jacobi, Patrick Stewart & pals made it that much more fun.

Of course, without a hard copy handy I’m totally at a loss for where any of my favorite lines are. So, that’s not good. I guess, I’ll have to do it again, slowly, the old fashioned way.

I love this portrayal of surface reality opening up to greater reality. There was a line—again, sorry, don’t know where it was—describing the awareness of never being able to ‘go back’ once having seen Narnia. And the reverse being a huge problem—ignorance of deeper realities makes it harder and less likely ever to know them. “To those who have more will be given…”

The good versus evil is also quite refreshing. Warfare, battle, struggle, suffering and loss are integral to going deeper into reality. I love that Lewis delivers this truth directly to children. We shelter them these days so much from even the possibility of ever knowing there’s a difference between good and evil.

Right now, I’d say “Horse” was my fave. I’m sure it’ll change. I love his almost throwaway description of the upshot for Shasta and Aravis, at the end, about the resolving of their quarrels.

The whole thing’s a treasure.

Expand full comment