I haven't quoted Lewis in a while, so . . .

Speaking on the eve of WWII, Lewis said:

If we had foolish unchristian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we though we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon.

That's from a recent post on Kevin DeYoung's blog, in which DeYoung also quotes the philosopher Gilbert Meilander:

Life, and our shared way of life, are always fragile and insecure. That is not a crisis; it is human history. And during our share of that history it will always be true that how, rather than how long, we live should be our central concern.

No doubt.

On Reading and Blogging

My blogging life began a few years ago as a whim. I thought, knowing myself as I did, that I'd stick with it for a week or two, maybe a month, and then just let it slide. My first and second blogs were Mr. Standfast and Gratitude & Hoopla. My idea then was, at least in part, to be an encouragement to believers. Perhaps even a guide of sorts (sure, don't we all start a project with over-wrought expectations?).

Anyway, I've drifted away from the encouragement motif, as any occasional reader would recognize. I've drifted away from the blogging as ministry idea altogether. Nevertheless, blogging seems to be a part of me (as millions of others can say as well). In the end, it's just me, blogging. Take it or leave it.

My subject now, more often than not, has something to do with the books I've been reading. So, if this blog is anything, it is a reader's blog. Not a lit-blog, for to be that I would have to keep up with (and care about) goings-on in the literary world. No, but I love reading, am around books a lot (I work in a library), eschew television because it's not nearly as enjoyable as reading, and looking back I can honestly say that mine has been a life of one who has often been accused of having his "face in a book."

Okay. So that's what I am. And no book, btw, has given me more pleasure lately than Alan Jacobs' The Narnian. Jacobs is certainly the right man to write about Lewis, for his prose, like that of Lewis himself, has a certain ease about it, a relaxed erudition, and even a joy, as of one who loves to express a thought clearly about something he loves well.

To finish this somewhat rambling post, how about a quote from Lewis himself. In The Weight of Glory Lewis speaks of the real pleasures of this world as hints or markers of something deeper ("the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited"). Then:

Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am, but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.

Jacobs, summarizing Lewis' thought on this matter, adds this: "How can we be released from the evil enchantment that threatens to abolish humanity? Perhaps the greatest resource on which he draws--and it is a mighty one--is, simply, delight. He calls us to take note of what gives us pleasure, for, though our pleasures can indeed lead us astray, they are in their proper form great gifts from God."

The Narnian

Don't you like reading a good book? Especially in winter, I suppose, when (for us in the north) the range of alternative activities is somewhat limited. Anyway, I have always been the bookish type. In my middle- and high school years I loved sitting on the back porch on a rainy day and reading Dickens. Strange boy!

And I guess that marks me as a bit of an anglophile. I have to admit it's true, I do suffer a touch of that malady. But lately I've been getting my thirst quenched by reading Alan Jacobs' biography of C. S. Lewis, The Narnian. It is a wonderful and perceptive book, and the stories of Lewis' school days, and the sound of Lewis' voice--the lucid English diction--more than satisfy my anglophilia.

It is not so much a biography of Lewis as the story of the development of his imaginative life. And Jacobs is a fine one to take us on the journey--sympathetic without fawning, critical without bombast. A rare combination of traits in a biographer. Anyway, it's good to get back to Lewis now and then. I highly recommend this book.

Till We Have Faces

Just finished re-reading C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces. What a wonderful book. The author's finest work of fiction, I believe. Lewis seems more immersed in his story here than elsewhere, letting it speak on a level that leaves his usual didcacticism--however fine and good-natured that trait often is in him--far behind. The story cannot be summarized in nifty little aphorisms. However, I did a quick search to find out what other bloggers have said, and discovered this helpful analysis at a very lit'rary blog called Iambic Admonit. Also, this blogger just finished it as well. Why does that seem kind of cool to me? That I can quickly discover on the Internet that another human being was reading the same book at the same time, and blogged about it on the same morning?