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primeideal(Yeah it's another Christianity-themed bingo pick, there will probably be more where this came from, sorry if this is not your thing.)
A few months ago I was having a heavy conversation with a board game friend in which, among other things, I despaired of my possibilities for "real friendship," whatever that means. (This is not the same person from Debrief, but similar vibes.) Basically, there are lots of people I can enjoy spending time with, because we have similar hobbies and those hobbies are more fun together. But there are very few people where I feel like I would be okay with them dumping their emotions on me. By the principle of fairness/reciprocity, there are very few people where I feel like I would be okay dumping my feelings on them! Now, it's possible, even likely, that different people bring different strengths and weaknesses to a relationship, and it might sometimes be okay to show friendship in one way and receive it in another...but for someone like me, there's still a lot of anxiety about what counts as "fair" on those terms.
My friend's response, in part, was to bring up "The Great Divorce," and the philosophy that where you wind up in life isn't the result of one consequential turning point but rather many small turning points that add up. Maybe sometimes relationships are like that too--ones that succeed aren't the result of grand gestures, but lots of small cases of deliberate effort into trying to make them work?
Anyway, I'd heard of the book before but hadn't actually read it, so it went on the list, and fortunately it fits a couple different bingo squares so here we are! :P
"The Great Divorce" is told by a narrator who sort of kind of is "Lewis himself," who finds himself in a gray and grungy town and gets on a bus with some of the other locals, which drops them off in a sunny and pleasant forest. There, among other things, he meets his (or at least the RL Lewis') hero, George MacDonald, and spends a lot of time asking him questions and following around and hugging him when things get scary. So I was very glad to have started the Divine Comedy readalong before this, because it's very similar to the Dante & Virgil vibes. In fact, Lewis makes the parallel explicit: "I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I first bought a copy of Phantastes (being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the New Life."
Lewis, unlike Dante, does not have people staring at him and going "...why are you here, you're not even dead," nor does he spend as much time talking smack about people from his city or awkwardly being translated into weird-scanning Longfellow lines of iambic pentameter. Points for Lewis.
The overall conceit is that people from the Gray Town have the appearance of Ghosts, and the people who live in the green place are Bright Spirits, and each of the Ghosts is met with a Spirit who tells them how great everything is and how all wounds of the past are forgiven, and they are allowed and encouraged to stay. The Ghosts, however, find the green place uncomfortable at first (walking on grass hurts because everything is "too" solid!), and most of them, rather than adapt, prefer the familiarity of the Gray Town. You get where this is going.
Several of the ghosts and their rationalizations for refusing the invitation were very well-drawn. Early on we meet an Intelligent Episcopalian ghost who is way, way too familiar as the progressive liberal sort who cares so much about being the right sort of open-minded chap that he's drifted away from, you know, actual faith:
This was written in 1945, the same year that "That Hideous Strength" came out to complete the Space Trilogy, and five years before the first Narnia book was published. We can see early glimpses of some of the Narnian whimsy (lions playing in the grass! a unicorn stampede! even people afraid of being "taken in" in the double entendre "deceived"/"received" context the Dwarves use it). And the skepticism towards modernity that also appears in That Hideous Strength:
Which, oof, that still resonates today. Then they devolve into a "well this is all just a metaphor, really, from a God's-eye-view things don't happen in linear time, so don't read too much into this," and in this sense I'd say the ending fizzles.
I guess my tradition emphasizes the aspects of "God is the agent, we are not agents, we don't have a whole lot of efficacy in the matter," so we'd be more likely to join Lewis-as-narrator in the camp of "God can and will drag you to heaven kicking and screaming, whether you want to come or not. Lewis has written lots of other, pithier lines about "aim at heaven and you'll get Earth thrown in, aim at Earth and you'll get neither," which I've found relatable as metaphors in non-religious contexts. So from this perspective, I'm not sure this adds a lot to my understanding. But I think the depiction of the Ghosts is very well-done.
And while I still don't think I'd describe "real friendship" along these lines, either, I definitely appreciate that this friend thought of me enough to share a specific reference!
[Edit to add: I wonder whether Lewis would have agreed with the "watch your thoughts" copypasta. It's a philosophy I reject, and specifically, I reject the first link in the chain--that one's thoughts necessarily become one's words, spoken aloud. (If you count "incessant internal monologue" as "words," then I reject the second link, that one's words determine one's actions.) In some sense this is the contrapositive to Luther, who points out "even if your heart is faithful, you can never earn your way to heaven based on good works." Of course, if I get too self-righteous about "well I'm a good person because I don't lash out or get violently angry at anybody," then maybe I am in fact the target audience for Lewis' criticism--"sure, but in your heart you're still grumbling, that's not good enough." To which I would reply: "I have a free will module, I can choose what to do, I just can't choose how to feel, you're asking the impossible." But I sometimes get the sense that even my approach to my free will module doesn't match up with those around me...]
Bingo: Novella for sure. Maybe Angels & Demons or Mythical Creatures, although I'm not sure if either would count as "prominent" enough. Literary Fantasy? Multiverse/Alternate Realities? They take a bus between worlds, that's pretty unique? ;)
A few months ago I was having a heavy conversation with a board game friend in which, among other things, I despaired of my possibilities for "real friendship," whatever that means. (This is not the same person from Debrief, but similar vibes.) Basically, there are lots of people I can enjoy spending time with, because we have similar hobbies and those hobbies are more fun together. But there are very few people where I feel like I would be okay with them dumping their emotions on me. By the principle of fairness/reciprocity, there are very few people where I feel like I would be okay dumping my feelings on them! Now, it's possible, even likely, that different people bring different strengths and weaknesses to a relationship, and it might sometimes be okay to show friendship in one way and receive it in another...but for someone like me, there's still a lot of anxiety about what counts as "fair" on those terms.
My friend's response, in part, was to bring up "The Great Divorce," and the philosophy that where you wind up in life isn't the result of one consequential turning point but rather many small turning points that add up. Maybe sometimes relationships are like that too--ones that succeed aren't the result of grand gestures, but lots of small cases of deliberate effort into trying to make them work?
Anyway, I'd heard of the book before but hadn't actually read it, so it went on the list, and fortunately it fits a couple different bingo squares so here we are! :P
"The Great Divorce" is told by a narrator who sort of kind of is "Lewis himself," who finds himself in a gray and grungy town and gets on a bus with some of the other locals, which drops them off in a sunny and pleasant forest. There, among other things, he meets his (or at least the RL Lewis') hero, George MacDonald, and spends a lot of time asking him questions and following around and hugging him when things get scary. So I was very glad to have started the Divine Comedy readalong before this, because it's very similar to the Dante & Virgil vibes. In fact, Lewis makes the parallel explicit: "I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I first bought a copy of Phantastes (being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the New Life."
Lewis, unlike Dante, does not have people staring at him and going "...why are you here, you're not even dead," nor does he spend as much time talking smack about people from his city or awkwardly being translated into weird-scanning Longfellow lines of iambic pentameter. Points for Lewis.
The overall conceit is that people from the Gray Town have the appearance of Ghosts, and the people who live in the green place are Bright Spirits, and each of the Ghosts is met with a Spirit who tells them how great everything is and how all wounds of the past are forgiven, and they are allowed and encouraged to stay. The Ghosts, however, find the green place uncomfortable at first (walking on grass hurts because everything is "too" solid!), and most of them, rather than adapt, prefer the familiarity of the Gray Town. You get where this is going.
Several of the ghosts and their rationalizations for refusing the invitation were very well-drawn. Early on we meet an Intelligent Episcopalian ghost who is way, way too familiar as the progressive liberal sort who cares so much about being the right sort of open-minded chap that he's drifted away from, you know, actual faith:
‘Ah, I see. You mean that the grey town with its continual hope of morning (we must all live by hope, must we not?), with its field for indefinite progress, is, in a sense, Heaven, if only we have eyes to see it? That is a beautiful idea.’
...Jesus (here the Ghost bowed) was a comparatively young man when he died. He would have outgrown some of his earlier views, you know, if he’d lived. As he might have done, with a little more tact and patience. I am going to ask my audience to consider what his mature views would have been...
The parentheticals :D His friend, having circled back to orthodoxy before he died, calls him out on how "brave" the skeptic was in life:...Jesus (here the Ghost bowed) was a comparatively young man when he died. He would have outgrown some of his earlier views, you know, if he’d lived. As he might have done, with a little more tact and patience. I am going to ask my audience to consider what his mature views would have been...
‘What risk? What was at all likely to come of it except what actually came—popularity, sales for your books, invitations, and finally a bishopric?’
There's an Artist Ghost who's at first overwhelmed by the beauty of Heaven and wants to paint it right away; his friend tells him to take it easy and learn to just appreciate seeing it all first before he worries about subcreation. All the artists/musicians/writers who create beauty in their Earthly lives are, at first, reflecting some tiny fragment of the ultimate joy and beauty of Heaven, but they can be easily led astray by the desire for approval and fame. The Artist, at least in this scene, isn't able to overcome the idea of living without fame or appreciation. Lewis has a difficult balance to strike here in terms of "oh yeah some artists can be selfish and in it for the wrong reasons, but not me, I'm one of the good artists..." I'm not entirely sure I got a sense of what a Good Artist looks like, based on this scene, but oh well.
Another really strong character was a woman whose son had predeceased her. She's greeted by her brother, but all she wants to talk about is getting her son back.
Another really strong character was a woman whose son had predeceased her. She's greeted by her brother, but all she wants to talk about is getting her son back.
"Give me my boy. Do you hear? I don’t care about all your rules and regulations. I don’t believe in a God who keeps mother and son apart. I believe in a God of love. No one had a right to come between me and my son. Not even God. Tell Him that to His face. I want my boy, and I mean to have him. He is mine, do you understand? Mine, mine, mine, for ever and ever."
I feel like I've seen this sort of "take" expressed in the contemporary zeitgeist as a sympathetic figure, like, "if God had told Sarah to sacrifice Isaac she would have done the right thing, which is to tell God where to shove it *clap emoji*". Lewis realize what he's up against in portraying this sort of attitude as, while extremely relatable and human, ultimately negative:
‘I don’t know that I dare repeat this on Earth, Sir,’ said I. ‘They’d say I was inhuman: they’d say I believed in total depravity: they’d say I was attacking the best and the holiest things. They’d call me…’
This was written in 1945, the same year that "That Hideous Strength" came out to complete the Space Trilogy, and five years before the first Narnia book was published. We can see early glimpses of some of the Narnian whimsy (lions playing in the grass! a unicorn stampede! even people afraid of being "taken in" in the double entendre "deceived"/"received" context the Dwarves use it). And the skepticism towards modernity that also appears in That Hideous Strength:
There were planning Ghosts who implored them to dam the river, cut down the trees, kill the animals, build a mountain railway, smooth out the horrible grass and moss and heather with asphalt.
There's also an original poem which I think is trying to imitate the Psalms in its loose couplet structure (every line is broken into two parts with a colon).
Towards the end of the book, Lewis-as-narrator continues to question the mercy of Spirits who cannot, or will not, help the Ghosts reach heaven:
Towards the end of the book, Lewis-as-narrator continues to question the mercy of Spirits who cannot, or will not, help the Ghosts reach heaven:
What some people say on Earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.
To which MacDonald (Lewis-as-author?) says, among other things:
Every disease that submits to a cure shall be cured: but we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on still having jaundice...
Which, oof, that still resonates today. Then they devolve into a "well this is all just a metaphor, really, from a God's-eye-view things don't happen in linear time, so don't read too much into this," and in this sense I'd say the ending fizzles.
I guess my tradition emphasizes the aspects of "God is the agent, we are not agents, we don't have a whole lot of efficacy in the matter," so we'd be more likely to join Lewis-as-narrator in the camp of "God can and will drag you to heaven kicking and screaming, whether you want to come or not. Lewis has written lots of other, pithier lines about "aim at heaven and you'll get Earth thrown in, aim at Earth and you'll get neither," which I've found relatable as metaphors in non-religious contexts. So from this perspective, I'm not sure this adds a lot to my understanding. But I think the depiction of the Ghosts is very well-done.
And while I still don't think I'd describe "real friendship" along these lines, either, I definitely appreciate that this friend thought of me enough to share a specific reference!
[Edit to add: I wonder whether Lewis would have agreed with the "watch your thoughts" copypasta. It's a philosophy I reject, and specifically, I reject the first link in the chain--that one's thoughts necessarily become one's words, spoken aloud. (If you count "incessant internal monologue" as "words," then I reject the second link, that one's words determine one's actions.) In some sense this is the contrapositive to Luther, who points out "even if your heart is faithful, you can never earn your way to heaven based on good works." Of course, if I get too self-righteous about "well I'm a good person because I don't lash out or get violently angry at anybody," then maybe I am in fact the target audience for Lewis' criticism--"sure, but in your heart you're still grumbling, that's not good enough." To which I would reply: "I have a free will module, I can choose what to do, I just can't choose how to feel, you're asking the impossible." But I sometimes get the sense that even my approach to my free will module doesn't match up with those around me...]
Bingo: Novella for sure. Maybe Angels & Demons or Mythical Creatures, although I'm not sure if either would count as "prominent" enough. Literary Fantasy? Multiverse/Alternate Realities? They take a bus between worlds, that's pretty unique? ;)
