Of Elsewhere
I’m back, ish. I fell behind on my reading and even further behind on my writing about it during quarantine (I got absorbed in fiction projects again). Still, I’ve read some good books, both virtuous and fun, and I hope to write a bit about what I’ve read as well as my projects. I left […]
As you may recall from earlier on this blog or elsewhere, C.S. Lewis writes about sweet desire: a hunger that is better than any other fullness, a sensation of miserable longing so beautiful that one feels compelled to recapture it and fails. In lieu of a longer post tonight, I thought I’d share two excerpts […]
I started reading George MacDonald in high school, at C.S. Lewis’s recommendation. My first George MacDonald was, if I remember correctly, “The Golden Key,” a lovely story about a boy and girl who enter fairy land to go on a quest and find as they near the end that they have lived their entire lives […]
This past two weeks I’ve reread Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer—I read it the first time in a public library, I think in high school—and finished C.S. Lewis’s narrative poems (I’d read Dymer and the Launcelot before but stalled out before The Nameless Isle and The Queen of Drum). A few notes from Letters […]
I just finished reading C.S. Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. I’m exhausted, and not (overall) excited. This is not Lewis’s fault. He has to cover so much material, so much of which bores and annoys him, that—even though he expresses his boredom and annoyance with a great deal of wit—I too […]
Of the three books I mentioned last week I was thinking of reading next (C.S. Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Greer Gilman’s Moonwise and Cloud and Ashes, and Stephanie Burt’s The Poem Is You), I’ve selected English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and I’m more than a third of the way through (I think I’ll try to be done by next week, […]
During high school, I loved to talk with my mother about whether C.S. Lewis had successfully proven that morality is valid the way axioms of mathematics are. I think we both thought not (as I recall, we were looking primarily at Mere Christianity and possibly The Abolition of Man) I was open to the possibility and strongly wanted […]
A young girl with a four-letter L name is whisked off to a land of perpetual winter because she climbed into a wardrobe, all through the agency of a dominating male character whose name begins with the letters As. She must help defeat a deceptively charming, poisonously evil woman who kidnaps a boy the protagonist […]
I’m an agnostic—not even a particularly hopeful agnostic, at least emotionally. Intellectually, I try to keep an open mind about the universe—to paraphrase Borges, the world is so strange anything could be real, even the Holy Trinity—and even, I would add, everything from eliminative materialism (which is, as far as I understand it, the conviction […]
At some point I wrote that I preferred the literature of conviction to the literature of perception despite lacking all conviction myself. I speculated that this was because I took malicious pleasure in all the scenes where people prove how right they are and how absurd their opponents are (a pleasure that in me has […]
Of Elsewhere 