My other blog is down, so I’ll use this one at least for now.

I’m rereading C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. It’s a book I’ve read several times before but get to the end and have lots of questions. This time I thought I’d try blogging about it as I go.

I’m through the first chapter and here are some observations:

• I never noticed before how much like the wood between worlds (in The Magician’s Nephew) Bragdon Wood is. It’s a green and growing place where leaves block out the sky, and the speaker is brought under its drowsy spell and falls asleep there. This is where the “progressive element” wants to build the N.I.C.E. laboratory — directly over Merlyn’s Well. It’s a wood removed from time and from society by several gates and passages, increasing verdancy, and progressively older architectural styles. The voyage into the wood seems clearly to be a voyage back in time; the N.I.C.E. building, which represents all the most dehumanizing, manipulative, institutionally-minded, futuristic, and “scientific” elements of thought, wants to build on that site.
• Lewis does such a masterful job sketching out the manipulative tactics of “the progressive element,” as well as the mindset of Mark Studdock, who wants so much to belong! “The progressive element” seems an inevitability any time we have a human institution.
• Merlyn and the N.I.C.E. pose competing modes of being in the world, competing philosophies, competing religions, competing power.

That’s all so far. More, perhaps, as I get further into the story.