Findings

It’s Shakespeare’s birthday (they think), and you can read Garrison Keillor’s recognition either by clicking the Writer’s Almanac link in my sidebar or by using this link, which takes you to the permalink for this week’s programs. (There’s no permalink for individual entries, just for a week’s worth.)

This is National Turn Off Your T.V. Week, I’ve read in a few other blogs. Being a loather of television at all times, I applaud the concept mightily… but confess that I haven’t unplugged ours. The girls watch “Clifford” every morning. I figure a half hour a day won’t kill them, and also I use it as motivation for getting beds made, clothes on, and table cleared in a timely manner. I’d love to think of another effective motivation but so far have drawn a blank… Which is a worse default tactic: “Clifford?” or me, stewing ineffectually and pacing from one bedroom to the next to the bathroom to do my hair and then repeating the cycle? I’m like a shallow, suburban version of Lady Macbeth…

Anyway I’m trying to sit less at the computer too, which has some of the same negatives as the t.v. as a relationship-subtracter, imagination-sapper, and time-eater. How does this screen absorb so many moments of my life?

Yup, I’ve been flaky about my blog header lately. I think I’ll stay with this photo for awhile, though. Anyone know what path it depicts? (Hint: Phil Keaggy has an instrumental named after it. Tune in next time…)

I’m almost finished with Tolkein and C.S. Lewis. It’s enjoyable to read, but it’s taking me a while because I don’t get to it till the evening and zonk pretty quickly. The only frustration is where the author touches on something without explaining it enough for my amateur ears. What does it mean that Lewis was “a protestant Ulsterman”? What did Tolkein think when he handed Lewis and his friend a manuscript of The Silmarillion to read, and Lewis gave it back–Lewis who had been such a huge force of encouragement for The Lord of the Rings? How did their disagreements about theology and divorce and other things surface in their Inklings meetings? The tidbits are tantalizing.

The picture that emerges is of two very different men. Lewis lives out his life being thoroughly Lewis. He’s a pipe-smoking, pub-loving, portly, loud-talking, loud-laughing, people-loving, expansive person, not just a dry logic machine grinding around Oxford. He reads everything, at every tier of the literary ladder. He cares deeply for people, accepting the responsibility for caring for a deceased friend’s mother for the majority of his adult life. He marries a divorcee to give her citizenship, then falls in love with her. He enfolds her orphaned sons into his protection without stint or condition when she dies. He invites everyone he even faintly admires to Inklings meetings, and is prone to hero worship. His mind can be changed in conversations with others.

Tolkein on the other hand is a meticulous, i-dotting-t-crossing, dusty-ancient-language-studying, phenomenally imaginative man who takes 17 or 18 years to write LOTR (even longer for The Silmarillion), occasionally bores his friends (Hugo Dyson vetoed any further reading from LOTR at their meetings), and spends a fair amount of energy on disapproval. He disapproves of Lewis’s popular theology, his views on divorce, his use of mythical creatures in the Narnia books, and the speed at which he writes them. He disapproves of Lewis’s admiration of Charles Williams. Though he’s a warm, generous person, he feels faintly hurt when the Inklings expand to a big group because the real pull of the group for him is Lewis. And so on.

They stayed friends, but Lewis put up walls. Tolkein didn’t know about his relationship with Joy Davidman till after the marriage. How sad is that? LOTR most assuredly wouldn’t have been completed–perhaps not even undertaken–without Lewis’s encouragement and shared delight in fairies and myths. (Kind of endearing to me.) But Lewis ended up withdrawing behind a protective curtain. Though the friendship lasted, it settled out at a shallower level and stayed there. 

Of the two, though suspect I might like Lewis more if I met him, I probably resemble Tolkein more (minus the part about being a genius). He wasn’t a stingy or hypercritical person, but he was a personality that couldn’t abide hypocrisy. It was the blessing and curse of his life. He was the one who went for a walk one night with two friends that ended at the gates of Heaven, for Lewis. He was the one who created the more dazzling literary achievement, thanks to long persistence and commitment to excellence. His influence is broad and lasting because of this uncompromising character.

But on the downside, it could cost him relationally. He loved Lewis, but couldn’t remain immersed in the friendship on false terms. When he thought Lewis was wrong, he was honest about it. (For me the sticking point would be truthfulness, not theological differences. But for him intellectual differences were a bigger deal.) I have to say that I admire Tolkein more for being honest, rather than going into hiding like Lewis did. Imagine hiding your marriage from a friend! I guess he interpreted disagreement as condemnation or rejection. It looks to me (from this very distant vantage point) like the friendship weakened not because Tolkein was too critical, but because Lewis couldn’t handle being challenged.  

Maybe it was meant to be. But it still makes me a bit sad.

I’m fascinated by the “parallel biography” of Lewis and Tolkein that I’m reading. Why am I only now getting interested in the lives of writers I’ve admired? Somehow I guess I’ve thought it would clutter up my reading of their stories to learn too much about them.

But there’s something exciting about discovering that I actually can relate to them as people. I’ve always felt (maybe everyone does) like I’m missing something. Now I’m reading about two men who also felt they were searching for something, and helped one another to realize who they were meant to be. It’s a story of “findings,” so how can I not find it compelling? They found an incredibly beneficial friendship, which over the course of their lives equipped them to find their callings much more completely than they would have done otherwise.

Who would have thought their relationship would work? In 1926 Lewis wrote in his diary that Tolkein was “a smooth, pale, fluent little chap [with] no harm in him: only needs a smack or two.” Three years later, Tolkein writes, “Friendship with Lewis compensates for much.”

Who would have thought that Lewis was once a dufflepud himself, passively mired in the popular mindset? It was Owen Barfield who argued him out of ”the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” Lewis, the great thinker everyone quotes, once needed someone to point out the difference between “seeing what happens and getting used to it,” and “consciously participating in what is.”

I think he may not have approved of the way he’s now thrust out front as the only Christian who thinks. I love his writing and reasoning, and it’s good enough for the likes of me. But he himself always acknowledged his debt to reading. He’s a conduit, kind of like cliff notes, into the original sources of his ideas. Here’s a wonderful description of him reading: “To sit opposite him in the Duke Humphrey [Library] when he was moving steadily through some huge double-columned folio…was to have an object lesson in what concentration meant. He seemed to create a wall of stillness around him.”

That’s not to say he’s nothing more that a passive quoter of what he himself has read! His imagination is another attribute I see developing in this biography, and that’s what makes him who he is–it determines how he synthesizes what he reads and forms his own perspective. Tolkein’s imagination, too, was a massive force that took time to mature. His editor described him in the 1920’s and 30’s as having an imagination “running along two distinct courses that did not meet.”

Somehow these two connected and encouraged one another (I haven’t gotten very far into the story yet). Somehow they helped call out each other’s destiny.  I’m not sure why this is such a big deal to me right now. Maybe this  is part of it. In any case, it’s speaking hope to me on some level.

I’m learning some interesting odds and ends about Lewis and Tolkein. For example, Tolkein didn’t publish that much in his field (philology). Instead of academic writing, he invested in his students. Both Lewis and Tolkein were soldiers. Both men lost their mothers at a young age. Both men were clinical book geeks: for amusement, Tolkein would translate fairy tales into Anglo Saxon.

I’m seeing in both men an ability to laugh at themselves, and therefore to laugh at others without ill will. Here’s Tolkein: “I cannot help recalling some of the salient moments in my academic past. The vastness of Joe Wright’s dining room table (when I sat alone at one end learning the elements of Greek philology from glinting glasses in the further gloom)… My first glimpse of the unique and dominant figure of Charles Talibut Onions, darkly surveying me, a fledgling prentice in the Dictionary Room (fiddling with the slips for WAG and WALRUS and WAMPUM…).”

Lewis at age 9 identified a bad temper and a sensible nature as the Lewis family features. His mother he describes as “stout, brown hair, spectaciles, kniting her chief industry.” He describes himself this way: “I am like Papy, bad temper, thick lips, thin, and generally weraing a jersy.” Later, in describing his teacher Wm. Kirkpatrick, Lewis writes, “The idea that human beings should exercise their vocal organs for any purpose except that of communicating or discovering truth was to him preposterous. The most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation.”

Their friendship is encouraging. Both are brilliant, exceptional men. That’s an open invitation to loneliness. Yet they found each other, and other forms of community as well. Tolkein (or “Tollers”) was a great clubber; he was always starting fellowships in his areas of interest. It’s good to see, at a time when so much of my own social being is necessarily confined to a young family. These guys were extraordinary, so if they can find community, surely I, amongst the ordinary, can too.

“About the same time that Tolkein is fascinated by the Welsh place names on coal wagons,” writes Colin Duriez, “a much younger Clive Staples Lewis has his own epiphany. His six-year-old brother Warren Lewis runs into the nursery… [carrying] the lid of a biscuit tin filled with moss, flowers, and sticks to proudly show his younger brother” (Tolkein and C.S. Lewis). We’re told that this earliest remembered apprehension of beauty enables Lewis, a little less than 3, to “see in a new way the garden outside.”

Seems incredible. And then–think of Narnia in The Last Battle, when through the stable door the Pevensies arrive in the true, eternal Narnia, and realize their experience has been with a Narnia in miniature. Think of The Great Divorce, in which the true and lasting figures are above all large. Think of Aslan, sometimes Lion-sized but in his most striking moments larger than the sky. I guess they’re not fooling about the significance of those early childhood impressions.

My earliest experience of joy took place on my tricycle, so I couldn’t have been that much older. I wore a blue corduroy jacket, had helped rake leaves for a neighbor and earned a 50-cent piece, and was watching the fog on the hills across the river from my house on a Saturday morning. All the best experiences since have had to measure up to that moment.

I finished Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder. It leaves me feeling sad. Yes, she lived a life admirable in many ways. (I wrote about that here.) She and her husband were a team. She knew how to carve out a life from uncooperative earth, how to sew and can and garden and care for stock. She and her husband overcame extreme poverty through persistence, knowledge, an independent spirit, and stubbornness.

But there was not a trace of romance in her life, either. Her husband was essentially crippled within the first few years of their marriage, then lived the remaining 65 years with a limp, in a weakened state. She and he shared a partnership, but she was a dominating wife and a bossy mother. Her daughter rejected her way of life and struggled for years with feeling controlled by her mother. There seems to be a loneliness never fully fulfilled.

Helen Keller’s autobiography has given me much food for thought as a Christian homeschooling parent. Her teacher, Anne Sullivan, writes: “Great care has been taken not to lead her (Helen’s) thoughts prematurely to the consideration of subjects which perplex and confuse all minds. Children ask profound questions, but they often receive shallow answers, or, to speak more correctly, they are quieted by such answers. . . . She has not yet been allowed to read the Bible, because I do not see how she can do so at present without getting a very erroneous conception of the attributes of God.”

My reflex is a legalistic flail in defense of Bible-reading to the young. I’ve been reading a children’s Bible storybook to my two young children, a little each day, for the last 6 months or so. I want to model a devotional life in which scripture is the basis of our interaction with God and our perspective on life.

Even though I believe God will honor this, and will negotiate the misconceptions that are sure to come…what if I had waited? Is Anne Sullivan right that their curiosity would have opened the door later, when they’re better able to comprehend “the great mysteries”? Would a time come when I wouldn’t worry that the God of love is all talk to them, while the God that loses His temper and punishes steals the show?

Or is it just arrogance that believes such a time would ever come? Is spiritual understanding dependent on intellectual maturity? Does it do children a disservice to assume that these matters are beyond them?

This approach certainly had favorable results with Helen, who writes later, “But how shall I speak of the glories I have since discovered in the Bible? For years I have read it with an ever-broadening sense of joy and inspiration; and I love it as I love no other book.” She’s not brainwashed either, for she writes, “Still there is much in the Bible against which every instinct of my being rebels, so much that I regret the necessity which has compelled me to read it from beginning to end. I do not think that the knowledge which I have gained of its history and sources compensates me for the unpleasant details it has forced upon my attention. For my part, I wish, with Mr. Howells, that the literature of the past might be purged of all that is ugly and barbarous in it, although I should object as much as anyone to having these great works falsified.”

In the end I recall Jesus’ words: “Let the little children come unto Me.” They already live in a world and a human nature that are beyond their ability to process or manage. Even if we could censor their outer world, we can’t censor their inner world. They’re as wonderful and as fallen as adult human beings. Maybe it’s best to introduce them to the grandest, highest, most challenging vision of all now, before their minds are saturated with either their own nature, or the spirit of the age.