Whether it is a literary accomplishment or not I have, finally, read Bunyan’s allegorical travelogue—not just the story of Christian, but the sequel about Christiana (his wife) and her children. I was spurred on to Bunyan again by a colleague, Dr. Shannon Murray, who studies Bunyan’s work as children’s literature.

What surprised me about Murray’s work is the journey of The Pilgrim’s Progress as literature itself. At a recent presentation she gave, she noted that Bunyan’s illicit conversion narrative was met with indignation by his educated coreligionists. People who liked the content of the Progress—those who agreed with Bunyan’s work as a spiritual handbook—blamed it for not being Milton. Almost immediately there was an adaptation published in Miltonic verse to counter the “vulgar” Bunyan original.

What began as a dream narrative in everyday, simple language eventually found its way to the children’s lit shelf, as Murray notes:

“For over two centuries, The Pilgrim’s Progress was essential reading not in the university classroom but in the nursery, adopted by children who, like Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March in Little Women (1868), revelled in the journey and the adventure of Bunyan’s allegory. As a children’s book, it was so common that Frances Hodgson Burnett, L.M. Montgomery and Mark Twain could assume a basic knowledge of Christian’s journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City…. While Emily in Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon (1923) is proud to have both read and enjoyed Bunyan’s allegory (the only book her devout aunts let her read on Sundays), Huckleberry Finn famously judged that the allegory is ‘about a man that left his family, it didn’t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough’” (Shannon Murray, “A Book for Boys and Girls: Or, Country Rhimes for Children: Bunyan and Literature for Children,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan, 120).

Though I probably had an advantage going into the book, like Huck Finn I thought there were some tough things in it. There are pages of doctrinal discussions, the allegorical characters splitting hairs over issues that even I—who have studied evangelical theology—can’t see the significance of the distinctions.

My biggest struggle might be that I found the middle fifty pages of each book to be a bit dull. I can’t for the life of me figure out why everyone gets married near the end of Christiana’s tale. Moreover, the Progress doesn’t capture the subtleties of temptation that make the path of Christian pilgrimage so very dangerous. Vanity Fair, for example, is garish and obvious. The real temptation of consumerism, however, is the warm bath of normalcy, where the shocking reality that we treat people like transferable commodities is a simple matter of everyday policy. I suspect that an allegory simply can’t capture these subtleties without losing its universal appeal.

Rather than tough, though, when I got past the doctrinal minutia I actually found much of the book easy to read. “Vulgar” language has not changed much in the 325 years since it was written. I only had to look up a couple of words and I knew all of the allegorical allusions.

And yet, As Murray notes, Bunyan’s Christian allegory is now part of the university curriculum, and I suspect many students find it a challenging read. The Pilgrim’s Progress is also the benefactor (or victim!) of adaptations designed to make it more accessible. Most people who encounter Christian’s story, I would guess, encounter it through popular versions like Enid Blayton’s The Land Far Beyond (1942) or the Marvel Comic adaptation (1993)—both of which I have actually read!

So the literary history of The Pilgrim’s Progress is an intriguing one. It began as a street-language Christian handbook, and then migrated toward the nursery, being one of the few good books that children could read (especially on Sundays). By Mark Twain’s time, even though the story is well known, a Huck Finn character might find the language a bit of a challenge. A generation later Lucy Maud’s Emily character can be proud that she is able to read and understand what was once a children’s book. About that time The Religious Tract Society of London is printing an evangelistic version, with some obsolete words translated and eight colour illustrations, for “readers of every class” (4)—the version that I have. As the century moves on, the university takes up Bunyan’s Dream as an academic study. Now Bunyan is hard, intellectual, historical, and best fed to us in short bits with colourful pictures (or stage musicals with a bad actor as the leading man).

I write this not to brag at my own accomplishment in reading the original (or blush at my heretofore embarrassing display of literary cowardice), but to show the nature of how language works. It was Tyndale, I believe, whose work was developed into the King James Bible. And it was Tyndale who once quipped,

“I defy the pope and his laws! If God spares my life, in a few years a plowboy shall know more of the Scriptures than you do.”*

Tyndale imagined his translation as “vulgar,” and now the King James is the height of English poetry and requires a sophisticated readership. We ease into Shakespeare in high school, training our brains to appreciate plays that were enjoyed by the street class illiterati who paid a penny to stand and watch.

I wonder if there is more to our struggle with the classics, though, than the normal evolution of language. When I read C.S. Lewis’ The Pilgrim’s Regress for the first time in 2011, it was a real struggle. With hundreds of often un-translated French, Italian, German, Latin, and Greek words and phrases, Lewis’ little spiritual allegory is intimidating. Rereading it again this year, having educated myself in Lewis’ world and works, and it is much more approachable. This realization leads me to suspect that had I taken up Bunyan’s travelogue two years ago I would have struggled more than I did. Not only has language moved on, but so has education. We are simply less educated than the readers of the past.

In either case, despite having conquered Bunyan’s “Similitude of a Dream” I have more literary backfilling to do. I wonder if Marvel Comics has a Milton.

Actually, according to Foxe, he said, “I defy the Pope, and all his laws; and if God spares my life, ere many years, I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost!” But, as you know, language does evolve!

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” (Surprised by Joy, ch. 14).

I have been slowly working through Lewis’ published poetry, voluminous letters, and personal diary of the 1920s. It is true that the reader can see a shift in Lewis through the period. As I was moving toward this expected “Trinity Term of 1929,” though, two publications simultaneously questioned the date of Lewis’ conversion to theism–they questioned the timing of that first reluctant prayer.

The first hint came by whispers. When I was at the Wade Center last summer, I overheard staff and researchers talking about how leading Christian intellectual Alister McGrath was doing an “insider’s” biography of Lewis. Like C.S. Lewis, McGrath is an Irish convert to Christianity from atheism, and they both centred their academic life around Oxford. In the first wave of advertising for McGrath’s C. S. Lewis – A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet came the idea that McGrath challenged that conversion date, and would argue for a 1930 date rather than Spring 1929 (as Lewis himself claimed).

Any critical historian would immediately challenge McGrath’s conclusion based on the testimony of the man himself! But a second stream of questioning came from a second, independent source. More than confirmation, though, this is a primary source: C.S. Lewis’ own words, pinning down his theistic conversion to June, 1930. American C.S. Lewis scholar Andrew Lazo connected the dots based on his work in an early conversion narrative of C.S. Lewis’ that is now housed at the Wade. He is publishing the results in VII: An Anglo-American Literary Review, which has just been released.

I have been waiting until I read all the material for myself to make a judgment. As is proper historically, I have read through all of Lewis’ published work before looking at what other scholars say–in particular, his letters and journal. I must admit, based on his letters, I don’t think that Lewis had converted to theism in Spring 1929. His belief seems, to me, to come on strong through Fall ’29 through Spring ’30. We know that he has converted by the end of 1930. In a Christmas Eve 1930 letter to his best friend, Arthur Greeves, his conversion is a fait accompli–he admits that he has personal doubt, though he has no reason intellectually to doubt the existence of God. And in a June 1, 1930 letter he speaks of temptation and sin, which fits with Lazo’s target date.

But I have some doubts. In a Mar 21st, 1930 letter to A.K. Hamilton Jenkin, Lewis writes:

“On my side there are changes perhaps bigger: you will be surprised to hear that my outlook is now definitely religious. It is not precisely Christianity, though it may turn out that way in the end. I can’t express the change better than by saying that whereas once I would have said ‘Shall I adopt Christianity’, I now wait to see whether it will adopt me: i. e., I now know there is another Party in the affair—that I’m playing poker, not Patience, as I once supposed.”

This sounds much like the Surprised by Joy quotation above–taken from a chapter entitled “Checkmate”–though perhaps that’s where Lewis has finally lost the hand of poker! Moving back further, in Feb 1930 Lewis writes to his anthroposophical friend, Owen Barfield:

“Terrible things are happening to me. The ‘Spirit’ or ‘Real I’ is showing an alarming tendency to become much more personal and is taking the offensive, and behaving just like God. You’d better come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery.”

About the same time, Lewis writes to Arthur Greeves that materialism is definitely not what he believes and speaks of a group of “us” when it comes to religious belief. That winter of 1929-30 Lewis speaks of his spiritual growth and meditation practices. And in a Jan 26, 1930 letter to Arthur Greeves I found what I can only describe as the first “Lewisian” moral statement–an idea with that upside down quality we see in his WWII books:

“I suppose there is such a thing as imagining you have got beyond the stage of hating bad men, when in reality you haven’t got as far as hating them. Divine charity must be very different from human truckling to bullies, or human indulgence for rotters because they are amusing…”

There are hints in 1929 of spiritual growth but nothing like that Mar 21, 1930 letter to Jenkin. Now that I have read Lewis’ work up through The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933)–which I am almost through for the second time–I will look at the work of McGrath and Lazo and come to conclusion. I think, though, they are on to something. Winter of 1929-30 was spiritually very rich for Lewis, and it seems that he finally gave in during the first half of 1930 (rather than late Spring of 1929).

C.S. Lewis’ preface to The Allegory of Love (1936) is no exception. Hidden within this short set up to Lewis’ first academic book–the research that really put him on the map as a literary historian–is filled with little hints of Lewis’ personal story. The Allegory of Love began in 1929, before Lewis converted to Christianity. The book, then, stretches back into the foundational years of his intellectual conversion, through the period when he became a Christian, and after he “came out” as a believer with the publication of The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933). 

We see in this preface Lewis’ famous brevity–laced with wit–as well as his deferential style of apologizing (in both senses of the word) for his work. In particular, we see in this note the people that helped shape C.S. Lewis intellectually and spiritually as he moved toward conversion. He tenderly mentions his father, who died while chapter two was being written. The names Tolkien, Onions, Dyson, and Smith are part of “a far larger circle of those who have helped me, directly or indirectly, when neither they” knew it or not. And as he also does in Surprised by Joy (1955), Lewis gives special credit to Owen Barfield, who

“taught me not to patronize the past, and has trained me to see the present as itself a ‘period’. I desire for myself no higher function than to be one of the instruments whereby his theory and practice in such matters may become more widely effective.”

Indeed, the entire book is dedicated

TO
OWEN BARFIELD
WISEST AND BEST
OF MY
UNOFFICIAL
TEACHERS

The Allegory of Love is an important academic book for Lewis. But he never claims to be a lone scholar, a solitary intellectual, or an autodidact (that Greek word at the end of the preface). Lewis was a collector of influences, and his literary genius comes out of a large circle of official and “unofficial” teachers–Lewis indeed stands on the shoulders of giants, even if we see him as one of those giants now. Here is the preface in its entirety.

IT is to be hoped that the purpose of this book is sufficiently explained in the text and the preface need therefore be occupied with nothing but thanks where thanks, so far as I can recall, are due. But I cannot promise to remember all my debts, and I am well aware, like the philosopher, that ‘if I had succeeded in owing more, I might then perhaps have gained more of a claim to be original.’

Of unambiguous debts my first is naturally to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press and to the skilled and patient anonymities who serve them; then to Dom André Wilmart, O.S.B., for careful criticisms of the first two chapters; to Professor C. C. J. Webb for his helpful interest in the second; to the Medieval Society of Manchester University (and specially to Professor Vinaver) for their kind hearing and useful discussion of the third; to Dr. C.T. Onions for subjecting my attempts at Middle English verse to that best criticism in which all distinction between the literary and the linguistic is resolved; and to Dr. Abercrombie, for all that is not erroneous in the Appendix on Danger. The first chapter was read and commented upon by Mr. B. Macfarlane and Professor Tolkien so long ago that they have probably forgotten the labour, but I do not therefore forget the kindness.

Thus far my task is easy; but behind these unmistakable creditors I detect a far larger circle of those who have helped me, directly or indirectly, when neither they nor I supposed that any such matter was toward. There seems to be hardly any one among my acquaintance from whom I have not learned. The greatest of these debts—that which I owe to my father for the inestimable benefit of a childhood passed mostly alone in a house full of books—is now beyond repayment; and among the rest I can only select. To have lived on the same college staircase with Professor J. A. Smith is in itself a liberal education. The untiring intellect of Mr. H. Dyson of Reading, and the selfless use which he makes of it, are at once spur and bridle to all his friends. The work of Dr. Janet Spens has encouraged me to say more boldly what I saw in Spenser and to see what I had not seen before. Above all, the friend to whom I have dedicated the book, has taught me not to patronize the past, and has trained me to see the present as itself a ‘period’. I desire for myself no higher function than to be one of the instruments whereby his theory and practice in such matters may become more widely effective.

I have tried to acknowledge the assistance of previous writers wherever I was aware of it. I hope it will not be supposed that I am either ignorant or contemptuous of all the celebrated books I do not mention. In writing my last chapter I have regretted that the particular point of view from which I was approaching Spenser did not allow me to make much use of the labours of Professor Renwick and Mr. B. E. C. Davis, or even of Professor de Selincourt’s noble preface. Such knowledge as I have of Latin poetry would have been more easily and pleasurably acquired if Mr. Raby’s great works had reached me earlier. But when all is said, doubtless I have still failed to mention many giants on whose shoulders I have stood at one time or another. Facts and inferences and even turns of expression find a lodging in a man’s mind, he scarcely remembers how; and of all writers I make least claim to be αὐτoδιδακτός.

C. S. L.

C.S. Lewis was part of a WWII-era literary group called the Inklings that included authors like J.R.R. Tolkien,  Charles Williams, and Roger Lancelyn Green. Among those that I might consider “Honourary Inklings,” Frederick Buechner has, for me, pride of place. Buechner (pronounced Beek-ner) is an American pastor, writer, and teacher. In the literary world he is probably best known for his bestselling breakout novel, A Long Day’s Dying (1950) and his Pulitzer-nominated Godric (1981). I first encountered Buechner through his Bebb stories–brilliant short novels about a pear-shaped, bowler hat-wearing religious scam artist who still strikes the reader as utterly guileless and endearingly authentic. I soon stumbled upon Buechner’s sermons and spiritual writings, before I faced the task of reading his memoirs for Eugene Peterson’s “Soulcraft” course at Regent College a decade ago. 

I recently dug out my reflective response for that transformative class. Although I cringe at some of the writing, I am struck by how much these books gave me a voice for the various streams of vocation I was struggling with at the time. This response is a spiritual memoir of sorts, so the conversation is quite personal. But as I found that Buechner was telling my story at times, I suspect some readers will also find themselves in these words.

Even from an author’s memoir, it is sometimes difficult to know the person behind the words. From a different perspective, though, everything an author writes is autobiographical. After reading Frederick Buechner’s four memoirs and some of his fiction, I am struck by the points of contact that exist between Buechner and me. While the details of our lives are different, on the whole our lives are not radically disparate. In fact, I often felt like he was telling my story too, and it is valuable to explore the encounter of imagination that has occurred in my reading.

In Sacred Journey (1982) Buechner cleverly separates life into three periods: childhood before time began with his father’s suicide, adulthood where time is essential, and life when he began to see beyond time. The definitive point between my childhood and adulthood occurred when I was fourteen. My house caught on fire at 4:16 a.m. on February 4, 1990, and, as a result, my father and baby brother died. Unlike Buechner, my movement from childhood to adulthood to eternity happened very quickly, since I became a Christian soon after the fire. We both lost fathers when we were young, and we both experienced many of the same consequences of such a loss, but our paths of healing have been quite different precisely because of my early glimpses into eternity. Like no other time in my life since, God gave me a perspective that helped me see sunlight in the darkness.

When Buechner describes in Now and Then his mixed feelings regarding the vocation of helping the down and out in East Harlem, I understand his feeling.  Each morning I wake up to see the volcano Mount Asama overshadowing a lush valley of rice fields and small Japanese towns hedged in by mountains and forests.  There is a beauty here that people search their whole lives to find.  I live among a people who have never known about Jesus, and most of them will die without knowing Him.  I know that we are not supposed to be here for long, but I feel myself being called to stay–not by the Lord, but by the reality of what could be done.  And so Mt. Asama haunts me each day like the man on the street corner who Buechner helped find a job.

I hesitate to say it, but I may share some aspects of darkness with Buechner.  I hesitate because I am unsure to what degree he struggles in this area.  If it was not for Telling Secrets, I would have suspected he slid through life without significant inner pain.  There is a time when Buechner’s memories and imagination turn in on himself, which kept him from seeing the truth about his life, his mother, his daughter, and his father.  I cannot imagine that someone with his imagination and reflective ability can have escaped the demons that plague thinkers.  Perhaps London’s Little Ease dungeon he speaks of in Telling Secrets is the same as my fear, my darkness, and my self-doubt.

A deeper theme Buechner develops in his darkness, is how God works through pain and trial to communicate His loving forgiveness.  At the funeral for my father and baby brother, a nun said, “you are truly blessed to have received so many tragedies.”  It was a horrible, yet relieving thing to hear.  It felt like this woman was the first to acknowledge my true pain, yet she did it without saying “sorry.” In his pain, Buechner learned a secret lie that had haunted him: he believed that if someone he loved was unhappy, he had no right to be happy. Even in his most recent memoir, Eyes of the Heart (1999). Buechner does not share whether or not he has conquered this lie, or whether he still stumbles in the unhappiness of his loved ones. One of the truths that comes out of Buechner’s life is that telling the truth about our lives is important, but it does not mean that lies have been extinguished.

After reading his autobiographies, I feel connected to Buechner in many ways.  It has been a delight to walk with him along the journey of his life. Buechner is clearly reflective and self-aware, bringing out parts of my own life and much about the life of God.  His writings are an exegesis of the soul, pointing toward truth, and he walks there with us in his meandering, storytelling way.

“I have succeeded, at last, in shaking off the ailments of one of the most troublesome terms I have yet had.”

As I read that line I immediately understood it. Lewis goes on to explain that his ailments are quite literal—a squashed finger, the flu, a swollen gland—but the phrase “troublesome term” resonated with me deeply on another level. This entire semester, I have been completely, incredibly, irredeemably busy.

Because of a shift in teaching schedules and family needs, I took on a huge course load–about double what a typical full time university load normally looks like. I was ready for the semester to begin. I had every book and article read with copious notes, I had every lecture written, and I began the term with most of the administrative work complete. And still, I have worked from dawn to late into the evening almost every night. The schedule has been relentless.

One of the reasons the semester has been exhausting, beyond the sheer number of work hours, is the nature of the work. Reading and lecture prep are actually the most fun and rewarding aspects of teaching life. But that work was mostly complete before January. Instead, my days and nights were filled with reading 1^st year composition papers. It was a great topic (“Is God or religion viable in the modern world?), most of the students improved dramatically, and there were some genuinely exciting papers. But there is great weight in the task of going word-by-word, line-by-line through hundreds of assignments to simultaneously address semicolon usage and argumentative logic. It was nearly overwhelming.

On top of the course load, and a semester where I have seen more than 1500 assignments, is this research career I am trying to build. During this semester I also finished an article, submitted it, checked the proofs (when it was accepted), and worked on the revisions of another article. I have not written much—you can see my hopeful lament here—but I have blogged intermittently and presented my research. This semester I have also applied for a PhD, and after great preparation, have interviewed. While these pressures aren’t “sorrows,” I can say, like Paul, that, “Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches” (2 Cor 11:28).

But, I see the light approaching. The spring is coming, and I am steadily working my way through paper. I have only 60 assignments left to mark—and they are mostly pretty good assignments—so I am starting to emerge. Another 7 or 8 days of marking and a week of administrative work and my life returns to normal rhythms. I no longer feel an allergic reaction to the keyboard, and the backlit screen I stare at for hours on end is no longer ominous.

And as I sit at the end of this exhausting cycle, I am already starting to look back at the semester fondly. I love my work—even the correction of semicolons and the curious poetry that is freshmen logic. I love to teach, and it is the teaching that enriches my research and writing. So while I am tired—in the bone, shoulders slumped, near-the-edge-of-sickness tired—I will miss this most troublesome of terms when it is over.

Reblogged from Mere Inkling:

The title of this post is slightly misleading. In truth, it does contains advice from Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950) whose pen name was George Orwell. However, because of the impact of his two dystopian classics, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, the author’s name has actually become a true English adjective . . . one that might suggest I'm alluding to futuristic or totalitarian matters.

Read more… 1,109 more words

I thought I would add my piece to the growing Work In Progress Wednesday digital tradition. This is an excerpt from

Hildamay Humphrey was nine years old, but I am sad to say that she was completely unaware of that fact.

This is a normal morning for our protagonist, Hildamay, who lives the boring life of an adult though she is only nine. Everyone in her world treats her like a normal adult, including her confused neighbour, Mrs. Cuesta, who asks Hildamay to pick up 142 pounds of cinnamon at the market.

…

Hildamay Humphrey absolutely loved going to the market, in much the same way as you might love going to the candy store or the beach or the dentist—well, perhaps not so much the last one. She loved it so much, she went almost every day, and always to Bella Italiano, a small Italian supermarket that, for as long as she could remember, was owned by a man with a thick French accent named Mr. Confrère.

“Ah, good morning, Mlle. Humphrey,” Mr. Confrère greeted her politely, but with a grand smile. “Mlle.” is actually pronounced “Mademoiselle” by French-speaking people. It means “my little lady,” but is a polite greeting for young women in general. Hildamay always appreciated that Mr. Confrère greeted her so pleasantly and formally, and returned the greeting by practicing her own French.

“Bonjour, M. Confrère. How are you this fine morning?” “M.” is Hildamay’s way of saying “Monsieur,” or “Mister,” in French.

“Ah, it is a lovely day, no?” he answered while polishing an apple, which he then placed carefully on a neatly stacked pile in a wooden bin. The sidewalk was filled with M. Confrère’s bins of apples, pears, sweet peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchinis, corn and squash. He had used fishing net to tie up bunches of cloves and ginger and greens around the doorway into the store, much like holly hangs in doorways at Christmastime—at least in houses with people who have better imaginations than Hildamay Humphrey, who though holly served no purpose whatsoever.

As incurious Hildamay entered the market, even she could not help but drink in the rich, delicious scents. Some smells were hot and spicy, and tickled her nose. Others were green and fresh, husky smells that reminded her of her second floor garden. She also thought she smelled cinnamon and thought briefly about her confused neighbour, Mrs. Cuesta.

Hildamay squeezed between the bins of fresh vegetables and fruit from around the world to get in line at the meat counter. She was annoyed at herself for dawdling along the way to the market: there were four people in front of her in line when Mario, her favourite butcher, began to serve the first customer.

“Ah, good morning, Hildamay,” Mario greeted her brightly when it was her turn, his thick Italian accent very much like a welcoming sigh. He tried his best to be grumpy to the customers, but he was often quite pleasant to Hildamay.

“Buon giorno, Mario,” Hildamay replied carefully, practicing her Italian. “I’ll have a pound of ground turkey, 150 grams of mild capicola, and a nice piece of liver on the small side—please make sure it’s a fresh piece, Mario,” she added politely with a little smile. While you and I may agree that liver is a vile, vicious meat, unfit for human consumption, it was one of Hildamay’s favourite foods, “full of iron and energy,” she liked to say. For all Hildamay knew, everyone in the world liked a lunch of liver and onions.

Mario smiled at her comment mischievously.

“Ah, Bella, you know I only serve the freshest meat. And I certainly would not give low quality produce to my most discerning customer, would I?” Mario winked at her as he began slicing and bagging the meat. Hildamay smiled at being called a “discerning customer,” proud that Mario knew she had good taste when it came to choosing her cuts.

“My, how cute!” a woman said brightly. She was standing behind Hildamay in the line for the meat counter. She was dressed in a smart business suit and had a small nose much like the beak of a little bird.

“Pardon me?” Hildamay replied, turning to see the smiling stranger behind her.

“Well, it’s just so darling how you did all that ordering!”

At this comment, activity in the entire store stopped. Every eyed turned to look at the woman. Mario stopped writing on the brown butcher paper with a black marker, and M. Confrère looked up from his pyramid of shiny, stacked apples. Several customers stopped tapping melons and picking potatoes to watch the scene. Even Mrs. Zhang, who made the Chinese take-out food and chattered away constantly throughout the day, stopped and stared.

“Excuse me?” Hildamay repeated in displeasure.

If you have ever said the wrong thing at the wrong time, you know almost precisely how this woman felt right then. The difference, though, is that this poor woman did not know the damage she had done. Once, in a state dinner with leaders from around the world, I greeted the High Ambassador from Tankalu, a small Pacific nation, by offering to shake his hand. Little did I know that in Tankalu culture a handshake does not mean “How do you do?” It means, “If I had the power to go back in time, I would give you a Wet Willie in Kindergarten.” Strange, I know, but Tankalu culture is quite sophisticated, and takes Kindergarten very seriously. I, however, did not know the great insult I had caused, and I tried desperately and unsuccessfully to apologize.

Likewise, the woman in line was suddenly unsure of herself. She caught a glimpse from Mario, the butcher, who only shook his head at her. She knew she had said the wrong thing, but she did not know why.

While it is generally true that most adults are far less observant than children, all of the people at the Bella Italiano market knew that Hildamay considered herself to be an adult. At first they pretended to go along with her, and over time they began to think of her as a little, old, elementary-aged adult. After all, they had never once seen her do any of the normal things that children do, like dance or skip or play or compare bruises with other children. They also knew, above all, that she detested being treated like a child. For Hildamay Humphrey, this was the worst insult, and all the regular customers and staff at the market were waiting to see what would happen next.

Hildamay stared at the confused woman for a minute, then turned back toward the meat counter.

“How condescending,” Hildamay said quietly, though loud enough that most everyone would hear her, including the offensive woman. I’m sure that at some time you’ve been treated like a little kid by some well-meaning adult or by a big brother or sister. So I know that you know what it feels like for someone to act condescendingly toward you. But what you may not know is that adults sometimes do this to each other. Why? I cannot tell you. Adult humans are a strange and mysterious kind of people that scientists are only beginning to understand. But Hildamay found it an ignorant way of treating another person. In this way, I tend to agree.

“Mario, have you finished my order.” She looked seriously at the butcher.

“Yes, of course,” Mario snapped back into action. He passed her three packages of meat with a tight smile. “Ciao, Bella.”

“Ciao, Mario,” she replied politely. She turned to walk out of the store, leaving the baffled woman behind. Everyone in the store breathed a sigh of relief.  M. Confrère started shining and stacking apples, Mrs. Zhang started chatting with a customer about how to properly prepare roasted duck, and the regular Tuesday morning customers went back to finding their produce.

“What… What happened?” the woman asked to the others in the line.

But Hildamay did not hear her. She was somewhere else inside her mind. It was no longer a beautiful, sunny day. Instead, an ignorant woman had treated her as if she was a little kid. There was nothing worse in the world than being called “cute.” Even the prospect of having a delicious liver-and-onion lunch did not brighten her up as it usually did.

The excitement put me to mind of C.S. Lewis’ relationship with Catholicism, which grew throughout his life. He grew up in Belfast, Ireland, in a period of hardening Catholic and Protestant identity. When he was almost ten years old, Lewis was sent to boarding school in England just a few weeks after his mother died. He never had good experiences at “public school,” and one of his first letters to his father betrays the boyhood impressions of an Ulster Protestant:

“I do not like church here at all because it is so frightfully high church that it might as well be Roman Catholic” (Oct 3, 1908).

He calls the church “Romish” in his boyhood diary, and later recollects the experience in his spiritual memoir, Surprised by Joy:

“On the conscious level I reacted strongly against its peculiarities—was I not an Ulster Protestant, and were not these unfamiliar rituals an essential part of the hated English atmosphere? Unconsciously, I suspect, the candles and incense, the vestments and the hymns sung on our knees, may have had a considerable, and opposite, effect on me. But I do not think they were the important thing. What really mattered was that I here heard the doctrines of Christianity (as distinct from general “uplift”) taught by men who obviously believed them” (C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 36).

Evidently, his anti-Catholicism softened. There were a number of reasons for this, not least, perhaps, the gradual passing of time and intellectual maturity. Part of Lewis’ growing appreciation for Catholicism may have been aesthetic. From a longer letter I quote here, he describes a walk just before he went to the front line in WWI:

“I struck a very pretty little village however: the houses are mostly clay walled, which gives them a lovely colour, and are very ramshackle. The roofs are all of old old tiles and there are lots of old stone crucifixes, with their little offerings of grass & beads & things on them. Catholic Christianity is certainly more picturesque than Puritanism” (Feb 21, 1918).

By the time C.S. Lewis is studying at Oxford, he has rejected Christianity but is complaining about “anti-Catholic propaganda” in the books he’s reading (letters in February 1920). Some of Lewis’ key literary influences are Catholic, including G.K. Chesteron, Dante, and J.R.R. Tolkien—a key figure in Lewis’ conversion to Christianity. Famously, Lewis said of Tolkien:

“Friendship with the latter marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both” (Surprised by Joy, 205).

By the time he converts to theism (though not yet to Christianity), Lewis is able to appreciate Dante’s spiritual perspective:

“its blend of complexity and beauty is very like Catholic theology–wheel within wheel, but wheels of glory, and the One radiated through the Many” (letter to Arthur Greeves, January 1930.

Three years later, as a Christian convert writing to a student who had become a monk, he said,

“I have had a Catholic among my most intimate friends for many years and a great deal of our conversation has been religious. When all is said (and truly said) about the divisions of Christendom, there remains, by God’s mercy, an enormous common ground” (letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, Apr 4, 1934).

While there are occasional digs toward Roman Catholics in his letters, Lewis continued this ecumenical approach to his faith. When he began writing books defending and explaining his faith during WWII, he approached his subject as someone who is “merely Christian”—speaking only where the most Christians in most of history could agree with him. He sent the scripts for his famous BBC talks to Roman Catholic and Protestant clergy for their critique, including Griffiths.

While Lewis was open to fellowship with Roman Catholics and had Catholic ideas like purgatory, he never converted to Catholicism. Perhaps this note to H. Lymen Stebbins, an American Protestant considering a conversion to Catholicism, captures some of the reasons that Lewis himself never converted:

“The Roman Church where it differs from this universal tradition and specially from apostolic Xtianity [Christianity] I reject. Thus their theology about the B.V.M. [Blessed Virgin Mary] I reject because it seems utterly foreign to the New Testament: where indeed the words ‘Blessed is the womb that bore thee’ receive a rejoinder pointing in exactly the opposite direction. Their papalism seems equally foreign to the attitude of St Paul towards St Peter in the Epistles. The doctrine of Transubstantiation insists in defining in a way wh. the N.T. seems to me not to countenance. In a word, the whole set-up of modern Romanism seems to me to be as much a provincial or local variation from the central, ancient tradition as any particular Protestant sect is. I must therefore reject their claim: tho’ this does not mean rejecting particular things they say” (May 8, 1945)

Though some of these phrases seem like fighting words, he said them quite respectfully. Stebbins did, in fact, convert to Roman Catholicism. In general, Lewis avoided the controversies of the Christian church. In 1947 he began a conversation in Latin with Italian Catholic priest, Don Giovanni Calabria. In his Sep 6, 1947 letter, addressed to Calabria as “Reverend Father,” he shares his vision for conversation with Catholics:

“I am a layman, indeed the most lay of laymen, and least skilled in the deeper questions of sacred theology. I have tried to do the only thing that I think myself able to do: that is, to leave completely aside the subtler questions about which the Roman Church and Protestants disagree among themselves–things which are to be treated by bishops and learned men–and in my own books to expound, rather, those things which still, by God’s grace, after so many sins and errors, are shared by us.”

The common ground, that which was “Mere Christianity,” was most important to Lewis. As the world’s Catholics celebrate a day of Papal election, we have an opportunity to share a moment of common ground. While we view authority differently, in a sense, on this day, we all cry “Habemus Papem.”

The Form

In a lecture entitled, “Villanelle, Sestina,” by Cambridge scholar, Dr. Fiona Green, she thinks about the interplay between form and content. She chooses two kinds of structure that appear quite restrictive. The sestina is surprisingly precise, a 39-line poem that repeats certain words in an exact pattern. The villanelle is no less rigid in form, investing itself in peculiar repetition of entire lines. I share some examples of each at the end of this post, but it was Dr. Green’s use of a villanelle by William Empson that showed me, for the first time, the great potential this seemingly uncompromising form allows.

It is the pain, it is the pain endures.
Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

What later purge from this deep toxin cures?
What kindness now could the old salve renew?
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.

The infection slept (custom or changes inures)
And when pain’s secondary phase was due
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

How safe I felt, whom memory assures,
Rich that your grace safely by heart I knew.
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.

My stare drank deep beauty that still allures.
My heart pumps yet the poison draught of you.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

You are still kind whom the same shape immures.
Kind and beyond adieu. We miss our cue.
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

by William Empson

The reader can clearly see the pattern. A villanelle is a 19-line poem of 5 tercets (3-line verses) and a quatrain to close the poem. The ABA rhyme in the 5 tercets is obvious, but note that the 1^st and 3^rd lines are repeated as the closing line of alternating tercets. They are then each repeated to finish the quatrain. Intriguingly, there are only two rhyming sounds in this poem: words that rhyme with “through” (due, knew, you, cue) and words that rhyme with endures and yours (cures, inures, allures, immures). Quite evidently, in a villanelle as in a sestina, the form is determined.

The Form and the Poet

But does this capture the entire story? Dr. Green suggests not. She argues that to suggest that a poet “uses” a particular form to write a poem is an inadequate way of imagining the process. Which comes first: the form or the content? “It gets harder and harder,” she says, “to distinguish between what it’s about and what it does, between what it says and how it works, between form and content—if ‘content’ is even the right word.” Then Green uses a simple word picture:

“it simply doesn’t work to think of the villanelle as a container on the outside, and the subject matter … carried on the inside.”

Green continues to quote poet Paul Muldoon:

“People think that in a sestina, everything is pre-determined because you have the end words already. But it’s the opposite: nothing is determined. I had no idea what would happen when I wrote that poem. It’s not painting by numbers, it’s stepping out into the dark.”

As a fiction writer, I am fascinated by this claim. In a less integrated way my writing is as much about discovery as it is about execution, and form must always ring authentically with content.

Now, I hope the real poets and critics will see that in my wading into poetic waters, I’ve tethered myself to stronger swimmers. Essentially, Green is arguing that it is as true to say that the poetic form “uses” the poet as it is to say the opposite. While this co-relational idea is worthy of a blog on its own, allow me to co-opt the thesis as a thought experiment for another question entirely.

The Quandary

Humans are, I’m afraid to say, locked in a kind of philosophical quandary—the question of human freedom. For today, let us look at the question of God and time and human free will, and I’ll make the problem my own.

The best words I can use to describe the God I know include phrases like all powerful, all loving, and all knowing. In an Einsteinian sense of space-time that I have not yet grasped, God, if there is one, created “space-time” as other than God’s-self, so God is best understood to be outside of time. I, however, am very much in time, tumbling forward in life at 60 minutes an hour.

From this perspective, God can see my future, what I will do tomorrow morning when I wake up and am faced with the question of whether I will make coffee. Since God can see what I will choose, and because an all-knowing God cannot be wrong, we must ask whether I am really free to choose. If God has foreseen that I will make coffee, it is certain that I will make coffee. If that event is foredetermined, then in what sense am I free to choose it? Can I choose orange juice if I happen to feel like I don’t need coffee? If I do, it either means that God was wrong, or that God knew all along that I would change my mind.

Traditional Ways Through

There are a number of ways through this problem. I think Thomas Aquinas captures it best when he says that God is eternally present, so God is never foreknowing, thus not foredetermining. In the sense that what I am doing now is both free and necessary, God knows what we are doing now. As C.S. Lewis puts it in The Screwtape Letters:

“God doesn’t foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded now. And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it” (Letter XXVII).

The simplest way to play out the implication of this idea is to ask the question, “are we free to have done what is done and can’t be changed?” We chose freely, and although that is a past event to us, it is not past to an ever-present God.

I think there are other ways through this question (like Open Theism), and it may be true that we simply don’t understand time. But grant the tension for a moment. It isn’t hard to see the tension between our free will and a determined future that is laid out ahead of us in God’s mind.

Freedom Like Form

I wonder if Dr. Green’s form-content tension offers us an analogy to think about the problem. It is easy to imagine how difficult it would be to write toward a predetermined word (in the case of a sestina) or to shape a thought toward the bounded repetition of whole lines (as in a villenelle). But, if we are to believe the poet, the predetermined structure is actually freeing. Though Green did not include the entire passage, Muldoon goes on to say,

“I’m interested in raising the stakes: in how one can step into the dark. A sestina allows you to raise them in a spectacular form” (Interview with Paul Muldoon by Ruth Padel, published in The Independent, October 2002).

This known-unknown tension is very much, in my mind, like life. While we often think of God as Author and Poet, in this analogy we are the poets, our choices make up the content, and God’s knowledge is the form. The pre-determined is not a limitation to free will.

Perhaps this thought experiment fails, or perhaps we should stick with the greats—Aquinas or Ockham or Lewis. In any case, Muldoon is right about our approach. We step into the dark. The future may be predetermined and our free will is an illusion. Perhaps we do live in a paint-by-numbers universe. Even then, that doesn’t change how we live. We live free, like the poet, and the future “allows” rather than “restricts” in the yes and no of now and then.

Examples of the Form

The following is an example of a villanelle (“Honestly”) and a sestina (“Meditation: Chopin in the Snow”). Higgins’ villanelle demonstrates the surprising nature of the form as the first and third lines combine in the closing quatrain. The question is turned around, as what the model implies in her eyes is evidently lies. The unspoken word that rhymes with rain and stain, if we can imagine it, is “drain”—the dissipation of more than body and yet is bodily in form. The hint of light does not come from the eyes, but the sunrise. Yet the light does not pierce through rain, smoke, or the pre-dawn shades of blue and gray. The night remains throughout the day.

I heard the poet’s sestina “Meditation” in a public reading once, and two things drew me in. First, Higgins plays with the idea of brokenness, changing the repeated word’s form as she encounters the hard, immoveable images of architecture. And then there is the path in the winter wood. Nature is not unmoving like the cathedral, yet not broken like the body. Winter is bent over but not turned in. I’m not sure what to do with the winter, which begins in weeping willows and ends in intricate architecture. Second, as Higgins read her “Meditation,” the repeated words are almost imperceptible. They do not land heavily on the ear, which, as Dr. Green judges, is key to a good sestina and is intricately connected to the content of the poem. In this way, Higgins’ sestina demonstrates Green’s form-content co-relation well, as the content poem also seems to bring light to the form.

“Honestly,” a villanelle by Sørina Higgins
to S.M.B.

What have you been doing with your eyes?
Have you been washing them with acid rain?
The pain behind your irises implies

that touching needles, tells dirty lies,
and breathing smoke is not a funny game.
What have you been doing with your eyes

instead of sleeping normally? Surprise:
you’ve drunk yourself to death. When you’re awake,
the pain behind your irises implies

the nightmare doesn’t dissipate with sunrise.
Do you think poison will not strip your veins?
What have you been doing? With your eyes

wide open, pouring sludge in your insides?
Start gazing at your soul, and see the stain
the pain behind your irises implies.

Though you paint happy colors, I surmise
that blue and gray are your internal shades
The pain behind your irises implies
what you have been doing with your eyes.

“Meditation: Chopin in the Snow” a sestina by Sørina Higgins

I know what a heart feels like when it breaks.
I once knelt in a tiny chapel in the dark, under arched
stained glass, shaken with the kind of weeping
that is as red as the inside of a broken body,
gold as threads of life unraveled, shaped
like shattered windows or unfinished songs. Lovely,

and unendurable. This day is nothing like it: lovely
with a gentle kind of comfort, but the beauty breaks
my heart nevertheless. It doesn’t take much: trees arching
over the path, heavy with sparkling winter, weeping
willows dripping into their own shadows, disembodied
cries of hidden kingfishers—the sounds and shapes

of a late February run stretched out and shaped
by a river. Curling its path to lead to loveliness
unbearable, out into solitude so silent I fear to break
the softness with my double tread. Larch
and lilac, sleeping. The very whiteness makes me weep,
as does the music of my pulse: the beauty of a body

that is young—yet knows the intimations of the body’s
coming age. I would not lose my memory for my shape,
would not exchange ideas for an imaginary love,
yet wonder how the mind goes on in broken
flesh, wonder if a wounded figure feels the archetype
of what it could have been. I should not weep

on such a day for thoughts; yet I am weeping
to the music that I wear close to my body
in my very ears: a study in the colors and shapes
of poignancy. Each stricken note a single tone of beloved
melancholy. I wish I could stop the breakneck
pace of snowflakes: slow them so the gothic architecture

of each microcosm lifts its tiny architraves
and crystal naves against the silent sun and sweeps
the sky with leaded glass. I believe anybody
could pray in a cathedral made of ice or a shapely
sepulcher of frost. If that is so, more lovely
still the vaults and domes of unbreakable

splendor where I will one day break my heart on every archway,
cast my body’s perfect shape in shadows of startling light,
laugh in the heartache of love, and weep tears that hurt no more.

Sørina Higgins is an American poet, writer, and Inklings scholar. She has appeared as a guest blogger on A Pilgrim in Narnia, and hosts her own blog, Iambic Admonit. Her most recent book of poetry, Caduceus, includes both these poems and is available on Amazon and other online booksellers.

March 6th is World Read Aloud Day! I wrote a read-aloud post last fall for the Hobbit Read-Along, a merry fellowship of nine writers.  When I began the blog project, I didn’t account for the fact that I would be reading aloud to my son. As a result,  I was always scrambling to cover two chapters each week. Reading aloud slows down the process, but it is amazing how it changes not just the

Reading aloud to a curious 7¾ year old has challenges beyond sheer volume. The Hobbit is more complex than some of the other books we’ve read. We have only one book left in the Narnia Chronicles, and before that we filled our bedtime hours with Lemony Snicket, E.B. White, Roald Dahl, and some of my own fiction. Tolkien’s language is older, the scenery darker and more layered, and the dialogue—what little there is—is highly accented. So each paragraph is punctuated by a question or two, and I am sometimes translating as I go, particularly clarifying pronouns (which can seem obscure to younger children). Even this book, a fairy tale of 350 pages, takes a long time in the economy of a grade 3 bedtime.

Part of the challenge of reading The Hobbit aloud, besides the intentionally archaic syntax, is the sheer number of voices. I am far removed from the skilled voice actors that read our books for posterity. Some are quite bad, like the Chinese American trying to pass herself off as Japanese in The Memoirs of a Geisha. Others impress me, like Brendan Fraser’s work in Dragon Rider or John Cleese’s pretentious interpretation of The Screwtape Letters. When it is done well, a single reader can do a marvelous job.

My goal is more modest: I just want to create a magical atmosphere for my son. As I write those words, I suppose that seems a much greater goal than sheer entertainment. But it is true: I want the stories to come alive for him, so that he is forever shaped by the literary dragons we slay together long after the words on the page have slipped in the deep stores of memory.

E.B. White’s books and the Chronicles of Narnia have very few characters, so voicing them isn’t difficult. Moreover, some of the characters have voices that emerge easily: Eustace Scrubb’s smug BBC dialect with a tinge of lip; Reepicheep’s shrill, dignified superlatives; Puddleglum’s resigned languid tones; and Sam Beaver’s (from The Trumpet of the Swan) soft, flat Montana accent which slowly deepens as he moves from his preteen years to young adulthood. Even the animals in Charlotte’s Web have literary voice that slip out easily enough.

The Hobbit, however, is a challenge.

Admittedly, I’ve done my best to steal Ian McKellen’s Gandalf voice, and it is hard to read Gollum again without thinking of Andy Serkis’ marvelous voice work in the films. But for the most part I’ve tried to leave Peter Jackson behind.

Bilbo came naturally: a soft rural English accent, slightly effeminate, and almost always afraid. Thorin was a challenge, but nothing compared with a dozen dwarfs in tow. I was clearly out of my element as Bag End filled with dwarfs. Ultimately I decided on an Irish or Scottish accent, unable to really keep track of the individual dwarfs. Oin and Gloin took on more of a Newfoundland lilt, and Balin distinguished himself with my best Cape Breton accent. But except for Bombur, who has a deeper, fatter, Bomburish sulk, the rest are a blur of Irish and Scottish—two cultures I’m sure I’ve managed to insult here simultaneously. Thorin rose out of this bunch with a slightly more exalted and dignified air.

Hugo Weaving, who I presume is genuinely descended from the race of elves, influenced my Elrond, though he is far less affected in The Hobbit. The trolls reveal my prejudices (or my influences) as I gave them a Cockney accent (as best I could), which I think captures a bit of what Tolkien was on about there. Beorn gets a deep, resonant, reluctantly entertained tone, with a touch of longing, like a scorned lover, and a hint of Scandinavian. The goblins get shrill and high pitch voices with wretched cackles.

By midway through the book, though, I’ve used all my voices. I managed to pull a growling, haughty character for Smaug, but it is really just a reworking of the Wargs. The spiders are a wispy recycling of the goblins. And by the time I come to the elves in Mirkwood or the people of the Lake-town, I am spent. I tried to lace the Elvenking’s voice with hubris—a subtlety I’m sure my one audience member missed—the Master of Lake-town is overly indignant and the only American voice I included, and I’ve got nothing but a rural Prince Edward Island accent left for Bard, the hero of the lake. Perhaps that is fitting—my province has long been under the spell of Anne of Green Gables. Perhaps some dragon slaying would do us good.

I am out of voices and I still have four chapters left—I’d love suggestions for voices of what is coming, if you have them (without revealing the end, which I know but willingly forget). But my hope is that, even with my great limitations as a reader, I will have intrigued my son enough to catch the bug that is fantastic or romantic (in the old sense) literature. Somehow, I hope the warmth of bodies side by side, the dim light of bedtime, and the strange voices of the characters permanently map his future literary world.

And perhaps it is working. “Fire and Water,” my chapter, includes an absolutely key moment and the last stand of the timid villagers against the wrath of Smaug. Through the great battle and the politics of restoration that followed, my boy was entirely silent. And when the chapter ended—it was a short one—he tried to prevent me from turning over the page, protesting greatly as I closed the book. It makes me suspect that he has been ruined already.

I mourn the day when he is too old for our “snuggle reading,” as we call it. But in the meantime I’m pleased to leave him wanting for more. The chapters in The Hobbit have been long, but tonight he asked if we could read the Lord of the Rings next. We’ll see. In the meantime, we’ve left the residents of Mirkwood and Lake-town looking north to the Lonely Mountain, where thirteen dwarfs and a Halfling hero are shivering while they wait in great expectation their fate.

If I am right about my son’s interest in the book, they aren’t the only ones waiting.