A Pilgrim in Narnia

Well, it has been quite some time since I wrote my “I’m still here but just exhausted” blog post. I am still here! I am less exhausted, but the tumbling forward of incomplete work continues. Moreover, though I’m making excellent progress on the last stages of a book, I can’t seem to write short, snappy thoughts and smart mini-essays.

To put it briefly, I’m struggling with brevity.

But the heavens are on my mind today. A total eclipse will fall on Prince Edward Island soon. My wife and I are headed west with dark glasses to see how close we can get to Totality. As Lewis was a speculative fiction writer fascinated with the heavens, I thought a briefish note about C.S. Lewis and Solar Eclipses would be interesting.

The scrupulous editors at Wikipedia tell me that no Total Solar Eclipse was visible from the United Kingdom between 1724 and 1925, when it skipped across the Hebrides in the north. Other off-centre kinds of solar eclipse events happened again in 1954 and 1959, but this time most of the UK experienced partial eclipses. I see nothing in any of Lewis’s writings that suggests that Lewis knew about the events in 1925, 1954, or 1959.

Closer to home, in Jun 29, 1927, there were 24 seconds of Totality in North Wales/Northeast England, meaning that Lewis’s home of Belfast would have had a partial eclipse. Lewis’s father, Arthur, would have been unlikely to break his routine to see the light and shadows, and his brother, Warren, was in (or on his way to) Shanghai. On Jul 9, Lewis writes to Warren:

“I have no difficulty in imagining a day grey and drizzling as an English November ‘seeing as how’ we have lived under such days for a week or so, relieved by the mutterings of a chronic thunderstorm. The popular theory is that the weather is all ‘caused by the eclipse’, the eclipse which has been ‘news’ in the papers long before and after its occurrence: or as Rose Macaulay wd. say, it produced ‘amazing crowds’ and in them were ‘many well dressed women’. Unfortunately it was not visible from Headington. What I can’t understand is why, if the moon is constantly revolving round the earth, it gets directly in the light of the sun only once in a century or so: I shd. have imagined that it would happen about twice a year. None of the elaborate explanations in the papers touch this point, so I suppose it must just be given up.”

I don’t know what the inverted commas mean in this passage at some points, but it is a lovely combination of flawed folk knowledge, unhelpful media, and Lewis’s limitations in scientific understanding. After all, there had not been a total eclipse in England since the early 18^th century, nearly 200 years. Lewis chose not to Google the answer, but I did. It turns out that I have been having trouble thinking fourth dimensionally, as the Doc would remind me. I can envision orbits overlapping, but I had not considered the nearness or farness of the moon in that orbit.

The closest to a total eclipse where Lewis lived and worked in England during his lifetime was at dawn on Feb 15, 1961. Lewis was lecturing at Cambridge on Spenser’s Faerie Queene in the season, commuting back and forth from Oxford. I can’t see even a hint of it in his correspondence or anything remarkable in his writings of the period. One of these period pieces is The Discarded Image, published in 1964, a few months after he died. I do not know what months he was working on this book, but it brings together decades of his Oxford and Cambridge lectures, which were designed to prepare students to read medieval poetry by teaching them about the medieval worldview. In a precursor essay from the mid-50s, “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages,” Lewis writes about how medieval folk viewed what was happening in the intentionally designed geocentric heavens:

Nor were those high regions dark [in the medieval imagination]. The darkness in which the stars (for us) are set is merely the darkness of the long, conical shadow cast by the Earth when the sun is below our feet. They knew, from their theory of lunar eclipses, that the apex of this dark cone must fall well above the moon. Beyond that apex the higher heavens are bathed in perpetual sunshine. In a sense, no doubt, we should say the same. But then we are aware (as they, I think, were not) of the part played by the air in diffusing sunlight and producing that bubble of luminosity which we call day; we have even, in stratospheric ascents, gone high enough to see the blue curtain grow thin at the zenith so that blue turns to black and the night of space almost shows through. They knew that, up yonder, one was above the air, in whatever they meant by aether; they did not know that one would see the sun flaming in a black pit. They thought on the contrary that they would be floating (for Milton is here a medieval) in

those happie climes that lye
Where day never shuts his eye,
Up in the broad fields of the skye. (Milton, Comus, lines 976-8)

Lewis works out this thought about medieval cosmology in his late 30s SF novel, Out of the Silent Planet. Indeed, he quotes this very passage in the space voyage part of the novel, where there is some neat play between light, shadow, and darkness. For all that Lewis was not scientifically minded—and he openly admitted to not caring that much about precision in his science fiction writing—there is a slip of paper in the archive where Lewis sketches out the complexities of getting a ship home from Mars when Earth is now on the other side of the sun. The space voyagers (like me and Lewis with regard to eclipses) fail to calculate the orbit of the moon, and their return voyage is in peril.

Lewis uses eclipses as an analogy in letter VII of Letters to Malcolm, which I believe he began in earnest in 1962. However, I don’t see much more thought about it. Even the above passage is about lunar eclipses, not solar. However, as I thought about the bright heavens and the earth’s umbra, I thought about The Great Divorce. In my fight with brevity, I have written a description of the speculative (after)worlds of heaven and hell in the WWII-era book, which I kind of like. So I hope this unauthorized book-jacket description works to add light (and not shade) to today’s events and Lewis’ literary cosmology.

An Unauthorized Book-Jacket Description of The Great Divorce

I have made no secret of my abiding interest in Lewis’ strange dream-vision novella, The Great Divorce. I keep finding my way back to this Dante-like version of a medieval idea turned into a literary experiment. “Let us suppose,” Lewis posits, “that the souls suffering in hell might have a day trip to heaven.” We then follow one of these tourists from hell to heaven as he walks through a travelogue of character encounters about the choices we make. Though it is a book about the afterlife, it is truly about the ways we curate the habits of our hearts and minds in the here and now.

Lewis’ hell in The Great Divorce is a gloaming suburb of near-nothingness, a ghostly, misty, insubstantial realm of despondency and despair. Imagine yourself sitting on a rarely cleaned floor of a smoggy subway station in the middle of the night. You are on hold with customer support, which is trying out their latest AI-generated hold music in the long intervals between nonlinear conversations with the new AI-bot customer assistant who was, incidentally, trained by the Quality Assurance Team from The Office. Add that kind of cold, misty dampness that never quite turns to satisfying, vivifying rain and the sulfuric smell of machines in the deep dark where there is never enough air. Finally, add eternity. Now, you should have a sense of what hell is like in the speculative universe of The Great Divorce.

By contrast, heaven is wild and vivid, with a bright, penetrating light and landscape. The hellish day-trippers are as insubstantial and natural to their environment as a greasy thumbprint on an eyeglass lens. It is so beautiful that it hurts. The land of goodness is “harsh to the feet of shadows.”

The hellish ghosts are invited to stay in heaven, but it is a hostile, untamable, immense, and alien land. In hell, dusk always feels like it will descend into apocalyptic night, the heat death of the universe. In heaven, twilight threatens the first rays of a sun whose life-giving heat and light pierces human hearts and shatters worlds. C.S. Lewis’ heaven is no flannelgraphed after-school special Disneyfied angelically glowing land of lost pets and no regrets.

By observing how the day-trippers react to heaven, we can see in story form what words cannot easily define, which is the Great Divorce between those worlds. Heaven cannot reach hell because its tiniest angels are cosmically huge, like trying to squeeze a mountain into a molecule. And hell simply cannot abide heaven. Thus, the more the ghastly refugees from hell have bound themselves up in their fears and desires, the more repulsed they will be by the unyielding goodness and bright light of heaven.

I love this disturbing book and find myself in many of the characters. It does, especially today, help me imagine the umbra of Totality and the penumbra of indecision in new ways. And if I understand it correctly, The Great Divorce imagines that one of its worlds will eclipse the other.

Note: the song doesn’t quite get it right … it will be better in PEI than Nova Scotia.