I am not familiar with how many books like this may exist. I am sure that personalities such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien have attracted many a biographer and beauties such as Oxford have inspired many a photographer, but this book accomplishes both with stunning success. It is as much a coffee table picture book as it is a sweeping biography of “Lewis, Tolkien and Their Friends” as the subtitle reads. I don’t know if I’ll ever make it to Oxford. The photos in this volume make one want to travel there today, but if I never get to go in person, I will always be thankful for the journey I was able to make through the pages of this beautiful book.
As for the prose, this book is history, biography, geography, literary analysis, and a little bit of philosophical meandering to boot. It is a pleasant read. Never dull. There are fewer words than you might expect, as the pages are filled with gorgeous photography, but perhaps more is said here than has been said with a far greater number of words elsewhere. The book costs about $20 on Amazon which is not cheap, but not expensive either. If you are a Lewis or Tolkien fan, you will not regret the purchase. If you are not a fan yet, you would do well to be, and this sweeping overview of “the Inklings of Oxford” is a great place to start. (Actually you should start by reading their books, but after a few of those…once you’re hooked, check out this book.)
Here’s a portion of the first paragraph of the first essay in Walter Hooper’s collection of C. S. Lewis essays, God in the Dock. This quote is a prime example of Lewisian logic–better known as common sense.
“Mechanism, like all materialist systems, breaks down at the problem of knowledge. If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it? As for emergent evolution, if anyone insists on using the word God to mean ‘whatever the universe happens to be going to do next’, of course we cannot prevent him. But nobody would in fact so use it unless he had a secret belief that what was coming next will be an improvement. Such a belief, besides being unwarranted, presents peculiar difficulties to an emergent evolutionist. If things can improve, this means that there must be some absolute standard of good above and outside the cosmic process to which that process can approximate. There is no sense in talking of becoming better if better means simply ‘what we are becoming’—it is like congratulating yourself on reaching your destination as ‘the place you have reached’. Mellontolatry, or the worship of the future, is a fuddled religion.”
A few years ago, I received a pile of books from a friend, several of which were works by C. S. Lewis. The fact that all of them bore my friend’s name, in the upper right-hand corner of the first page, caused his donation to seem more like a purging than a gift. As such, I inquired as to his health; he said he felt fine. No fever. No chills. I inquired as to his sanity, and he assured me that his actions stemmed from sound-reasoning. Given the nature of my two queries, I could take the former answer prima facie but have continued to this day to doubt the latter. I informed him that his name would forever remain inside the cover and that he could return to retrieve his volumes any time that he wished. If he took too long to return, however, they would become annotated copies.
One of the volumes in the stack of works by Lewis was rather thin. None of them were particularly large, but one was almost a pamphlet, bearing the title A Grief Observed. When I indicate small, I mean this book is slender enough to be read in the span of one pot of coffee, or perhaps two large cups of tea; I suppose Lewis would have preferred the tea.
My copy of A Grief Observed consists of 76 pages organized into 4 chapters. The book is a chronological progression of Lewis’ state of mind as he grieved over the loss of his wife, Joy, to cancer. In the Foreword, Madeleine L’Engle relates the fact that “when C. S. Lewis married Joy Davidson, it was a pretty certain expectation that she would die first, unless there was an unexpected accident, for she was in the hospital. He knew that he was marrying a woman who was dying of cancer.” She went into a period of remission which allowed them an extended period of time as a married couple, but in the end, their marriage was comparably short.
In the introduction, Douglas H. Gresham, Lewis’ stepson, states,
Anything entitled ‘Grief Observed’ would have to be so general and nonspecific as to be academic in its approach and thus of little use to anyone approaching or experiencing bereavement.
This book on the other hand, is a stark recounting of one man’s studied attempts to come to grips with and in the end defeat the emotional paralysis of the most shattering grief of his life.
What makes A Grief Observed even more remarkable is that the author was an exceptional man, and the woman whom he mourns, an exceptional woman. Both of them were writers, both were committed Christians, but here the similarities end. It fascinates me how God sometimes brings people together who are so far apart, in so many ways, and merges them into that spiritual homogeneity which is marriage.
In the first portion of the final chapter, Lewis discusses his reasons for cataloging his thoughts into a written work:
In so far as this record was a defence against total collapse, it has done some good. The other end I had in view turns out to have been based on a misunderstanding. I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I’ve already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat.
If you’ve ever wished that you could sit down and have a conversation with a truly great man and ask him the great, great questions of life and death, then this is your lucky day. Even more, you aren’t required to come up with a list of questions. Lewis has asked them for you. He does not pretend to know all the answers, but you get to hitch a ride with one of the greatest question-askers that I have ever come across.
One recommendation: Read Mere Christianity first. A basic understanding of how Lewis thinks will make the brief volume under consideration much richer. A Grief Observed is a real-time application of the conclusions reached in Mere Christianity. Lewis is a Christian man asking questions about the world that the one, true, and living God created and that the lord and savior Jesus Christ has redeemed.
Concerning the Christian paradigm by which Lewis considers his grief, here’s a final quote:
It doesn’t matter that all the photographs of (my late wife) are bad. It doesn’t matter—not much—if my memory of her is imperfect. Images, whether on paper or in the mind, are not important for themselves. Merely links. Take a parallel from an infinitely higher sphere. Tomorrow morning a priest will give me little round, thin, cold, tasteless wafer. Is it a disadvantage—is it not in some ways an advantage—that it can’t pretend the least resemblance to that which it unites me?
I need Christ, not something that resembles Him. I want (my late wife), not something that is like her. A really good photograph might become in the end a snare, a horror, an obstacle.
Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so popular. (It makes little difference whether they are pictures and statues outside the mind or imaginative constructions within it.) To me however, their danger is more obvious. Images of the Holy easily become holy images–sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of Messiah in ruins. And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not. But the same thing happens in our private prayers.
All reality is iconoclastic…
Okay, I have to stop. I’ve probably aggravated some copyright laws already. I highly recommend spending a morning or an evening drinking from the redolent fountain of C. S. Lewis. We are blessed that he took the time to journal this difficult period of his life. You will be blessed by taking the time to read it.
The following quote is taken from the lecture, “Shelf Life: Reading, Thinking and Resisting the Tyranny of the Urgent,” by Dr. George Grant, who granted permission for such a lengthy quote:
This afternoon, my talk is going to be, essentially, an exposition of a passage. I’ll read the passage first, and then, we’ll launch into the exposition therein.
“Well, I’ve got an idea,” said Rabbit, “and here it is. Look, we take Tigger for a long explore. Somewhere he’s never been. And then, we lose him there. And the next morning, we find him again. And mark my words, he’ll be a different Tigger altogether.”
“Why?” said Pooh.
“Because, he’ll be a humble Tigger; because he’ll be a sad Tigger; a melancholy Tigger; a small and sorry Tigger; and an ‘oh, Rabbit, I’m so glad to see you’ Tigger. That’s why.”
It’s a wonderful scene, isn’t it? Pooh and Rabbit talking about Tigger, who is always so… …pompous. Always so full of ideas.
You know, Pooh doesn’t have a brain, as he constantly reminds himself and everyone else. And Rabbit, well, he’s a bright one, but he’s small and he knows he’s small and he can’t dominate the world. Tigger, he’s even more pompous than Rabbit, because he knows so much. He’s so clever. He’s like an academic. So, Rabbit and Pooh come together to imagine a way to make Tigger more bearable. And they hatch this scheme that will somehow bring Tigger to a place of repentance.
J.R.R. Tolkien once said, “The essence of education is repentance. It is recognizing that we don’t know what we ought to know. We don’t do what we aspire to do. We make up a thousand excuses as to why it is that we’re not all that we were called to be.”
…And we could become overwhelmed with all that we’ve got to know and all that we’ve got to do, or we could be like that wonderful community just around the corner where Pooh lives where we provoke one another on toward repentance.
We all kind of need a Pooh and a Rabbit in our lives to take us on a long explore. Where we can then get lost, and then found again. So that we wake up the next day a much more humble Tigger; a much more receptive Tigger; a much more ‘oh, I’m so glad to see you Rabbit,’ Tigger.
That’s what reading does for us. We look at all of the tasks that we’ve got and we realize immediately that we are going to need to rearrange our lives. Because we have been robbed culturally; because we have been robbed spiritually; because we have been deficient ourselves, and we have contributed to own intellectual and spiritual indolence; we know that the great call of God on us is not just to stack the books up and to have all sorts of good intentions. It really is to repent. And there is nothing greater in all the world to provoke us to repent than to read books. Books that stretch us; books that change us; books that open to us new horizons; books that change the way we look at the world; books that change the way we talk; books that change the way we set the table; books that change the way we have relationships.
Emily Dickinson, the great American folk poet said,
“There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot That bears a Human soul.”
Mark Twain, reinforcing that notion, said, “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
I’m convinced that to a large degree, what many of you are wrestling with as you think through your already crowded day-timers; as you think through all of your past, bashed, best intentions, is that God is beckoning you to join with me in repenting.
In this session, what I’d like to do is to suggest a practical way for us to undertake this humble task of repenting: changing our lives, realizing that we need to be hungry to learn. That we need to find teachers to speak into our lives, who may not live in our neighborhoods, but who can be brought to our school, into our communities, into our homes by way of that marvel called a book.
Long before the bane of television invaded our every waking moment, C. S. Lewis commented that while most people in modern industrial cultures are at least marginally able to read, they just don’t. In his wise and wonderful book, An Experiment in Criticism, he wrote,
“The majority, though they are sometimes frequent readers, do not set much store by reading. They turn to it as a last resource. They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternative pastime turns up. It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for the process called ‘reading oneself to sleep.’ They sometimes combine it with desultory conversation; often, while listening to the radio. But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading for a few days they feel impoverished.”
He goes further, admitting that there is a profound puzzlement on the part of the mass of the citizenry over the taste and habits of the literate. He says, “It is pretty clear that the majority, if they spoke without passion, and were fully articulate, would not accuse us of liking the wrong books, but about making such a fuss about any books at all.
We treat, as a main ingredient in our well-being, something which to them is marginal. Hence to say, simply, that they like one thing and we another is to leave out nearly the whole of the facts. He goes on to argue that all of this is not to imply any hint of moral turpitude on the part of modern Bohemianism; rather, it is to recognize the simple reality of the gaping chasm that exists between those who read and those who don’t; between the popular “many” and the peculiar “few.” It is to recognize that education requires the latter while maintaining steadfast incompatibility with the former.
He concludes the whole affair by saying, “true readers may never carry their knowledge with “hubris.” You know what ‘hubris'” is. It’s like pride, on sterroids. The truly well-read will never carry their education with hubris, because every time you turn a page, you discover something that you did not know. Thus, he says, it brings you back to that theme of education as repentance.
The preceding quote is taken from the lecture, “Shelf Life: Reading, Thinking and Resisting the Tyranny of the Urgent,” by Dr. George Grant. You can buy an mp3 download of the lecture here.
“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”
― C.S. Lewis, from the preface of The Screwtape Letters
Evil creep. It’s a thing. Ancient evils slither into our lives through bureaucracies and policies. The pencil pushers who just want to do their jobs are of the devil.
And sometimes that’s hilarious.
You should watch Codefellas, a short animated series about two NSA agents, one old-school, one new. The mundane creep of great evil can be pretty funny in these writers’ hands. And do watch it until the end. The entire series should take you twenty minutes.
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’Abraham Kuyper
