*NOT* by Salman Rushdie

One of the things you learn while reading “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” as it is presented in Lyle W. Dorsett’s “The Essential C.S. Lewis” is how short the book is.

In this presentation, it’s a mere 77 pages.

In standalone paperback editions, it’s up to 208 pages long.

But the story’s word count belies whatever formatting it appears in. Per the Internet, it is 37,492 words. Or 36,362 words. Or 38,421words.

(The Internet, as is its wont, disagrees. Suffice it to say, the book is not long, and variations in number from place to place probably depends on the edition, and whether forewords, etc., are included in the word count.)

Nevertheless, that seems really short.

(The Hobbit, by comparison, clocks in at about 95,000 words [won’t quibble here on word count; just wanted another contemporary “children’s novel” for comparison].)

Then again, he probably had time to write a short novel, if Mark Twain is to be believed.

Why should I fret that the story is so short, given that it’s part of a seven-book series?

Probably because I recognize that at 103,000 words and counting, my Doleful Creatures could probably do with a paring down to sharpen the story.

Now, we don’t know how much cutting Lewis and/or his editors did with his book before it was published. But I suspect, given the economy of the story, that not much was cut.

Or maybe some was moved to a subsequent book?

I’m not going to fuss about it. I’ll just finish reading it for the umpteenth time and marvel in the story, and in its anthropomorphic and spiritual perfection. And in this section, which since I read it the first time has made me loath to kill mice:

I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night, but If you have been – if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you – you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again. At any rate that was how it felt to these two. Hours and hours seemed to go by in the dead calm, and they hardly noticed that they were getting colder and colder. But at last Lucy noticed two other things. One was that the sky on the East side of the hill was a little less dark than it had been an hour ago. The other was some tiny movement going on in the grass at her feet. At first she took no interest in this. What did it matter? Nothing mattered now! But at last she saw that watever-it-was had begun to move up the upright stones of the Stone Table. And now whatever-they-were were moving about on Aslan’s body. She peered closer. They were little grey things.

“Ugh!” said Susan from the other side of the Table. “How beastly! There are horrid little mice crawling over him. Go away, you little beasts.” And she raised her hands to frighten them away.

“Wait!” said Lucy who had been looking at them more closely still. “Can you see what they’re doing?”

Both girls bent down and stared.

"I do believe!” said Susan. “But how queer. They’re nibbling away at the cords.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Lucy. “I think they’re friendly mice. Poor little things – they don’t realise he’s dead. They think it’ll do some good untying him.”

It was quite definitely lighter by now. Each of the girls noticed for the first time the white face of the other. They could see the mice nibbling away, dozens and dozens, even hundreds, of little field mice. At last, one by one, the ropes were all gnawed through.

The sky in the East was whitish by now and the stars were getting fainter – all except one very big one low down on the Eastern horizon. They felt colder than they had been all night. The mice crept away again.

And just a reminder, it’s NOT by Salman Rushdie.

On Christianity in Writing

Heil, Heilige Nacht!

How many years to Bethlehem?

Near a hundred score.

Can I get there by candlelight?

Not this war.

The friendly, holy candle light

Is bale fire now to death,

Its perilous glimmer long blown out

By sirens’ breath.

Through skies the Wise Men humbly scanned

Three keener hunters flit –

Heinkel and Dornier seek the gleam,

With Messerchmitt.

No manger now, no cattle shed,

Too lowly to be found.

Take up the babe and hurry him

Deep underground.

But cave nor grave is deep enough

To shield young flesh and bone.

Hurry him down, and o’er his head

Roll the great stone.

What need of law to still the bells,

For how should bells be merry?

The day the child in joy was born,

The child we bury.

Gentlemen of the High Command,

Who crucify the slums,

There was an earlier Golgotha.

The third day comes.

-- Ogden Nash

And there we have it. A powerful poem delivered by a man more commonly known for his light verse.

This poem is from Nash's collection "Good Intentions," which is home to poems written between 1937 and 1945. I read it first in 2010 and must not have noticed how many poems in this collection relate to the war, either lightly or, more rarely, somberly, as with this poem. And what a poem it is, reminding those in command of the war that this is not their world, but rather it belongs to someone else.

I've tried to discover the circumstances in which Nash wrote this poem, but my Google-fu skills are weak, or there's not much commentary on this poem online. A few people I've found chide him for his Christianity, making me hark back to the time I've spent reading CS Lewis' "Surprised by Joy," in which he marvels at his own ignorance when he tsk-tsked about an author's overt display of religion.

Additionally, he relates this, his conversion:

The odd thing was that before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. In a sense. I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus. Without words and (I think) almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow presented to me. I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armor, as if I were a lobster. I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corset meant the incalculable.

I'm often flummoxed and amused when people become offended when they read something overtly Christian in a popular novel, or discover an author they enjoy is Christian or religious; it's almost as if they become offended that the author has dared include something of his or her own self in a book or story without prior approval from this particular kind of reader.

And I know it goes both ways, as religious readers discover things they don't like about a particular author or a particular story as going against their beliefs. We all have that right. But we all have the ability to walk away if what we discover is too unsettling.

 

Ignorance

NOTE: From time to time, I will post a bit from my FDENG 101 class here. Is for fun.

A good part of our discussion this week has focused on two things:

1) How do we express our ignorance without saying we’re stupid?
2) How do we counteract our own ignorance?

First, ignorance without stupidity.

These are not synonyms.

• Ignorance, per the American Heritage Dictionary, is defined as “The condition of being ignorant; lack of knowledge.”
• Stupidity, per the same dictionary, is defined as “The quality of fact of being stupid, or a stupid act, remark, or idea.”

So we now turn to the root words:

• Ignorant: Without education or knowledge; exhibiting lack of education or knowledge; unaware or uninformed.
• Stupid: Slow to apprehend, dull, obtuse; showing a lack of sense or intelligence.

To me, this implies that when we speak of ignorance, we speak of a lack of education – whether through lost or missed opportunity, laziness, distraction, or what have you. Stupidity, conversely, is a lack of the mental or spiritual means or drive to obtain knowledge. We may be at the same time both ignorant and stupid – we can lack knowledge, of, say, cosmology – the study of the universe – while at the same time lacking the mental or spiritual faculties necessary to attain that knowledge and erase our ignorance.

In contrast, we may be ignorant of cosmology but at the same time not stupid – we have at our fingertips the tools, the guidelines, the raw data, the imagination necessary to convert our ignorance into knowing.

I speak of cosmology because of this wonderful example of an ignorant, but not stupid, man turning his ignorance into a great pool of knowledge:

When the Mount Wilson Observatory was under construction at the turn of the 20th century in the hills above Los Angeles, a man by the name of Milton Humason worked there as a mule skinner, tending some of the many mules used to haul construction equipment and supplies up the mountain to where the observatory was being built.

After the observatory was finished in 1917, he got a job there as a janitor, partly to impress his father-in-law, who looked down on a potential son-in-law who had no formal education past the age of 14 and worked as a ranch hand.

Shortly thereafter, however, he changed jobs at the observatory and became a “night assistant,” or an astronomer’s helper. His patience, skill, and diligence, per Brian Vertrudo, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, brought him to the attention of George Hale, head of the observatory. Recognizing in Humason only a lack of knowledge, evidenced by his stunted education – but not stupidiy – evidenced by his dedication to his new duties – Hale appointed Humason to the scientific staff of the observatory in 1919.

Humason went on, with fellow astronomer Edwin Hubble, to describe the “red-shift” of stars and galaxies, a key component to the Big Bang theory.

There’s a bit more about Milton Humason here, from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos episode “Edge of Forever”:

I recommend you watch the full episode here, but especially the final few minutes, where Sagan, years after the show first aired in the early 1980s, updates the science he spoke of in the show. Here we see a man confessing his past ignorance without expressing a single iota of stupidity.

That brings us to another of mankind’s vices, from stupidity to pride. Do we, then, as educated, non-ignorant people, have the right to brag about our lack of ignorance? Not really. I know some very intelligent people, whose intelligence ranges from knowing how to interact with people to the intricacies of nuclear criticality safety. They have in common something Eliot Butler points out in his essay “Everybody Is Ignorant, Only On Different Subjects”:

I am sorry to say that one cannot always detect whether someone recently met has graduated from a university. But one can soon tell if one is speaking with an educated person. Mark Van Doren points out correctly that nobody who is will ever admit to being educated, but only that he or she is so conscious of many areas of gross ignorance. Will Rogers saw it clearly: “Everybody is ignorant,” he said, “only on different subjects.”

Our Father in Heaven wants us to attain knowledge and imagination and to help those around us. Elder David A. Bednar said in a Sept. 11, 2001, devotional BYU-Idaho:

Each of us must also appreciate the roles of faithfulness and diligence and obedience in the Lord’s pattern for receiving help from heaven. Please turn with me again to 2 Nephi 28:30. “For behold, thus saith the Lord God: I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little; and blessed are those who hearken unto my precepts and lend an ear unto my counsel, for they shall learn wisdom; for unto him that receiveth I will give more; and from them that shall say, We have enough, from them shall be taken away even that which they have.

He goes on to say:

[A]s we mature spiritually, we begin to develop a sound judgment, a refined and educated conscience, and a heart and mind filled with wisdom. It is not just that we have grown older, nor have we simply become smarter and had more experiences on which to draw, as important as those experiences are. Rather, the Holy Ghost has over time been expanding our intellect, forming our feelings, sharpening and elevating our perspective, such that we increasingly think and feel and act as the Lord would under similar circumstances.

Here we see the pattern for counteracting our own ignorance: Humility. We humbly seek knowledge and inspiration and sparks of imagination from our studies, from the books we read, the programs we watch, the thoughts we have individually and as we discuss things with others. Wee see the fruition of what Butler writes of:

[O]ne quickly detects when one speaks with an educated person. Matters learned last evening, and being pondered and developed, books recently read, an essay just encountered, an argument still going on, a book just purchase to be read tonight as soon as another is finished -- one hears of such from an educated person.

Over several years I have spoken with many graduating seniors in one program here: with several there was the pain of learning that not one book had been read since they entered the university except the required books. By others a few had been read. But the educated men and women in the program all had books just finished, others being read, and a growing list of books that they could hardly wait to get into.

Further, author CS Lewis had this to say about humility when he offered his sermon “Learning in War-Time,” in 1939:

As the author of the Theologia Germanicai says, we may come to love knowledge -- our knowing -- more than the thing known: to delight not in the exercise of our talents but in the fact that they are ours, or even in the reputation they bring us. Every success in the scholar's life increases this danger. If it becomes irresistible, he must give up his scholarly work. The time for plucking out the right eye has arrived.

Acknowledging our ignorance is the first step in erasing it. And if we pursue that erasure with humility – expressing thanks to those who have gone on before us, as Albert Einstein says:

Bear in mind that the wonderful things you learn in your schools are the work of many generations. All this is put in your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honor it, add to it, and one day faithfully hand it on to your children.

we will attain what President Gordon B. Hinckley said:

Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running abound shouting that he's been robbed. The fact is that most putts don't drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to be just people, most successful marriages required a high degree of mutual toleration, most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is like an old time rail journey . . . delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.