Lewis CCA Paper

I am currently writing my CCA paper. I forget what the assigned topic is, exactly…something about the morality and religion of Tolkein or Lewis. I’m just writing what I want to, and figuring it will manage to touch upon the necessary things. (It’s sort of hard to talk about Lewis without mentioning religion...)

Some of the lectures were OK, some were a bit boring, and apparently one was rather trite. But there were also two or three incredible ones. Like Dr. Jerry Root's, which I’m taking most of my required quotes from. It's got a really stupid title – “C.S. Lewis as an Apologist” (which isn’t what the thing was about at all). And it doesn’t have the speaker’s digression into coruscating sunrises, or stars, or the braided rings of Saturn, or what-if worlds where the sun has only risen once. But it does have the parts about iconoclastic reality, and problems with transposing the infinite into the finite, and master’s metaphors vs. pupil’s metaphors, and fiction helping to solve the general/particular tension.

And my new favorite Lewis quote: “For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see My face and live.” (The Pilgrim’s Regress)

And some more new favorites:

By Lewis:

• “When [a given] metaphor is our only method or reaching a given idea at all, there our thinking is limited by metaphor so long as we retain the metaphor; and when the metaphor becomes fossilized, our ‘thinking;’ is not thinking at all.” (Selected Literary Essays)
  
  
• “The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less as self, is in a prison. My own eyes are not enough for me; I will see through those others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what other have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books.” (An Experiment in Criticism).

And one by Janet Soskice:
“Our concern is with conceptual possibility rather than proof, and with a demonstration that we may justly claim to speak about God without claiming to define him.” (Metaphor and Religious Language.)

And one by Robert Browning:
“Welcome each rebuff that turns earth’s smoothness rough.”

And a couple by Dr. Root:

• “Fiction, because it is not expected to give hard definitions, is less likely to tempt the reader into thinking its world is complete or full understood. Fiction is able to describe without eliminating all ambiguities. In fact, often it is a rest with a degree of ambiguity.”
  
  
• “Without respect for criticism, faith traditions (and we might add apologetic methods) will tend to ossify and become unresponsive to the way things are.”
  
  
• “All understanding is approximate, and one must constantly be seeking better and better approximations.”
  
  
• “Lewis writes, often enough in his books, that Reality is Iconoclastic. And iconoclast breaks idols. As Lewis uses the phrase, he writes of God, as the iconoclast who seeks to break all false notions we may have of Him. One may pick up a new image of God: after reading a book; after having a late night discussion with a friend; after hearing a lecture or a sermon. These images may be particularly helpful in a given moment for putting many pieces of a very complex puzzle in place. But, if we hold onto these images too tightly, helpful as they might have been, they compete against one’s gaining a growing image of God. The image once helpful now becomes and idol. God, in is mercy, kicks out the walls of any temples built for him, because He wants to give to each more of Himself.”
  
  If reality is iconoclastic, and more complex than any individual might naturally grasp, it stands to reason that understanding will be enhanced in the context of community where opposition is encouraged, and perspective widened by dialectic association with others….”
  
  
• “Lewis himself is quick to remind his readers in many, many places that all human system, paradigms, models, and so forth are destined to become ‘discarded images’.”
  
  
• "In the Great Divorce, George MacDonald appears as a character, and declares ‘Ye cannot know eternal reality by definition.’ The word definition literally means ‘of the finite.’ We define things by virtue of their limitation -- they can be distinguished from other things –- and their function. In other worlds, for a thing to be defined it must be small enough to wrap words around it. In light of this, how can anyone speak of the Infinite? Even Jesus, in the Gospels, preaching about the Kingdom of God, says, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is like...’ – he resorts to simile, metaphor, figures of speech, parable and so forth."

Squee.

If all the professors at Wheaton were like this, I would have killed to have gone there. They aren't, which is one of the reason's I'm glad I ended up here at Hillsdale instead.

Brain is going into giddy overload at the moment. Partly because I finally got the transcript, partly because it’s dark and chilled and raining outside (and I want to go splash in puddles and lie down in the wet grass), partly because people up here are cool, and partly because I’m going to my first ever formal dance thing tomorrow.

Late Night Graveyard Conversations

Some useful things learned with Laura, Tiffany, Matthew, and Aaron tonight/last night:

• Cemetaries at night are beautiful.
  
  
• Order of the Stick is near-universally applicable.
  
  
• The existence of the word "zebroid" has been existentially proven. Sort of.
  
  
• If the ancient philosophers had known about Einstein, they would have envisioned God as hyperspace. Or space bent in on itself. Not a sphere.
  
  
• The honey glaze for ham can be used to penetrate some kinds of biological-weapons-defense materials.
  
  
• If you're stalking a deer, and you step on a twig, you should gobble like a turkey. It will confuse them, and they'll come back to check the thing out.
  
  
• We won't run out of energy, saith Matthew. But another apocalyptic event is very likely. Eventually.
  
  
• Apocalypses are like anti-christs. Even now there are many little ones among us.
  
  
• If your tradition is not to have a tradition, would you have to refuse to have a tradition in order to be traditional?
  
  
• You can see the International Space Station at night if the sky is clear enough.
  
  
• Matthew and Aaron could invent a killer "Biblical RPG":
  
  Player A: "Hey -- my conversion roll failed!"
  Player B: "You must be an Arminian, man. It's not you that does it -- it's the Holy Spirit!"

And finally...

• Envisioning a circling sphere of stars, turning around a fixed earth, gives one type of awe. Envisioning the vastness of space, with blinding motion and movement and scattered stars, gives a wholly other kind.
  
  And because Lewis can express things so much more poetically and articulately than I can:
  
  "Be comforted, small immortals. You are not the voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come. No feet have walked, not shall, on the ice of Glund; no eye looked up from beneath the Ring of Lurga, and Iron-plain in Neruval is chaste and empty. Yet it is not for nothing that the gods walk ceaselessly around the fields of Arbol. Blessed be He!"
  
  "[Even] the Dust itself which is scattered so rare in Heaven, whereof all worlds, and the bodies that are not worlds, are made, is at the center. It waits not till created eyes have seen it or hands handled it, to be in itself a strength and splendor of Maleldil. Only the least part has served, or ever shall, a beast, a man, or a god. But always, and beyond all distances, before they came and after they are gone and where they never come, it is what it is and utters the heart of the Holy One with its own voice. It is farthest from Him of all things, for it has no life, nor sense, nor reason;it is nearest to Him of all things for without intervening soul, as sparks fly out of fire, He utters in each grain of it the unmixed image of His energy. Each grain, it if spoke, would say, I am at the center, for me all things were made. Let no mouth open to gainsay it. Blessed be He!"
  
  (from Perelandra)

Benzing Dorm Life

I officially recant. Benzing Dorm (or my hall of it, at least), is an awesome place. If I stay at Hillsdale another semester, I'd probably want to keep living here. It's one whacked out, weird, and rather goofed up place, but still awesome.

To save 1000 words (or at least 150), here is a lovely diagram of my dorm to start things off.



Claro?

Now, I can understand why people wouldn't want to live here, and why there were reactions last semester of "Eww! Benzing? That's the LAST dorm I'd ever choose to live in!" when I mentioned it. I hear you guys, and yeah, that was my basic impression of the place, too.

It is, I think, still my general impression of the second and third floors -- from what I can see of them, I still wouldn't want to live there. The second floor, because it's mostly athletes and I'm not an athlete. And the third floor because...well, I really don't know. Because it feels like McIntyre (my freshman year dorm)? Sorry for having no coherent reason; I just wouldn't want to live there. Although it is fun to visit. And it has the Narnia Club headquarters!

Now...the 1st floor. I can definitely understand people not wanting to live here, too. Reasons would generally focus on, but not necessarily be limited to...

• noise
  
  
• language used by some of the girls (crap, shit, fuck, ass, double entendres, etc. etc. etc.)
  
  
• The choice of 'Nigel' as a door decoration

And maybe a few other things that are slipping my mind.

I probably should have been traumatized by my first week there. But my brain ended up being pretty one-track: "Look! People! Yay! Talk!"

With the end result that I discovered a couple other things about this hall:

• Girls who know how to play Risk. ("Ha! The Fascist Confederates of Southern Asia will never surrender to the Greenpeace Alliance!")
  
  
• Classics majors.
  
  
• People writing epic poems.
  
  
• Noise.
  
  
• A good chunk of the anime club.
  
  
• Intermittent hand to hand combat with cardboard poster tubes, mineral water, and Sharpie pens. Usually sparked by some comment about the civil war.
  
  
• Staying up late.
  
  
• Air conditioning.
  
  
• Our hall's unofficial referendum on Benzing identity: "They're trying to make us a party dorm this year, and we DON'T want that. But it's not like we want to be Mauck, either."
  
  
• Cool RAs. Maybe it's just the "let's be friendly and positively reinforcive" training that they apparently switched to, but in either case, I actually know who my RAs are this year, and like hanging out in their rooms.
  
  
• Some really neat people I only knew in passing last year (Paula, Christine)
  
  
• Tons of neat people I'd never even have said "hi" to otherwise. (Megan, Suzanne, Kristi, Kirsten, Avril, Ellyn, Amy, Roseli...)

However cliched it sounds, and however much grief I'm going to get from my fellow Hillsdalians for saying this, I pretty much agree with one of Kate's RA profile answers. The best reason to live in Benzing is the diversity. Or perhaps more accurately, the diverse range of people who are happy and willing to talk with one another. At least on floor 1.

Life would be a lot poorer in 1st Floor Benzing without a Kristi or Megan or Christine or Kirsten or Roseli...or even an Avril. Maybe a bit more calm, or unified, or quiet, or easy...but nowhere near as fascinating. Or as exciting and challenging and fun. I hang out with fairly like-minded people all day, which is awesome-cool in its own right. Let me have my awesome-cool counterbalance as well.

Literature Papers and "Christian Life Application" Clauses

Some thoughts on literature essays...rather disorganized, and will probably stay that way for a while.

I went off on a bit of tangent typing out a reply to an email from back home; we're in the middle of looking for a new school for my sibling(s), and my Mom wanted a quick summary of what my high school Brit Lit class was like, so we could compare curricula.

Correspondence back and forth included this line:

As far as the writing goes, the students write a substantial number of papers, essays, some research work on various issues in the works, authors, and developments of British Literature itself. Most of the papers have some sort of "Christian life application" element to them, from the topics and themes we discussed in the literature.

Now. One thing I appreciated about Dr. Klucking, my 12th grade teacher, was that she didn't make us tack on a Christian Life Application to our papers, or sum everything up in some grand conclusion about how this book illustrated a profound scriptural truth. Lots of people did do that, but it wasn't mandatory. I could usually get away with talking about how certain beliefs the author had explained the actions/views taken by various characters in the work. Which is honestly still about all I'm comfortable doing -- if the author isn't making some grand point about the Christian life, I'd rather just say "look at the incredible, utterly believable character development! The interior monologues illustrate a progression from sanity to crippling skepticism -- and one that is as relentlessly inescapable as it is chilling." Or maybe, "doh -- this other book has an awesome use of the Faustian archetype. And that is one of the main reasons that this character and his dilemma resonates with us. This tension of "forbidden knowledge" has been a staple of Western literature since the beginning. Literally -- just look at Genesis. And Prometheus too, while you're at it. And Pandora. And of course Faust... :-)."

They're literature papers -- CS Lewis didn't go off giving gospel-summary life-application-messages in his introduction to Paradise Lost.

Last year, we had some speaker come in and give a talk about literature...though I didn't agree with his conclusion (along the lines of "we shouldn't analyze the 'lessons' of literature at all; we should rather experience it as we do music -- for its form and beauty"), I think he did have more than half a point. And I especially liked how he described literature as a window into the human soul, into human creativity -- sometimes right, sometimes wrong, sometimes inspired, sometimes confused, sometimes misguided, but either way telling us something about people and the author and part of life. And a lot of the time, when I'm reading something, I just want to say, "Wow. That's incredible language, incredible imagery, incredible effect, incredible characterization, and an incredibly fundamental human tension and dilemma ... Look at it. It's a masterpiece. It's beautiful." Or as Donahough (or whatever his name was) put it -- "Dear God! To live in a world where such perceptions are possible!"

And I do not want to say -- (picking the first thing off the top of my head) -- "Hester Pryne was a bad person, according to Bible passages A, B, C, D, E, F, and G."

DIEDIEDIEDIEDIE!!!! What sort of literature paper is that? Context (for starters)! Why are you abstracting the thing from its context? Who was Hawthorne? What sort of audience and culture was he writing to? What was he trying to say with this story? What, precisely, was Puritanism? What would have been 1600-Massachusetts-Puritain-people's verdict on Hester? Then, what parts of this worldview if Hawthorne criticizing? What parts does he appear to be supporting? What does the symbolism, etc. of this story imply? Does Hawthorne show inconsistency in how he portrays these things? And forget Puritanism for a second -- what sorts of literary characters have prefigured the Hester-character?

I CAN write a paper on how Hester Pryne was a bad and unrepentant person according to Bible passages A, B, C, and D -- but I could pretty much only do it by discussing Hawthorne, Puritan culture, and Christian theology, Christian tradition, and what Hawthorne was saying about all of it -- how he was consistent/inconsistent, or giving a valid criticism/giving an invalid criticism, or hitting close to the mark/missing the point. And maybe throw philosophy and Victorian culture into the mix as well. If Hester's Pryne's a bad person, there'll be more to show for it than Bible passages A, B, C, and D -- we should be able to find a good bit of universal human experience on this side, and plenty of archetypes, and a rooted and consistent ethical system, and lots of other cool stuff like that.

Plus, the Scarlet letter isn't a (just) biography or moral proposition -- it's a work of literature, a piece of art, a glimpse into a creator's mind and thoughts and imagination. And any good literature essay will treat it like that, and not like a dead and cold moral essay, and not like a candidate for theological vivisection.

//...and she descends from her soapbox. ;-)//

Though I still want to write my "There is no fear in love, for perfect love casteth out fear" paper on 1984 someday.