Book Club: Chapter 4 - Energy Revealed in Creation

I very much enjoyed this chapter.  (Perhaps because I didn't have to read it three times to really digest it!)  :-p

I enjoyed getting the insight into how an author of fiction must really get the mind of the character, sort of put on the character, like a set of clothing, when writing for him.  It made excellent sense to me and made me realize how much energy and thought goes into writing a piece of fiction.  I loved her phrase about an author's "favorite" characters as the "saints and prophets of his art."

Her explanation about how we really cannot pin down an author based on his writings made sense, although I've found myself crossing that line with authors like Steinbeck and Kingsolver.  She says, "The mind is not the sum of its works, though it includes them all."

Interestingly, a student (and dare I say, friend?) sent me an essay by C.S. Lewis to read before we meet for class this week.  Renee, you will know this student, Jamie, who is highly intellectual and loves to read and discuss what she reads.

This essay by Lewis is titled De Descriptione Temporum and is his inaugural lecture from The Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University in 1954.  The essay is about where to make divisions in history; where is the line between the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages; between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age?  He argues for a revision to the hitherto demarcations.  But, in the midst of this lecture he touches on something that Dorothy Sayers spoke about in the previous chapter.  It is his 4th supporting point on redrawing the lines.  I will quote him here:

"Lastly, I play my trump card.  Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines.  This lifts us at once into a region of change far above all that we have hitherto considered.  For this is a parallel to the great changes by which we divide epochs of pre-history.  This is on a level with the change from stone to bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy.  It alters Man's place in nature.  The theme has been celebrated till we are all sick of it, so I will here say nothing about its economic and social consequences, immeasurable though they are.  What concerns us more is its psychological effect.  How has it comes about that we use the highly emotive word "stagnation," with all its malodorous and malarial overtones for what other ages would have called "permanence?"  Why does the word "permanence" suggest to us clumsiness, inefficiency, barbarity?  When our ancestors talked of the primitive church or the primitive purity of our constitution they meant nothing of that sort. Why does "latest" in advertisements mean "best?"  Well, let us admit that these semantic developments owe something to the nineteenth-century belief in spontaneous progress which itself owes something either to Darwin's theorem of biological evolution or to that myth of universal evolutionism which is really so different from it, and earlier.  For the two great imaginative expressions of the myth, as distinct from the from the theorem-Keats's Hyperion and Wagner's Ring-are pre-Darwinian.  Let us give these their due.  But I submit that what has imposed this climate of opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image.  It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones.  For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is the clumsy.  And this image, potent in all our minds, reigns almost without rival in the minds of the uneducated.  For to them, after their marriage and the births of their children, the very milestones of life are technical advances.  From the old push-bike to the motor-bike and thence to the little car; from gramophone to radio and from radio to television; from the range to the stove; these are the very stages of their pilgrimage.  But whether from this cause or from some other, assuredly that approach to life which has left these footprints on our language is the thing that separates us most sharply from our ancestors and whose absence would strike us as most alien if we could return to their world.  Conversely, our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defence and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life, would most shock and bewilder them if they could visit ours."

That's but a very small portion of his talk and I'll say just one more thing about it.  He believed we have lived to see the 2nd death of ancient learning.  And that we (as Believers) have much more in common with the ancients who worshiped other gods than with our contemporaries who worship none.

Hopefully you can see the parallel with Dorothy Sayers that I was getting at; that belief that just because some is new, doesn't necessarily mean it is better.  But we are conditioned to this.  I thought Lewis expanded on that fact very well.