Macdonald and Lewis

I finished all the Chesterton I'm likely to finish save for a few more pages in his Heretics. After that I really need to read his Orthodoxy, but you knew that already. Blake Edwards said that book nearly caused him to join the Roman Catholic Church (too bad it didn't fully accomplish that goal), so it's gotta be pretty good. I've read his Everlasting Man which I love greatly. His prose in general is like a good thick meal. It is rich prose, rich as plumcake. Yet its imagery is bold and riveting even when it seems opaque as mud.

I made the jump and purchased Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia the other month because I am nineteen and am required to own his septilogy. There is no excuse for a reader of my stature to be without such essential Lewis. His prose is very, very fine and he is a spectacular storyteller as well. The magic of The Horse and His Boy will never lose its charm for me, or The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I devoured most of the Chronicles in a few days and moved on to Lewis' inspiration: George Macdonald, who deserves a paragraph all to himself.

Now George Macdonald is a very different author than Lewis or Tolkien. He predated them, for one thing, but you wouldn't (at least I didn't) notice that too much. His prose is a bit more archaic and formal, most recognizable in his adult fiction and the Curdie books, but his writing...oh! his writing! He was an absolute master of the mythopoeic 'genre', or rather: he creates myth, much like the ancients created their myth. Now if anyone truly knows me, he would know that that is the highest compliment I can give a work of fiction, that it be mythlike in nature. Cut short, I believe that myths are one of God's way of revealing himself to his highest creation along with reason, the Greeks, and his own revelations. And Macdonald does this myth writing better than any man I have yet met; his dreamlike, wandering prose so affects me that I plunge into his books like none other. I devoured Lilith in only a few days and I'm absolutely tearing into Phantastes. And they are amazing to me. It's not so much the 'plot' (as a purely literary author, perhaps Macdonald is not even third best in my mind) as the sequence of events, the essence of any myth, not the words. To paraphrase Lewis, if the myth could be told in colors or images, it would hold every bit as much power.

There is my rambling about Macdonald. Now I really need to finish De Anima before I read it in seminar in the fall, and I would like to get through most of the Old Testament - I'm currently in I Samuel (and the 1611 KJV is a real treat, let me assure you). In other words, I have a lot to read, but at least I have time in which to read.

Wish me luck!

Summer Reading - Chesterton, Aristotle, and the Bible

Reading is ever so much fun when there's no schedule to follow - I can spend as long as I wish on one book and that is just fine. Most recently I have finished Chesterton's The Everlasting Man; a treatise on natural history and Christ's place and transforming thereof. You already know how much I love Chesterton's prose - it may well be the finest prose I have yet read in an original tongue. His rich imagery and ruthless logic coupled with his dry sarcastic wit (not to mention his Classical education) exalt him far above writers such as J.K. Rowling, Christopher Paolini, and even better writers such as Weis, Hickman, and Gamel, who are fine storytellers (except maybe for Paolini, for reading his work is like perusing a Warcraft game on paper) but not so fine writers. I read all the DragonLance books when I was younger and still enjoy most of what Weis & Hickman wrote themselves, but I can easily recognize that their writing as writing do not match up to the fantastics of Tolkien, Lewis, Heinlein, Herbert Verne, Wells, or Bradbury. They also are wonderful storytellers, especially Bradbury, but they are great writers as well; it is a pleasure to read their words in addition to admiring their story.

Good prose exalts the mind and benefits the soul. Reading Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is good for you in every sense of the word. Reading classical literature is good for the soul in addition to stimulating the mind and exposing it to high quality reading. Once you get into classical prose you will find works by authors such as those in the first list fun to read (Mom would call it chocolate for the brain but not good chocolate) but lacking the solidity and feel of good thick prose. When all is said and done, would you rather have DragonLance on your shelf or The Lord of the Rings? Harry Potter or Dune? I would of course prefer to read them all, for modern literature is easy. You can breeze right through it and read hundreds of pages in one sitting, whereas even The Hobbit is mildly dense though it is a children's book, and Chesterton and Lewis (especially their adult fiction) is thick and rich, preventing you from swallowing it whole.

The written word is capable of such beautiful, terrible power it is a shame to see us as a culture debasing it. Children do not read Tolkien - they read dumbed down version of Weis & Hickman, Harry Potter (whose volcabulary is roughly that of an eight year old), or Paolini. We need to read! We must read the great books of children's literature to prepare us for adult classics! It's terrible that adults do not read Plato, Aristotle, and Homer! It's terrible that teenagers go through adolescance without reading Austen, Tolkien, Lewis, or Bradbury! It's terrible that boys who watch Star Wars don't read Dune! We need to read!