Skip to main content

Platypus Fantastique

Je ne sais pas que vous dit, mais le porte de ma couer est ouvre maintenant; et tout le monde est different. Perhaps Lewis would forgive my broken French, but I've been reading through George MacDonald's "Phantasties" and that seems to be as best as I can describe what both Lewis and MacDonald say in so many of their works. Tout le monde est different. Je parle a les intelligents. Il qui ne sais pas, pour il, mon esprit est blanc. In the dark and tangled woods of Fairy Land we pursue the thing as it is. The vale is drawn back and the metaphor found to be more real than what we thought it represented, for we are in Fairy Land if we have the eyes to see it. Beren and Luthien still dance through the moonlit glades where once a quiet Oxford don and an English country-girl walked hand in hand beneath the hemlock umbels tall and fair. I have been there. I know. There it is ever Autumn and the Platypus sings his songs by the river in the moonlight. If you go there you may see him in a forest glade where he dances the harvest dance for the Lady of Autumn and her knight.

Comments

Graf Spee said…
Faerie is all around us. We just have to see it. :}
James said…
Have you been gluing models in a small, poorly ventilated room again? That always helps.
Ema said…
I love George MacDonald's works. He is one of my favorite writers, and yet, it is rare for me to find anyone who has read any of his writings. You have made ema's top 100 list of wonderful people;)

Ema
Linds said…
Nate and I are reading through Fantastes right now, actually! We think the main character needs to reevaluate his opinion of his steadfastness in the face of a pretty girl. :)
James said…
Hi Linds! Yeah, I got through the book and ended up thinking hmmmm... There's a common theme here. Let me know what you think when you finish!

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...

Tolkien's Dark Tower: The Platypus Reads Part CLXXXVI

Tom Shippey points out in his Road to Middle Earth that the germ of Barad Dur, Sauron's Stronghold, comes from a scrap of Chaucer where the poet makes an offhand reference to a knight and his approach to "the dark tower."  Chaucer expected that everyone knew that story, but somehow in the intervening centuries it has become lost.  Using his imagination, Tolkien tried to delve back into the mine of story and imagine what this Dark Tower might have been.  We see several tries at this image, or several "accounts" in Tolkien's corpus.  The first is Thangorodrim, Morgoth's "dark tower," where he sits "on hate enthroned."  The second, and like unto it, is Sauron's original keep at Tol Sirion.  This is the dark tower before which Luthien, in all her frailty, stands and lays the deepest pits bare with her song (an image oddly reminiscent of protestant poets like Spenser, Bunyan, and Wesley).  Building on these two images, Tolkien constru...

SNES as Money Well Spent: Platypus Nostalgia

I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old.  That's a couple years after it first came out.  The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer.  I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit.  It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows.  With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play.  What was that first game?  It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge.  It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing?  There were stretches when I didn't.  Many times, I've just been too busy.  There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games....