Skip to main content

The Holy Grail: The Platypus Reads Part LXVIII


And like to coins, some true, some light, but every one of you stamped with the image of the King.
-Tennyson, The Holy Grail

There are experiences that "stamp" a person for life.  Whatever they may be, these events are so life-altering that they set those who experience them apart from the rest of humanity.  No matter what your character, appearance, or circumstances are, something about you is different from those who haven't been "stamped."  Conversely, no matter how unalike you may be, you have a bond with anyone who has had experienced the same.  They know. They've been there.  They "get it."

Discussing Tennyson's Idylls of the King with my students has led me to coin a new term: "Round Table experience."  These are periods of profound communal interaction that dramatically shape our character for good or ill.  It's those moments when you feel part of something bigger than yourself; when you enter into fellowship at a deeper level than what you've normally experienced.  My first "Round Table experience" was with my high school friends in Connecticut.  I had a similar experience in college.  Watching my students draw together as a class this year has been my first chance to see a "Round Table experience" from the outside.

Like the Round Table iteslf, all of these experiences come to an end.  The Fellowship is inevitably broken, and we are left like Bedivere with "new faces, other minds."  Still, the marks left on our souls endure, and the memory drives us on in search of new communities, new fellowships.  The old order may change, yielding place to new, but Christ is still King, and the music that built Camelot can never be silenced.

On my finger I wear a silver ring that bears the words "Bonum, Veritas, Pulcher."  Of those that wear it, some good there are, and some bad, but all stamped, all marked, with the same image.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
15 comments
Read more

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...
4 comments
Read more

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....
10 comments
Read more