Platypus of Truth

 

There's nothing quite like arriving late to the conversation. It's why I don't like being late to Christmas parties if I can help it. When I began reading Inklings scholarship (Tom Shippey on Tolkien, Doug Gresham on Lewis), I knew that I'd arrived late to the party. Things were being referenced or scoffed at that I didn't fully understand. Over time, I began to pick up on elements of the earlier conversation and orient myself. Recently, however, I've been able to go back and look at that earlier part of the discussion; specifically, the parts before the coming of Humphrey Carpenter and his monolithic J.R.R. Tolkien , and The Inklings . The particular works in question come not from Oxford insiders or authorized biographers but academics on this side of the pond who were willing to risk professional scorn by asserting the literary greatness of the Inklings and their associates. They are, respectively, Understanding Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings  (copyright...

Across the grey Atlantic, Across Saint Brendan’s sea, Is the land where the lairds wear sackcloth And all the serfs are free. Across the grey Atlantic, Across the spume and foam, Lies the land of the Imram ’ s  castles Where a Gael can find a home. In the green fields of Elysium, Every blade of grass is a sword To pierce the feet of trespassers In the Garden of the Lord. Just so the Emerald Isle, Though e nslaved and conquered be, Will never lack for weapons To set her people free. But wars go on forever And the killing's never done Though the smoke rise up to heaven And strike from the sky the Sun. So many Gaels went wandering Across the Earth’s expanse, To find fair fields in foreign lands Where peaceful feet could dance. They flooded into Boston, Found safe harbor in New York, And others flew to southern climes As surely as the stork. They raked the bogs for cranberries While old Thoreau explained That if ...

A further thought occurred to me over the past week and I thought I'd add it as an addendum to my previous post .  I noticed that the plot felt "tighter" in the more constrained first third of the game.  The slums under Midgar are constrained in space, atmosphere, tone, action, and cast.  It is a wonderful feeling when you finally get out of Midgar and find a whole world to explore.   That said, after a half-hour or so of play it becomes clear that this new world is far more diffuse.  The cast begins to widen out beyond what the story is able to fully develop.  The action for many hours consists of chasing Sephiroth to a series of new locations that are only visited once or twice and these new locations lack the deep and consistent atmosphere of Midgar.  All these changes alter the tone of the story in ways that can be jarring.  The "tightness" wasn't there any more. Thinking about this reminds me of G.K. Chesterton's aphorism: "art is limitatio...

Rattle of Bones Rattle of Bones  brings Kane back from the wilds of Africa and places him firmly on European soil.  The genre shifts along with the setting bringing us back to the ghost stories that opened the collection.  Here, in his (almost) native habitat, Kane feels more true to character.  I can't help wishing that Howard had told more of this kind of story and I do note that other authors who have handled the character seem to share my tastes, keeping their Kane away from "exotic" locals. Speaking of other authors, Rattle of Bones  feels like a spiritual cousin to Anthony Boucher's They Bite .  Boucher's is the superior work, but Howard's attempt to handle the material is nothing to sniff at.  I avoid mentioning specifics since much of the effect of They Bite  relies on surprise and I wouldn't want to spoil the story for anyone who hasn't read it.  The only problem with Howard's story, in fact, is that, unlike Boucher's, the ending...

Across the grey Atlantic Across Saint Brendan's sea Is the land where the lairds ware sackcloth And all the serfs are free Across the grey Atlantic Across the spewm and foam Lies the land of the Imram's castles Where a Gael can find a home Most of my ancestors came over from Ireland.  The Rileys and the Kennedys, in particular, settled in Massachusetts before coming down into Connecticut.  The accents fly thick when the family gets together.  The statues above form part of a monument to all the Irish who perished in the Great Hunger or came across to find their fortune in the United States.  It's a reminder for all those who claim Irish ancestry that here in the U.S. the Celts have done well.  That's unusual given the course of the last two millenia.  G.K. Chesterton summarized what he thought was the aggregate effect of that suffering on the Irish psyche in few lines of verse: The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, for all...

Connections are forged at the oddest moments. We were discussing Tennyson's Guinevere , part of his larger work Idylls of the King , in class today and focusing in on Arthur's final speech to Guinevere.  After painfully listing every consequence of her sin, Arthur pardons and forgives the Queen, affirming that he loves her still and hopes to see her in paradise.  In the meantime, however, even if he should win his war with Modred, he tells her that they can never be together again lest the kingdom thinks that the king's justice can be set aside for family loyalty.  It's a harsh sort of self-limiting that strikes one as quintessentially Victorian: duty before love and all that.  Stuffy.  If we read Tennyson correctly, it's not, but an odd way of seeing that struck my mind today as we were discussing: I thought of Charles and Julia's pact in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited to never see each other after they become convinced of God's existence.  Call...

Reading about the Inklings, the informal literary circle that gathered around C.S. Lewis in the thirties and forties, gradually begins to feel like adjusting the focus on a camera lens.  You start with a single figure in hazy focus, say J.R.R. Tolkien.  Picking up Humphrey Carpenter's biography draws the professor in a few stark lines.  A person, a personality begins to emerge.  To begin to see Tolkien, however, is for others figures to become perceptible on the edges of your vision.  C.S. Lewis enters into the picture, and Charles Williams hovers, indistinct around the edges.  Seeking to know the relationship between the three men better, you may pick up Carpenter's second work, The Inklings .  Suddenly, Lewis and Williams jump sharply into view as characters and Tolkien continues to take on life and weight.  New personages flit through the frame: Hugo Dyson, Humphrey Havard, Dorothy L. Sayers, T.S. Eliot, Warnie Lewis.  Carpenter's Lewis do...

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...

These are pictures from Providence Classical School's production of G.K. Chesterton's Magic: A Fantastic Comedy .   I can't recommend this play enough for troupes with an interest in putting on small-scale but lively and professional theater (Torrey Theater... hint, hint...).  The pictures run in descending order: the Duke solo, Patricia and Morris Caerleon, the Duke and the Conjuror, the Conjuror solo, Particia solo, the Rev. Cyril Smith solo, and Smith with the Demons.  Missing are Dr. Grimthorpe and Hastings the butler.  Inspirations for the look and feel of the performance include: The Illusionist , The Prestige , and Downton Abbey . *all photos are used with permission courtesy of Louis Long and are copyright Louis Long 2012

I recently discovered that among his many other accomplishments G.K. Chesterton also wrote plays.  As a man all too willing to take up his pen at the slightest provocation, this shouldn't be surprising.  Evidently, Chesterton's friend, George Bernard Shaw, got tired of G.K.C. skewering all his plays and forbade the critic to criticize until he had tried his own hand at writing for the stage.  The outcome of that challenge was Magic: A Fantastic Comedy . Magic is a story where the characters stand for different sorts of people that could be found in the early 20th century.  We have an old and a new Atheist, a Progressive, a Liberal clergyman, a fan of the Celtic Twilight, and a Spiritualist.  The plot centers around the claim of a young Irish woman (a fan of the Celtic Twilight) that she has spoken with a fairy on her nightly walks in the garden.  Each character's worldview requires a different response to this claim and this conflict as well as the ques...

*All Images Copyright James R. Harrington 2011

Reading "This Discarded Image" this summer has deepened my respect for the Medieval model of the cosmos. So, to honor the imaginative achievements of my ancestors, I have decided to end off this summer by posting my awards for "The Seven Heavens of Summer Reading." Sun: The heaven of scholars could be monopolized any summer by C.S. Lewis, but as he seemed to prefer the sphere of Jove, how about an author that uses C.S. Lewis for a character? For giving us a thoroughly believable Lewis, the Sphere of the Sun goes to Peter Kreefte for "Between Heaven and Hell." Moon: For all its twists and turns, one book this summer deserves the honor of being paired with the Sphere of Luna; and it even shares her name: "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," by Robert Heinlein. Mars: Last year's martial book "A Princess of Mars," is a hard act to follow. I think this year's winner is up to the task, however. In the category of glorifying coura...