Last night—when I wasn’t watching the Jayhawks gut out a win over Iowa State, moving to 12-0 and showcasing again their daunting tenacity—I finished That Hideous Strength. Strength, being the final book in C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, brought his story to a crescendo and left me in a happily contemplative mood. Lewis excels at weaving “philosophy,” or what we would call philosophy if found in the abstract, into his narratives. But he does it so well that it’s hard to say where the story leaves off and the philosophy begins. Which is, of course, the point—they are one and the same; the vehicle of story, for Lewis, was ideally suited to conveying life’s hidden realities:
O WORLD invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
So Francis Thompson penned; and this seemed to be a working motto for Lewis.
Sometimes I think we have an almost physical hunger for story: “Take me below the surface of things and show me something undisclosed, that defies appearances, that is truer than what the eye sees. Give me a story, but make it real.”
Paradoxically, this is the great search that, however sweet, “stories” can never really end. But they have their uses. The great stories “trick” us into a mode of thought where trivialities begin to fade, and something larger appears through the mist. The real shape of life begins to materialize: mountains we’d never seen, while living on their shoulders; an ocean we’d never noticed, blinded by the waves crashing on the beach.
1 comments:
>>Can people really see the forest through the trees? Maybe we'll never know.<<
I think some people never try. Others make a show of trying and fail. Still others "try" in the wrong direction, blinded by preconceptions. And others (a minority) succeed.
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