Two Griefs Observed (Here There Bee Spoilers)

Having finished the Thesis this May time, I found myself burned out on academia.  The hours spent pouring over texts for the right passage to fill out a page, the books rushed through in search of a sentence with which to complete a footnote to justify my own observation.  And in those pages, the sight of erudition and excellence that seemed to mock my own feeble attempts at contributing to millennia of accumulated knowledge.  I was tired.  I needed a break.

But the opiate offered through repetitions of favorite video games and Netflix marathons wore out its welcome remarkably swiftly, so that before long I found myself drained of even the desire to be unashamedly distracted from the strenuous labors of applied thought.  My imagination burned.  Yet the idea of cracking the cover to almost any of my multitude of books (which library continued to grow with each ill-advised essay into Barnes and Noble) cowed my transitory ambition.  Though I purchased books with fervent devotion, I could not bring myself to read any of them.  In a moment of horror, found myself becoming the sort of man whom CS Lewis describes as liking the idea of books, yet never reading any in his vast collection.

So naturally, it was to Lewis that I turned for salvation.  His wit and humor would entertain my fleeting fancy, but that same wit coupled with his customary genius for explaining profound truths about which no reader has even considered to think would spur on my much-exhausted academic faculties.  Accordingly, upon my succeeding pilgrimage to B&N, I picked up a copy of CS Lewis: The Signature Classics anthology.  My expectations were not disappointed, and it was with a profound sense of relief and growing excitement that I blitzed through Mere Christianity (fittingly, the first entry) and The Great Divorce.  

That concluded my summer, and so rejuvenated, I tackled my academic duties as an instructor with renewed vigor, though the increase of busywork started to drag at my mind once more, inciting a return to the mindless rambles in place of more challenging exploration amongst my bookshelves.

That is when I discovered Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.  The BBC dramatization appeared in my Netflix queue, and I recognized the title at once as a book highly recommended by a good friend. Intrigued, I committed to the pilot episode over dinner, and by the end of the weekend had completed the series.  The premise is elegant and unique - a pair of Regency era magicians seeking to research and restore English magic during the Napoleonic Wars.  But what I found most delightful was the academic element so strongly portrayed through their dialogues and intrigues.  Here we see two well-spoken scholars (philosophers, even) engaging in wars of words over the nature and purpose of fairies, witchcraft, and superstition - treating it with all the care and devotion of real professors at my university.  Listening to Norrell wax eloquent on the proper use of magic among gentlemen sounded uncannily true to the spontaneous lectures delivered by my professors on the care and nurturing of proper history for the modern man.  I was enchanted.  My imagination burst into flame.  I wanted to read again, to write, to delve into my shelves with all the boyish glee of Jonathan Strange.

Once more, I returned to CS Lewis for inspiration.  If I am to truly learn, I told myself, If I am to produce something of value, then I must seek after deeper thoughts with constancy and devotion.  Much like studying the Bible.  But like the study of Scripture, it is not advised to tackle Predestination when one has but a shaky grasp of the Eucharist, or even a vague memory of having mastered the subject.  So as a warmup I selected the shortest Lewis text in my possession.  And it is in A Grief Observed that I met a Lewis most unexpected.

Until this evening I had only the shakiest notion that "Jack" had ever married, or ever loved a woman deeply (much as he writes - even self-consciously - on the topic).  Yet within those pages I found a lover bereft of half his soul, his own the grief to be observed and analyzed.  What struck me was the haste and passion with which it is written, and the ever-present threat of raving incoherence.  Lewis is always so careful, so precise and perfect that the certain perfection of it all is part of the thrill.  But here Jack appears, dashing off wild thoughts almost as they come to mind, yet all following a studied course, as though his surgically accurate mind could not help itself.  It is jarring, breath-taking, raw.  There is a real sort of fear that in reading one has become a voyeur.

In describing his wife, Jack once more puts into words what mere mortals fail to dare considering.  She is the very soul of remarkable, the final word in Godly feminism, at home in her own skin and utterly unexpected at every turn.  She is Eve to Jack's Adam; she completes him in ways he never dreamed, and daily could not expect.  In an odd way, this is the sort of relationship enjoyed by

Jonathan Strange and his wife, Arabella.  Though attracted to her at the beginning of the narrative, Jonathan's devotion looks more like that of a puppy than a mature man's.  But as his responsibilities increase, through war and dedication to his occupation as a practicing magician, Jonathan comes to see Arabella as the joy that he did not know he'd been missing.  She is the last word about good wives: supportive and expectant, frank and instructive, unafraid to give voice to her opinions, while unashamed of her fears.  Her attentions do not bring Jonathan to heel, but spark in him the desire to be a husband, to put aside his own puerile dreams with manful resolution when he confronts the reality that they threaten Arabella's happiness - even when she has already come to peace with them.  It is a refreshing break from the usual tripe peddled by contemporary media, of the bumbling or overbearing husband needing a good education from his sensible and sassy wife, or the frivolous and domineering wife who can't bring herself to love a meek and cringing husband.  The pure and unabashed love shared between Jonathan and Arabella is a thing of truly wondrous beauty.

All of this irrevocably changes when Arabella apparently dies of exposure to the winter chill.  At first, Jonathan's native flippancy reasserts itself as he forlornly tells himself that he, the King's Magician, can restore her to life.  This, however, does not transpire due to the fact that Arabella is not really dead.  But what follows is not resignation on Jonathan's part, but an intensified desire to find a way, any way, to revive his beloved, even once she's buried.  He engages in world travel, studies black magic, and even induces his own fits of madness.  It bears some resemblance to the sort of frustrated passion expressed by Jack in A Grief Observed.

Yet here is the difference: Jonathan's quest to reunite with his love is an adventure, and a fictional one.  His grief is a vehicle that drives him far beyond the stifling confines of his teacher's academic limitations, to challenge ancient powers and in the end save Arabella from a fate yet worse than death.  Jack had no such hope.  He had only the assurances of Scripture and the love of his friends to assuage his pain.  And in his erudite way he brutally analyzes the future.  Will he see her again?  Is it possible to have again what they had before?  If she is no longer a body, yet is outside time as all spirits are outside time, can she properly exist in the way that humans comprehend existence?  Indeed, did she ever exist at all?

Of Knights, Wizards, and Both

I recently borrowed a The Knight from a friend. Part one of a duology called The Wizard Knight. Strongly rooted in Norse mythology, this fantasy follows a young boy as he stumbles into a land of fairies and giants, seeking to remember his past and become a hero.

In some ways this is a conventional fantasy, such as Able's origin in our world, but in other ways it is completely new to me. One of these new elements is the plot...or lack thereof. When reading, one usually expects a hook, a stirring rise, and a dramatic peak to the action, before dropping off to a conclusion of some kind. Not so, The Knight. With this story, the main plot seems to take place in the background, rather brought to light by inference as Able, narrating in the first person, throws in comments about grand battles and convoluted politics that happen outside the tedious day to day wanderings of the confused hero.

SEMI-SPOILER ALERT

What we the audience see, Able stumbles out of a cave where an Overcyn gives him a bow string. Then he wanders into a forest and meets an old man who takes care of him. Then he meets a knight who sends him back into the forest where he meets a fairy queen. She turns him into a strapping, handsome man. When he goes back to the knight he gets lost and finds a woman and her baby. Later on he gets a dog. Able leaves the woods and travels to a town and gets on a ship, thinking to lose the dog. He beats up the captain, pirates attack, and the dog catches up. After Able gets wounded the dog jumps overboard to find help and fairies take Able to the sea and teach him the way of water. He climbs a tower and drinks some water. By the time he gets back to the ship, years have gone by. The ship takes him to a town where he goes into a volcano, meets a dragon, and years pass. He finds the ship again, and the dog. Then he goes to become a knight and gets sent on an adventure after picking a fight with the local knights and hunting for the fairy queen. Then the dog comes back.

The actual story seems to pick up sometime in the latter half of the book, but even then, one is not certain what the point of the whole book is exactly. But the great thing is that none of that matters. The story is beautifully written and simply making sense of it all is half the fun. And the magic is rendered in a refreshingly clever way: many books have lately tried to make magic more of a science (Harry Potter comes to mind, as does Howl's Moving Castle and the Warhammer Fantasy RPG) but The Knight takes the magic spells and sorcery cookbooks back to the basics by making magic strange and more elemental. My favorite example was when the fairy queen kisses Able and declares that he belongs to her. Able's response: "I knew it was true." Magic!

Now I'm on to the second book, The Wizard. It promises - for now - to be much more linear, though some of the fairy-land frolicking does come into play from time to time, and seemingly random characters are still cropping up without notice. The dog is back, Able is looking for trouble, and there is still no word from America. I'll write again once I've read to the end.