I was casting about (nice English idiomatic expression, that) for a subject tonight, and it crossed my mind that Owen Barfield was the longest-lived of the original Inklings, and he traveled extensively in his later years, lecturing in the US. There must be footage of him around somewhere.
And behold, the video above surfaced on YouTube. It’s the great Lewis promoter Clyde Kilby with Barfield, in a location which I take to be the Marion Wade Center in Wheaton, Illinois. They chat a bit about his friendship with Lewis, and then we get to see just the beginning of one of Barfield’s lectures.
I forget which book about the Inklings it came from, but I was interested to learn that Barfield was an enthusiastic dancer all his life (or as long as he was able, I suppose). Everyone who’s read Surprised by Joy knows he was an Anthroposophist, but he also joined the Church of England later on.
First of all, I want to share the movie trailer above. It’s for “Cabrini,” a film directed by the director of “Sounds of Freedom.” Lukas Behnken, son of my old college roommate Dixey Behnken, was unit production manager and line producer for this film (he was also, if you recall, director of the excellent “Mully” movie, a few years back). Dixey himself appears for a microsecond here, as an extra.
Looks good. (I mean the film, not Dixey, who of course has always been a living gargoyle.)
Do you ever wonder what it’s like inside Lars Walker’s head?
Of course you don’t. But I’m going to tell you anyway.
Yesterday morning, I was thinking about an experience I’ve had occasionally in my life and times – one you may have had too.
On a number of occasions, I’ve found information in a book that I wanted (for one reason or another) to remember, in case I needed it again. But when I did need it again, and looked in the book, it wasn’t there. In one particular case, I remember going through the book page by page, and still not finding it.
Of course, there are reasonable explanations. I might have remembered the right information, but assigned it to the wrong book. Or I could have remembered the information wrong.
But I choose not to believe those facile explanations. I think the truth is much simpler.
I blame the Underground Folk.
If you’ve read my novels, you know about the Underground Folk. They’re the Scandinavian elves, but they don’t like to be called by that name. You call them the U.F. (as above), or the Hidden Folk or the Good Neighbors, or some circumlocution like that.
In the classic novel, Troll Valley, we learned that they continue their activities in modern times. Their great purpose – their calling from God according to Miss Margit, the hero’s fairy godmother – is to change history. Real events include all those wonders and miracles and magic that we read about in the legends, but then the Underground Folk come in and remove most of the evidence. That way, most of the proof of the supernatural is gone, and people are left to believe or not based on reason and the calling of the Holy Spirit, not unanswerable manifestations of the supernatural.
I think what happened to me with those books was that the Underground Folk sneaked in and changed the text (this scenario actually plays a part in my work in progress, The Baldur Game).
And why would supernatural beings change the content of books just to mess with me? What divine purpose would that serve?
I say, sometimes even elves just play practical jokes.
I’ve read a little John Dickson Carr in my time – mostly short stories. An American who set his stories primarily in England, Carr is most famous for his characters Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale. He was one of the foremost mystery writers of his time, but I’ve always found his work a trifle dull, like most of the “Cozy” subgenre.
I’d never heard of his character Inspector John Cheviot before. A web search told me little about him. I get the impression Cheviot is the hero of at least one other book, and that both involve time travel as well as murder. I would like to know more about the underlying science fictional rationale for the time jump, because while this book, Fire, Burn!, was intriguing, I have questions.
At the beginning of the book, Inspector Cheviot gets into a London cab in the mid-1950s, and suddenly finds himself riding in a hansom cab in the late 1820s. He’s not exactly an intruder in the past – he seems to be a well-known figure in London Society – not always in a positive way. One of his scandalous activities is applying to be part of the newly organized London Metropolitan Police – the very first iteration of Scotland Yard. His application to be their new Superintendent is shocking, as Yard detectives are definitely not supposed to be gentlemen. They are essentially thugs, thieves set to catch thieves, and the population despises them.
But Cheviot – still conscious of being a 20th Century man – is galvanized. He’s long been a student of Yard history, and he’s often dreamed of the things he could have accomplished there with his modern knowledge and investigative techniques.
He soon gets a chance to show what he can do. Sent (rather contemptuously) to investigate the theft of bird seed from exotic bird cages belonging to a prominent society lady, he witnesses a young woman’s murder. The woman is shot to death, but he hears no gunshot, and no one seemed to be in a position to fire the fatal bullet.
On a personal level, Cheviot finds himself already in a relationship with a beautiful, passionate woman. He also makes a deadly enemy – an arrogant and cruel military officer who challenges him to a duel.
Where Fire, Burn! really excelled as a novel (in this reader’s opinion) was in its vivid recreation of early 19th Century London. The author had clearly done a lot of research, and the descriptions were highly convincing.
The mystery was also pretty good. The solution was clever, and I didn’t see it coming – though I thought I did. The book moved a little slowly (by the debased standards of this present age), and the female characters seemed a little stylized, the kind of languid females who are always getting the vapors in old dramas. Nevertheless, all in all, I rate Fire, Burn! high as an original historical mystery.
I do wish we were given some clue as to how Cheviot travels through time, though. Is it a dream? A rift in the Third Dimension? No clue is offered, and the book ends very abruptly.
Am I a Soldier of the Cross performed by Apryl Dawn
Today’s hymn is an old favorite. The great Isaac Watts (1674-1748) wrote this meditation on the Christian life in the modern world. The tune above is not one from your hymnal. It’s an excellent pairing with a traditional Irish tune, which I think of as “The Foggy Dew” but is used in many songs. Do you sing this song at your church?
“Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2 Tim 2:3 ESV).
1 Am I a soldier of the cross, A follower of the Lamb? And shall I fear to own His cause, Or blush to speak His name?
2 Must I be carried to the skies On flowery beds of ease, While others fought to win the prize, And sailed through bloody seas?
3 Are there no foes for me to face? Must I not stem the flood? Is this vile world a friend to grace, To help me on to God?
4 Sure I must fight if I would reign; Increase my courage, Lord; I’ll bear the toil, endure the pain, Supported by Thy word.
5 Thy saints, in all this glorious war, Shall conquer, though they die; They view the triumph from afar, And seize it with their eye.
6 When that illustrious day shall rise, And all thine armies shine In robes of victory through the skies, The glory shall be Thine.
Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.
But he disliked the supernatural elements in it. Bringing in God and demons tips the scales, as it were, “one always knows which side is going to win.” (via Andrew Snyder on Twitter)
And one other thought:
Culture War: Daniel Strand reviews Russell Moore recent book. “Losing Our Religion would be more persuasive if—instead of affecting to be a simple piece of pastoral counseling—it straightforwardly acknowledged its own agenda. Moore has an argument to make, and he wants to advance his project and defeat his opponents. But his book frames the gospel as some pure, otherworldly abstraction that has little to do with power or politics.”
More Lewis: Joseph Pollard has three posts on Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. Here is a link to all three. “While the Narnia series positively oozes with Christian symbolism and biblical allusion, in this, his final work of fiction, Lewis effectually communicates what so many thoroughly orthodox theology textbooks tirelessly aim to do: Till We Have Faces (1956) gently coaxes the reader to come to terms with both the futility of quarreling with the Almighty, and the resplendent beauty of the thrice-holy King.”
Economic Freedom: When Howard Ahmanson “heard [author John M.] Perkins speak, he heard something like his father’s message from the 1960s: free enterprise works, and small banks help people with modest incomes get mortgages so they have better homes. In India, the free enterprise message would take five more years to sink in, but in 1989 voters threw out Congress Party socialism. The result? India in recent years has been the world’s fastest-growing major economy.”
From History’s Wars: Patrick Kurp shares a few words from letters from a Civil War soldier. “Historians attribute more than half the 618,000 Union and Confederate deaths in the war not to battlefield wounds but disease: dysentery, pneumonia, malaria, typhus, chicken pox, enteric (typhoid) fever.”
Photo: Main Street, Iowa. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Over at Gene Edward Veith’s Cranach blog (which is, lamentably, paywalled), he linked today to Anthony Sacramone’s review at acton.org of Stephen Prothero’s God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time. (I’ll let you order it, if you like, from the review. I came to praise Sacramone, not to pick his pocket.) I had never heard of the book’s subject, Eugene Exman:
… “who ran the religion book department at Harper & Brothers and then Harper & Rowe between 1928 and 1965,” and who published some of the most recognizable names in the world of religion (and quasi religion) of that period, from Harry Emerson Fosdick and Albert Schweitzer to Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bill Wilson, co-founder of AA.
…if there’s one phrase that’s repeated mantra-like in God the Bestseller it’s “hidebound dogma” (note the modifier). The books Exman would publish at the helm of Harper and Rowe’s religion division would seek that which transcended mere doctrine, a “perennial philosophy,” as Aldous Huxley’s own bestseller would be called—a common thread that supposedly runs through all religions, tying the earthly to the heavenly, matter to the spirit.
Exman, raised a Baptist, had an intense spiritual experience, but it led him, not into the Bible or orthodoxy, but into a generalized search for spiritual truth, which he believed he could find in all faiths.
His greatest star was Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a hugely influential writer in his time, almost forgotten today (a fact which gives me hope for the future). I once borrowed a book on the life of St. Paul from my elementary school library. My mother noticed that Fosdick was the author, and cautioned me against it. This was wise. I did notice a tendency to downplay the supernatural.
As a short history of the American religious publishing game in the mid-20th century, and the signal role one man… played in that history, virtually transforming what passed for religion in the broader reading public’s imagination, Stephen Prothero does yeoman’s work in God the Bestseller. Anyone in the publishing trade will find this an enjoyable, if somewhat repetitive, read.
In the beginning, when people lived in growing, unorganized communities of farms and villages, they may have thought the world was a shape other than spherical. Maybe they didn’t think of it at all. Why should they?
Considering how several ancient civilizations were avid astronomers, we could easily imagine they had creative ideas about the world and maybe its shape. That the Mayans or Egyptians even asked what shape the land might be is not a given. They may have asked a thousand other questions, and if they were oriented around time or the spirit world, not space or the material world, they may not have asked the question.
Dr Josho Brouwers of Bad Ancient takes up this question, saying once people began to explore the world, it became apparent we live on a globe. By the time Plato was writing, it was a common question, the assumption being in favor of a spherical planet. Aristotle proposed the Earth and all of the heavens were fixed in spheres, each inside the other.
Brouwers writes, “This idea – that the world was spherical – became pervasive in the Hellenistic period. The work of Aristarchus of Samos [310-230 BC], the first known scholar to argue that the earth revolved around the sun instead of the other way around, assumes that the earth was round.”
There’s even a suggestion that the educated of ancient India believed the world was spherical too. So, ancient scholars worked out and believed the world was a globe and the medieval church did not oppose them. The idea that Columbus wanted to prove the world was round (and other silliness about the medieval world believing in flatness) is something pushed by people with a beef against the church.
Nothing to review tonight. I’ve had the misfortune to start reading two books in a row that I had to give up on due to lousy writing. Too painful to finish, even for the base pleasure of shredding them in reviews. And a third, which I just started, is looking a little dubious… (Fortunately, I got these books free or at very low cost through online deals, so my cost was minimal.)
I had a topic all teed up for blogging about, though. Entirely trivial and haphazard. And then I watched the video above, and it sparked some actual thoughts.
I do love Once Upon a Time in the West (except for the massacre at the beginning). It’s a case study in what you can achieve through blending visuals with music. The movie has been called operatic, and its effect has been lodged under my skin ever since I saw it in a theater back in 1969, when it was new. It’s even affected my novel writing – I try to mix poetry in with my big dramatic scenes, striving for the same kind of sublimity.
But it occurred to me to wonder about Charles Bronson’s character, known only as “Harmonica.” In the scene you see above, Jill (Claudia Cardinale) makes it about as obvious as she can (I think even I would have picked up on the hints) that she wants him to stay with her. But no, he’s gotta be on his way. Gotta ride off into the sunset, in the tradition of the Western hero (I think it has something to do with Manifest Destiny). Sergio Leone was explicitly doing homage to Western movie traditions here, and riding off alone, like Shane, is definitely part of that tradition.
But – in terms of this story – why? Why is Harmonica leaving? Up to now, his whole life has been devoted to a single goal – getting his revenge on the evil Frank (Henry Fonda). Now he’s finished that job. He’s got the whole rest of his life before him. Here’s an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of building a railroad town. Not a bad job. Not to mention THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE throwing herself at him. Why not stick around a day or two, just to see if it could work out?
I suppose Cheyenne (Jason Robards) explains it, when he tells Jill that men like Harmonica have got something inside them – “something about death.” Maybe Harmonica has killed too much. Maybe he’s got PTSD, and has lost his sense of belonging anywhere.
Then I pondered epics in general. In epic terms, I think we could say Harmonica is already dead. It’s the epic hero’s job to die at the end, like Beowulf. Like Hector. The very concept of the epic involves a battle with death – a battle no man can win. Epics teach us how to die.
And that’s a mythopoeic thing. The epic hero, in a dim and reflected way, foreshadows the great Hero of the Gospel. The epic hero may have no virtues at all except for courage – like Harmonica and Siegfried the Dragon Slayer – but his iron refusal to let Death break his spirit anticipates Christ passing through Death and finishing the job at which all the others have failed – killing the Great Enemy.
As I’ve confessed before, I seem irrationally compelled to be forever searching for another fictional detective to fill the gap left behind by John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee. So when I discovered there was a series character named Mac Travis, who’s involved with boats and lives in Florida, my old obsession could not be stifled. Steven Becker’s Mac Travis, hero of Wood’s Reach, however, is nothing like Travis McGee (though the name choice has to be intentional). I hope my disappointment didn’t sour my attitude to the book.
Travis McGee, for all his coolness, was essentially the ultimate Peter Pan, a boy who never grew up. He took responsibility as he took his retirement – in installments. He cared deeply about his clients (often damsels in distress) for the duration of his cases, but never took on the burdens of conventional family life.
Steven Becker’s Mac Travis is the diametric opposite. The owner of a struggling diving business, he frets over his debts and yearns for the woman he loves, who has decided they have no future. When an unethical fortune hunter offers Mac a lot of money to help him find a fabled treasure site, he feels as if he has no choice but to take the job. But when he realizes the kind of deal he’s signed up for, Mac starts planning to plunder the plunderer.
I’ve often said that I like boat stories, which was another reason I should have relished Wood’s Reach. But somehow it didn’t work for me. Maybe it’s sailboating stories I actually like. This book mainly involved people rushing around in power boats, alternately pursuing and fleeing from one another, and intersecting now and then to fight, threaten, or palaver. It all seemed kind of frenetic and implausible to this landlubber.
Still, there was a lot of action. The writing wasn’t bad.
Here’s another thought of mine, free of charge. I wonder if I’ve written about this before. It seems to me I’ve pondered it repeatedly over the years, but never actually sat down and verbalized it.
And as many have said before me, I don’t really know what I think until I’ve written it down.
It seems to me a lot of people misunderstand Christ’s command about turning the other cheek.
First of all, let’s quote the passage here, for the sake of our younger readers:
“But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (Matthew 5:39, King James Version)
Seems pretty simple, but of course it’s not, in practice. It’s kind of like a command not to ever fart – easy to say, not so easy to live by. How are we supposed to act, in light of this and all the Lord’s other commandments about non-violence? Is self-defense always forbidden? What about defending our families? Our country? Are the wicked to be left completely unrestrained in the world?
But that’s not exactly what I have in mind tonight. What I’m thinking about tonight is what I see as a common misinterpretation of this passage. As far as I can see, this is a simple command, without any promise concerning consequences.
Too many people think there’s a corollary there, one that’s not actually in the text. They think what Jesus is actually saying is, “If you turn the other cheek, then your enemy will be so impressed with your kindness that he’ll change his ways and stop being violent.”
This misapprehension was born, I suspect, in Sunday School stories. Sunday Schools used to provide little papers (maybe they still do; I haven’t been involved in one in a while) where they printed nice little stories with moral lessons. And often those stories were about Christian kids who showed kindness to other kids who’d bullied or hurt them, and in the end the villains saw the light, because of that kindness.
Now I won’t deny that such things can happen. People who treat others badly have been known, now and then, to change their ways, after experiencing forgiveness and kindness from their victims. And that’s wonderful.
But this is in no way promised or guaranteed.
I think that, in the political realm, some people think a Christian (or moral) policing or foreign policy would be based on doing kind things for people who attack and kill us. Naïve people believe that if we’re forgiving and passive enough, our enemies will be shamed into reforming.
Jesus did not promise that. When He told Christians to return good for evil, He knew perfectly well that a lot of them would end up getting martyred for it.
My own belief is that the government (which “bears the sword” according to Romans 13:4) is tasked with protecting its people, not evangelizing through acts of kindness and self-sacrifice. Governments can’t be saved, and make pretty poor evangelists.
