House of Eratosthenes

Let the record show, this is Joy Behar’s idea of a thoughtful critique. Let’s be clear, it’s not a critique of a book, or a critique of a critique of a book. But a critique of a personal reading list offered by a former Vice Presidential candidate from whom the personal reading list is demanded routinely, when such personal reading lists are demanded of seemingly nobody else.

Anyway, this is my idea of a thoughtful critique. Joy Behar is welcome to have a different opinion, but, uh, hey I wonder what books Joy Behar reads?

Lewis explored the life-changing power of stories by writing one of his own, “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” one of the seven books in “The Chronicles of Narnia.” One of the key themes of this book is the old maxim—”You are what you read.” He begins “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” with one of the most memorable lines in the series: “There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”

Eustace, Lewis tells us, “liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.” In other words, Eustace didn’t have time for the types of stories that Lewis wrote and thought were important—stories about “brave knights and heroic courage.”

Throughout “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” Lewis tells us repeatedly that Eustace’s biggest problem is that he “has read all the wrong books.” Lewis cites this as the reason that Eustace is overwhelmed when he first arrives in Narnia and finds himself in a dragon’s lair. “Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair,” Lewis writes, “but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.”

To hammer the point home, Lewis describes why Eustace was not able to recognize an approaching dragon to quickly get to safety. “Something was crawling,” Lewis writes. “Worse still, something was coming out of the cave. Edmund or Lucy or you would have recognized it at once, but Eustace had read none of the right books.”
:
[C.S. Lewis] thought that fairy tales were the best way to convey truth for children and adults alike. He wrote about this quite often in his letters, and took no shame in reading fairy tales out loud in British pubs with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the epic “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Nowhere is this more poignantly expressed than in his dedication to Lucy Barfield in “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.” “You are already too old for fairy tales,” he wrote to the young Lucy, “but some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” Hopefully that day will come soon for Ms. Behar as well.

RTWT.

From Daisy Duke a few posts ago to THIS hideous mug????

This blog’s goin’ downhill 😉

Actually, thanks for this post. It got me thinking. Well, it continued me thinking on something I’ve been thinking about for quite some time, and started thinking more about as I watched “A Christmas Carol” last night. It came back to me when I read this:

“You are already too old for fairy tales, but some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

Which dovetails into another of my favorite quotes — which was brought to mind as I watched the Ghost of Christmas Present show Scrooge what was going on all across the world at Christmas Time. What happened when he sprinkled Christmas Spirit on people as he came across them, wherever they were. And how that translates into real life.

With things such as believing in Santa Claus. And why I want my grandson to believe in Santa Claus, if only for a few ears. It is good to have believed in magic at one point in your life, if only to go back to for comfort and for strength later on. It was from Hub in “Second Hand Lions”.

Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love… true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.

And that is an answer I’ve struggled with over the years, I will admit out loud, right here. Is Santa Claus worth believing in? Oh, yes, he is. Is God worth believing in? Yes. Yes indeed. And for lots of reasons.

The biggest of which is, “you ain’t the center of the Universe”. Yup, there’s something bigger and better than you out there. Something you can’t be no matter how hard you try, but something that trying to live up to will make you a better person. Something that, if at worst it isn’t true at all, is the accumulation of thousands of years of human experience, how to produce as healthy societies as you can, and that Jim Bob has no right to tell you how to live your life because he’s bigger, and that Aristotle can’t tell you how to live your life because he’s smarter. From which springs the idea that all men are created equal — not by other men, but by something bigger — and are endowed by that something bigger with basic rights to their lives, liberty to live them to the extent that they begin to bump into other people’s liberty, and to their property.

And therefore other men have no right to take what was given by that something bigger away from you. Not for your own good. Or for anyone else’s.

That something bigger is important, whether you can put your finger on it or not. Because without it, law will eventually become what the strongest say it is. And though might, in a world with a creator, doesn’t make right, if right doesn’t have might, evil men will forcibly banish right from the world and replace it with their own selfish versions. First it will be the egotists who think they know what’s best for all and therefore have the right to enforce their vision. This will be followed by egotists who will use that power merely to persue their own interests with impunity and with rampant disregard for anyone elses.

We must be able to recognize evil. We must be able to recognize dragons. And we must know what to do about them.

A shared framework, a shared reference is handy. This is where culture comes in. And one of the things I know is that “multi-culturalism” amounts in the end “no-culturalism”. A fractious society is a weak society, and this one is becoming more and more fractious every day.

And shared religion is cultural glue.

Not everyone may really believe. Many really do. At one time, perhaps most. But at one point, just having one dominant religion in the culture meant that whether or not you did, you ran into the symbols and the rituals and the holidays all the time. At one point, people said “Merry Christmas” to each other without pardoning the expression. There were shared experiences that held us together. No, not everyone had the same ones, but most of us did, and it rubbed off on a good chunk of those who didn’t.

I’m not sure where this goes, really. But I do know one thing.

I think I’m old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
- philmon | 12/21/2010 @ 21:31
Why, yes, Joy. Yes, they are. And compared to some of the books that are marketed to kids these days, they’re frickin’ Proust.
- Rich Fader | 12/22/2010 @ 16:17

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“Aren’t Those Children’s Books?”Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

“Aren’t Those Children’s Books?”
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010