Et in Sempiternum Pereant

"The many people who have bought The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories since its publication in 1986 may well have been perplexed on reading ‘Et in Sempiternum Pereant’ by Charles Williams, so greatly does it differ in style and content from most of its companions in the anthology. For here is a story in which virtually nothing appears to happen. A retired Lord Chief Justice, out walking in the country, enters a burning empty house and encounters a troubled spirit on its way to Hell. The setting is vague and the material details scanty. Not until it is over does the story have the power to frighten: it gains its effects through implication. The only tale of its kind its author wrote, in its substitution of spiritual for material terror it epitomizes his approach to the writing of supernaturalist fiction." (Glen Cavaliero)

In the room there was no furniture, neither fragment of paper nor broken bit of wood; there was no sign of life, no flame in the grate nor drift of smoke in the air. It was completely and utterly void.

Lord Arglay looked at it. He went back a few steps and looked up again at the chimney. Undoubtedly the chimney was smoking. It was received into a pillar of smoke; there was no clear point where the dark chimney ended and the dark smoke began. House leaned to roof, roof to chimney, chimney to smoke, and smoke went up for ever and ever over those roads where men crawled infinitely through the smallest measurements of time. Arglay returned to the door, crossed the threshold, and stood in the room. Empty of flame, empty of flame's material, holding within its dank air the very opposite of flame, the chill of ancient years, the room lay round him. Lord Arglay contemplated it. 'There's no smoke without fire,' he said aloud. 'Only apparently there is. Thus one lives and learns. Unless indeed this is the place where one lives without learning.'

The phrase, leaving his lips, sounded oddly about the walls and in the corners of the room. He was suddenly revolted by his own chance words--'a place where one lives without learning', where no courtesy or integrity could any more be fined or clarified. The echo daunted him; he made a sharp movement, he took a step aside towards the stairs, and before the movement was complete, was aware of a change. The dank chill became a concentration of dank and deadly heat, pricking at him, entering his nostrils and his mouth. The fantasy of life without knowledge materialized, inimical, in the air, life without knowledge, corrupting life without knowledge, jungle and less than jungle, and though still the walls of the bleak chamber met his eyes, a shell of existence, it seemed that life, withdrawn from all those normal habits of which the useless memory was still drearily sustained by the thin phenomenal fabric, was collecting and corrupting in the atmosphere behind the door he had so rashly passed--outside the other door which swung crookedly at the head of the darker hole within.

Et in Sempiternum Pereant
Charles Williams

Inkling Tweets (Click here)

"Tweets have become a contemporay Haiku, at their best artfully worded moments of linguistic economy, abbreviation, and beauty." (Simon Pegg)  The Inklings, in all their vast output, were ahead of their time in their ability to capture a scene or mood in just a few lines, just like a Tweet.  So here we are, my experiment in Inkling Tweet postings... suggestions will be used!

Jack's Death and Funeral

[Quarry Church, Headington]

To Priscilla Tolkien (from J.R.R. Tolkien)

[Written four days after the death of C. S. Lewis]

26 November 1963 76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

Dearest,

Thank you so much for your letter…………..So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age - like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots. Very sad that we should have been so separated in the last years; but our time of close communion endured in memory for both of us.   I had a mass said this morning, and was there, and served; and Havard and Dundas Grant1 were present.  The funeral at Holy Trinity, the Headington Quarry church, which Jack attended, was quiet and attended only by intimates and some Magdalen people including the President. Austin Farrer read the lesson.   The grave is under a larch in the corner of the church-yard. Douglas (Gresham) was the only 'family' mourner. Warnie was not present, alas! I saw Owen Barfield, George Sayer and John Lawlor (a good mark to him), among others.   Chris, came with us.  There will be an official memorial service in Magdalen on Saturday at 2.15 p.m.

It was very sweet of you my dearest to write,

God bless you. Daddy.

Erotic Literature?

Wayland Young:

Now what in your view is overall right or wrong in modern erotic literature?

CS Lewis:

Well, what repels me - that's perhaps easier than saying 'right or wrong - is what I would call the appalling solemnity. I remember saying to a pupil once that I thought a certain novel pornographic, and he replied, 'how can it be? - he treats it all so seriously'. Now this seems to me so awfully wrong. The sexual act is often very serious to both parties, but more often, quite as often, it is more in the form of a play or romp, especially with married people; and all humanity knows this - it is always connected with jokes. The Greeks knew that the goddess of love was the laughter loving goddess, and this is what seems to be entirely crushed out by, what I would call, our modern aphrodhology, if I might coin this nasty word — the serious worship of Aphrodite.

C.S. Lewis
Interview with Wayland Young (19 Jan 1962)
Journal of Inklings Studies (Vol 1 No 1)

Tolkien Holidays (II)

[Belmont Hotel, Sidmouth]

To Christopher Tolkien

Begun about June 2nd. 1971.

My dearest C,

I am sorry that I have been so silent. But only a long 'tale of woe', of which you know the main outlines, wd. fully explain it. Here we are June 2nd, and May, one of the best of my experience, has escaped, without a stroke of 'writing’. Not all 'woe' of course. Our brief holiday to Sidmouth, which was what Dr Tolhurst's advice boiled down to, was very pleasant indeed. We were lucky in our time - in fact the only week available at the hotel — since May was such a wonderful month - and we came in for a 'spring explosion' of glory. with Devon passing from brown to brilliant yellow-green, and all the flowers leaping out of dead bracken or old grass. (Incidentally the oaks have behaved in a most extraordinary way. The old saw about the oak and the ash, if it has any truth, would usually need wide-spread statistics, since the gap between their wakening is usually so small that it can be changed by minor local differences of situation. But this year there seemed a month between them! The oaks were among the earliest trees to be leafed equalling or beating birch, beech and lime etc. Great cauliflowers of brilliant yellow-ochre tasseled with flowers, while the ashes (in the same situations) were dark, dead, with hardly even a visible sticky bud).

The Belmont proved a v.g. choice. Indeed the chief changes we observed in Sidmouth was the rise of this rather grim looking hotel (in spite of its perfect position) to be the best in the place - especially for eating. Neither M nor I have eaten so much in a week (without indigestion) for years. In addition our faithful cruise-friends (Boarland) of some six years ago, who recently moved to Sidmouth, and were so anxious to see us again that they vetted our rooms [at] the Belmont, provided us with a car, and took us drives nearly every day. So I saw again much of the country you (especially) and I used to explore in the old days of poor old Jo, that valiant sorely-tried old Morris. An added comfort was the fact that Sidmouth seemed practically unchanged, even the shops: many still having the same names (such as Frisby, Trump, and Potbury). Well that is that, & now, alas, over! I am, of course, still in the doldrums as far as my proper work goes - with time leaking away so fast….

Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #323

Tolkien Holidays

John & Priscilla Tolkien

The Tolkien Family Album

Agaparg

"(Jack) was a man noted for his generosity.   He helped with the education of many children by means of a secret charity fund known as "Agaparg" and personified as an imaginary giant of kindly disposition.  This fund had been set up by his lawyer and friend, Owen Barfield.   No tramp or beggar would be turned away empty-handed by Jack.  Although convinced of his own poverty, he would gladly give to anyone who asked.  He had no sense of money management and cared less."

Lenten Lands
Douglas Gresham

"... Mrs. Moore died."

Jack expressed no relief at the lifting of this millstone from around his neck, but he became happier and more relaxed than he had been for many a year. He settled gently and comfortably into the pattern of middle-aged bachelordom with Warnie and prepared to live out his life in such style. The Kilns was their haven, and Oxford their comfortable, friendly sea, inhabited by good friends, men of intellect and worthy opponents for lively debate. Jack wore his shabby old clothes and his old fisherman's hat of Irish tweed; he wrote, he read, he taught. Jack was, in a Hobbit-like way, comfortable and at peace. He was an academic success and a literary success. Those things which he could not do for himself, such as keeping up with his ever increasing volume of correspondence, he delegated to Warnie, who gladly acted as his private secretary.”

Lenten Lands
Douglas Gresham

Lewis on Dirty Stories

"Oh well, the one reason I want to keep up some censorship is that the so-called dirty story, let's say the indecent story, as one hears it in many bars - where it is not at all indecent and not at all disgusting and often told with great wit and humour - this is the only folk art we've got left, and once you allow all these things into literature, that surviving folk-art will disappear and will be replaced by a professional art of the same sort which I think will be simply ghastly."

C.S. Lewis
Interview with Wayland Young (19 Jan 1962)
Journal of Inklings Studies (Vol 1 No 1)

Alliterative poetry from LOTR

Here we find a beautiful example, taken from the end of "The Battle of the Pelennor Fields":

We heard of the horns in the hills ringing,
the swords shining in the South-kingdom.
Steeds went striding to the Stoningland
as wind in the morning. War was kindled.
There Theoden fell, Thengling the mighty,
to his golden halls and green pastures
in the Northern fields never returning,
high lord of the host. Harding and Guthlaf,
Dunhere and Deorwine, doughty Grimbold,
Herefara and Herubrand, Horn and Fastred,
fought and fell there in a far country:
in the Mounds of Mundburg under mould they lie
with their league-fellows, lords of Gondor.
Neither Hirluin the Fair to the hills by the sea,
nor Forlong the old to the flowering vales
ever, to Arnach, to his own country
returned in triumph; nor the tall bowmen,
Derufin and Duilin, to their dark waters,
meres of Morthlond under mountain-shadows.
Death in the morning and at day's ending
lords took and lowly. Long now they sleep
under grass in Gondor by the Great River.
Grey now as tears, gleaming silver,
red then it rolled, roaring water:
foam dyed with blood flamed at sunset;
as beacons mountains burned at evening;
red fell the dew in Rammas Echor.

J.R.R. Tolkien
"Return of the King”

Jack's Death

Jack put his affairs in order, did his best to provide for his brother and his stepsons, and answered his letters as he always had. Few of his friends had any idea as he gaily saw them off after a visit that he was dying and knew it. Warnie came home, and he took his turn in caring for his younger brother for those last months. He looked after Jack with great devotion, for Warnie too realized that Jack was going to go on ahead and leave him behind, just as Joy had already done.

On Friday, November 22, 1963, the famous writer Aldous Huxley died. On the same day in Dallas, Texas, John F. Kennedy, then president of the United States of America, was shot dead. Also on the same day at 5:34 in the afternoon, C. S. Lewis died at his much loved home, The Kilns, Kiln Lane, Headington Quarry, Oxford. He was the finest man I ever knew in my life, and I miss him to this day. But he was ready to go. He had done all he wanted to do and said all that he wanted to say; and more important still, God was ready to take him home.

Jack left behind him a large number of loving friends, a huge number of admiring acquaintances, and untold millions of fans around the world, and he also left a mass of unpublished manuscripts of things he had started and then rejected or started and not had time to finish.

Jack’s Life (2005)

Douglas Gresham

The dead man felt it...

But that moan was not only his. As if the sound released something greater than itself, another moan answered it. The silence groaned. They heard it. The supernatural mountain on which they stood shook and there went through Battle Hill itself the slightest vibration from that other quaking, so that all over it china tinkled, and papers moved, and an occasional ill-balanced ornament fell. Pauline stood still and straight. Margaret shut her eyes and sank more deeply into her pillow. The dead man felt it and was drawn back away from that window into his own world of being, where also something suffered and was free. The groan was at once dereliction of power and creation of power. In it, far off, beyond vision in the depths of all the worlds, a god, unamenable to death, awhile endured and died.

Charles Williams “Descent into Hell”, Chapter 7, ‘Junction of Travellers’

Joy Lewis on Lying

Throughout Christian history, denunciations of lying have been loud and frequent. Who has been so abhorred as Ananias? And yet we all know the meaning of the words "pious fraud." From the beginning, the devil has loved to tempt the devout to lie for the sake of their good cause—and thereby make it a bad one. One of the first tasks of the Early Church was to separate the true Gospels from the multitudinous invented "eyewitness" accounts in which the faithful lied their heads off for the supposed good of the Church. Fabulous miracles ascribed to the boy Jesus —and more suitable to an infant devil; romantic adventures of Paul with the holy virgin Thecla; forged donations of Constantine, false Isidorian decretals, profound treatises on metaphysics attributed to a Dionysius the Areopagite who never wrote them but was sainted for them—the list is endless. Nor did it end with antiquity; most modern churches have kept up the good work of forging their own praises and their rivals' dispraise, until that clear-sighted and honest Christian Charles Williams found it necessary to write warningly of "the normal calumnies of piety," and to say of a historian, "In defence of his conclusion he was willing to cheat in the evidence—a habit more usual to religious writers than to historical." Let us clean our own house first.

You can usually tell when a hypocrite has been sinning; he denounces that sin in public — and in somebody else. The mere halfhearted sinner may try to wriggle out of his guilt by some verbal quibble; he hasn't really lied to his wife about how he spent the week-end, he just hasn't told her all the truth. But the real, thoroughgoing, incarnate lie of a Pharisee covers his guilt by trumpeting loudly about his virtue; he comes forward boldly and denounces her for lying to Mrs. Jones about that horrid new hat. And if you want to find a man whose whole life is devoted to hypocritical dishonesty and deception, it might be wise to look for one who habitually beats his child for lying.

Smoke on the Mountain (1955)
Joy Davidman

Lamorak and the Queen Morgause of Orkney

Hued from the livid everlasting stone
the queen's hewn eyelids bruised my bone;
my eyes splintered, as our father Adam's when the first
exorbitant flying nature round creation's flank burst.

Her hair was whirlwind about her face;
her face outstripped her hair; it rose from a place
where pre-Adamic sculpture on an ocean rock lay,
and the sculpture torn from its rock was swept away.

Her hand discharged catastrophe; I was thrown
before it; I saw the source of all stone,
the rigid tornado, the schism and first strife
of primeval rock with itself, Morgause Lot's wife.

I had gone in summer at the king's word to explore
the coast of the kingdom towards the Pole; the roar
of the ocean beyond all coasts threatened on one hand;
on the other we saw the cliffs of Orkney stand.

Caves and hollows in the crags were filled with the scream
of seamews nesting and fleeting; the extreme theme
of Logres rose in harsh cries and hungry storms,
and there, hewn in a cleft, were hideous huge forms.

I remembered how the archbishop in Caerleon at a feast
preached that before the making of man or beast
the Emperor knew all carved contingent shapes
in torrid marsh temples or on cold crookt capes.

These were the shapes only the Emperor knew,
unless Coelius Vibenna and his loathly few,
squat by their pot, by the twisted hazel art
sought the image of that image within their heart.

Sideways in the cleft they lay, and the seamews' wings
everywhere flying, or the mist, or the mere slant of the things
seemed to stir them; then the edge of the storm's shock
over us obliquely split rock from rock.

Ship and sculpture shuddered; the crags' scream
mingled with the seamews'; Logres' convulsed theme
wailed in the whirlwind; we fled before the storms,
and behind us loosed in the air flew giant inhuman forms.

When from the sea I came again to my stall
King Arthur between two queens sat in a grim hall,
Guinevere on his right, Morgause on his left
I saw in her long eyes the humanized shapes of the cleft.

She sat the sister of Arthur, the wife of Lot,
four sons got by him, and one not.
I heard as she stirred the seamews scream again
in the envy of the unborn bastard and the pride of canonical Gawaine.

I turned my eyes to the lords; they sat half-dead.
The young wizard Merlin, standing by me, said:
'Balin had Balan's face, and Morgause her brother's.
Did you not know the blow that darkened each from other's?

'Balin and Balan fell by mistaken impious hate.
Arthur tossed loves with a woman and split his fate.
Did you not see, by the dolorous blow's might,
the contingent knowledge of the Emperor floating into sight?

'Over Camelot and Carbonek a whirling creature hovered
as over the Adam in Eden when they found themselves uncovered,
when they would know good as evil; thereon it was showed,
but then they must know God also after that mode.'

The eyes of the queen Morgause were a dark cavern;
there a crowned man without eyes came to a carved tavern,
a wine-wide cell, an open grave, that stood
between Caerleon and Carbonek, in the skirts of the blind wood.

Through the rectangular door the crowned shape went its way
it lifted light feet: an eyeless woman lay
flat on the rock; her arm was stretched to embrace
his own stretched arm; she had his own face.

The shape of a blind woman under the shape of a blind man
over them, half-formed, the cipher of the Great Ban,
this, below them both, the shape of the blatant beast matched,
his mouth was open in a yelp; his feet scratched.

Beyond them a single figure was cut in the rock;
it was hewn in a gyration of mow and mock;
it had a weasel's head and claws on hand and feet;
it twirled under an arch that gave on the city's street.

The child lies unborn in the queen's womb;
unformed in his brain is the web of all our doom,
as unformed in the minds of all the great lords
lies the image of the split Table and of surreptitious swords.

I am the queen's servant; while I live
down my eyes the cliff, the carving, the winged things drive,
since the rock, in those fleet lids of rock's hue,
the sculpture, the living sculpture, rose and flew.

Taliessin through Logres (1938)
Charles Williams

New York Times - March 13, 1938

This is one of the most freshly original and delightfully imaginative books for children that have appeared in many a long day. Like "Alice in Wonderland," it comes from Oxford University, where the author is Professor of Anglo-Saxon, and like Lewis Carroll's story, it was written for children that the author knew (in this case his own four children) and then inevitably found a larger audience.

The period of the story is between the age of Faerie and the dominion of men. To an adult who reads of Smaug the Dragon and his hoard, won by the dwarves but claimed also by the Lake men and the Elven King, there may come the thought of how legend and tradition and the beginning of history meet and mingle, but for the reader from 8 to 12 "The Hobbit" is a glorious account of a magnificent adventure, filled with suspense and seasoned with a quiet humor that is irresistible.

Hobbits are (or were) a small people, smaller than dwarves - and they have no beards - but very much larger than liliputians. There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large, stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off. They are inclined to be fat in the stomach; they dress in bright colors, chiefly green and yellow; wear no shoes because their feet grow natural leathery soles and thick, warm brown hair; have long, clever, brown fingers, good-natured faces and laugh deep, fruity laughs (especially after dinner, which they have twice a day, when they can get it).

Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit whom we find living in his comfortable, not to say luxurious, hobbit hole, for it was not a dirty, wet hole, nor yet a bare, sandy one, but inside its round, green door, like a porthole, there were bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries, kitchens and dining rooms, all in the best of hobbit taste. All Bilbo asked was to be left in peace in this residence, known as "Bag-End," for hobbits are naturally homekeeping folk, and Bilbo had no desire for adventure. That is to say, the Baggins' side of him had not, but Bilbo's mother had been a Took, and in the past the Tooks had intermarried with a fairy family. It was the Took strain that made the little hobbit, almost against his will, respond to the summons of Gandalf the Wizard to join the dwarves in their attempt to recover the treasure which Smaug the dragon had stolen from their forefathers. Bilbo has an engaging, as well as an entirely convincing, personality; frankly scornful of the heroic (except in his most Tookish moments), he nevertheless plays his part in emergencies with a dogged courage and resourcefulness that make him in the end the real leader of the expedition.

After the dwarves and Bilbo have passed "The Last Homely House" their way led through Wilderland, over the Misty Mountains and through forests that suggest those of William Morris's prose romances. Like Morris's countries, Wilderland is Faerie, yet it has an earthly quality, the scent of trees drenching rains and the smell of woodfires.

The tale is packed with valuable hints for the dragon killer and adventurer in Faerie. Plenty of scaly monsters have been slain in legend and folktale, but never for modern readers has so complete a guide to dragon ways been provided. Here, too, are set down clearly the distinguishing characteristics of dwarves, goblins, trolls and elves. The account of the journey is so explicit that we can readily follow the progress of the expedition. In this we are aided by the admirable maps provided by the author, which in their detail and imaginative consistency, suggest Bernard Sleigh's "Mappe of Fairyland."

The songs of the dwarves and elves are real poetry, and since the author is fortunate enough to be able to make his own drawings, the illustrations are a perfect accompaniment to the text. Boys and girls from 8 years on have already given "The Hobbit" an enthusiastic welcome, but this is a book with no age limits. All those, young or old, who love a fine adventurous tale, beautifully told, will take "The Hobbit" to their hearts.

Anne T. Eaton
New York Times -- March 13, 1938

A day out...

Sunday 29 October [1922]

Immediately after breakfast I got out my bicycle and started for Forest Hill. It was one of the coldest days we have had and a strong wind in my face all the way. As a result, tho' it cannot have been much about freezing, I was dripping with heat by the time I arrived.

She [Aunt Lily] is in a cottage which I once went to see for us a long time ago. From the windows you look across fields to the ridge of Shotover — she did not know of its connection with Shelley and was glad to hear of it. There is a very pleasant kitchen sitting room.

She has been here for about three days and has snubbed a bookseller in Oxford, written to the local paper, crossed swords with the Vicar's wife, and started a quarrel with her landlord.

The adventure of the Vicar's wife was good. That lady, meeting her in the Forest Hill bus, asked who she was, and promised to call. Aunt Lily said she might call if she liked, but she wasn't going to church. Being asked why, she said she had vowed never to enter any church until the clergy as a body came out in defence of the Dogs Protection Bill. "Oh!" said the priest's wife in horrified amazement, "So you object to vivisection?" "I object to all infamies," replied Aunt L.

Nevertheless the Vicar and his wife came to her all humble at the journey's end and said "Even if you don't come to church, will you come to our whist drive?" She says all parsons look like scolded dogs when you challenge them on this subject.

I refused an invitation to lunch, but stayed till one o'clock. She talked all the time, with her usual even, interminable fluency, on a variety of subjects. Her conversation is like an old drawer, full both of rubbish and valuable things, but all thrown together in great disorder.

C.S. Lewis
‘All My Road Before Me’
Harper Collins 1991

The Lay of the Children of Húrin

Tolkien loved archaic language, in which he often used far beyond the tolerance of the modern reader, when he wrote alliterative verse. He sometimes succumbed to all the temptations the alliterative form offers to a literary scholar: the opportunity to use archaic words to meet the alliterative requirements, the temptation to distort the syntax to meet the rhythmic demands of Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter, and various other sins less besetting, such as the temptation to include filler material for the sake of the meter. However, once tuned into Tolkien's world, the difficulties fall away in a plethora of wonderful, and often terrifying images:

Then Thalion was thrust to Thangorodrim,
that mountain that meets the misty skies
on high o'er the hills that Hithlum sees
blackly brooding on the borders of the north,
To a stool of stone on its steepest peak
they bound him in bonds, an unbreakable chain,
and the Lord of Woe there laughing stood,
then cursed him for ever and his kin and seed
with a doom of dread, of death and horror.
There the mighty man unmoved sat;
but unveiled was his vision, that he viewed afar
all earthly things with his eyes enchanted
that fell on his folk- a fiend's torment.

(The Lay of the Children of Húrin, lines 92-104)

The Geste of Beren and Lúthien

Rivers of fire at dead of night
in winter lying cold and white
upon the plain burst forth, and high
the red was mirrored in the sky.
From Hithlum's walls they saw the fire,
the steam and smoke in spire on spire
leap up, till in confusion vast
the stars were choked. And so it passed,
the mighty field, and turned to dust,
to drifting sand and yellow rust,
to thirsty dunes where many bones
lay broken among barren stones.
Dor-na-Fauglith, Land of Thirst,
they after named it, waste accurst,
the raven-haunted roofless grave
of many fair and many brave.
Thereon the stony slopes look forth
from Deadly Nightshade falling north,
from sombre pines with pinions vast,
black-plumed and drear, as many a mast
of sable-shrouded ships of death
slow wafted on a ghostly breath.

J.R.R. Tolkien
(Lines 3256 to 3277)

Lewis on Ethics

Let us very clearly understand that, in a certain sense, it is no more possible to invent a new ethics than to place a new sun in the sky. Some precept from traditional morality always has to be assumed. We never start from a tabula rasa*; if we did, we should end, ethically speaking, with a tabula rasa.

~ C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, "On Ethics" (1943)

*"blank slate" or "blank page"

Aristotle said that only those who have been well brought up can usefully study ethics: to the corrupted man, the man who stands outside the Tao, the very starting point of this science is invisible.

~C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, (1943)

About Hell

All I have ever said is that the N.T. plainly implies the possibility of some being finally left in 'the outer darkness.' Whether this means (horror of horror) being left to a purely mental existence, left with nothing at all but one's own envy, prurience, resentment, loneliness & self conceit, or whether there is still some sort of environment, something you cd. call a world or a reality, I wd. never pretend to know. But I wouldn't put the question in the form 'do I believe in an actual Hell'. One's own mind is actual enough. If it doesn't seem fully actual now that is because you can always escape from it a bit into the physical world — look out of the window, smoke a cigarette, go to sleep. But when there is nothing for you but your own mind (no body to go to sleep, no books or landscape, no sounds, no drugs) it will be as actual as — as — well, as a coffin is actual to a man buried alive.

C.S. Lewis
(Letter to Arthur Greeves – May 13th 1946)

The Jabberwock

"… the critic metamorphoses into the monster of the jabberwock, an unnatural creature that symbolises… perversion… This creature creates cacophony through a ‘conflicting babel’ of opinion: “For it is of their nature that the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture, flitting from one tum-tum tree to another” (p. 56). They no longer constitute a physical danger to others because of the myopia, which resembles that of the ‘friends’ and ‘descendants’: “Noble animals, whose burbling is on occasion good to hear; but through their eyes of flame may sometimes prove searchlights, their range is short” (p 56). Such shortsightedness hints at a greater spiritual danger to themselves as well as to others, for the ‘conflicting babel’ of their opinions reminds us of the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel, as the epitome of the sin of pride (of course… the critics destroyed the tower of the artist in their pride). Pride and selfishness, myopia, a ‘conflicting babel’ of opinion, destructiveness, chaos, all characterise the critic – truly a monster."

Tolkien’s Art 'A Mythology for England' ~ Jane Chance Nitzsche (Page 12)
Discussing and quoting from ‘The Critic as Monster: Tolkien’s Lectures [1936]

Towards the Gleam - A Review

Just occasionally a book comes along that grasps the reader from the first page, but often disappoints by the time the denouement is reached. T.M. Doran’s ‘Toward the Gleam’ with its sub-Tolkienesque dust-cover, certainly holds the attention from its first words. Indeed Doran’s expert and gradual unveiling of the plot builds the tension to the point that the book is impossible to put down. When the end comes this tension is broken, in the final pages, by one of the most satisfying, and unanticipated twists of narrative.

A fictional account of course, but we guess early on who John Hill, Doran’s hero is. A philologist with children called John, Michael, Christopher and Priscilla it is hardly a leap of logic to see that here we have the Tolkien family. His use of Mr. Hill is particularly amusing to those who remember Mr. Underhill so vividly, and Strider’s words at the Prancing Pony, “A matter of some importance — to us both… you may hear something to your advantage”. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that in this intriguing story, John Hill discovers something to his disadvantage.

Doran’s premise is quite straightforward. John Hill stumbles — in the darkness of a cave — upon a beautifully crafted box which contains a red book of several thousand pages of the finest paper. One might go so far as to say, “A riddle in the dark” Ring any bells? And quite simply he decides to try to decipher the runes and discover the origin of the long lost civilisation of which it was part.

Starting in 1917 when he makes his momentous discovery, John’s quest takes him across Europe to confer with colleagues and scholars, some of whom it seems seek his destruction. We are introduced, in passing, to Jack and Owen in the ‘Bird and Baby’ in Oxford, together with the merest echo of Sauron, in the terrifying presence of John’s adversary in his quest.

Many adjectives have been used to describe the sweep of this novel: Intriguing, moving, mysterious, startling, ingenious, horrifying, imaginative and inventive. I would go so far as to say that if you are a fan of Tolkien’s sub-creation, this book is a must read. Not only will it amuse and entertain, it will drive you back to the “Red Book of Westmarch” itself. Wonderful.

Reading Charles Williams: A Prolegomena

The work of Charles Walter Stanley Williams (1888-1945) is not likely to spawn a blockbuster motion picture, although I would like to see one of the better directors such as Wim Wenders or Guillermo Del Toro take a crack at All Hallow’s Eve. He is a cinematic practioner of what is called Magical Realism, and could come close to the eerie sense of Supernaturalism interpenetrating and existing “under, with, and in” the elements of ordinary waking life that is the food and drink of Williams’ work.

Charles Williams doesn’t enjoy the celebrity of his better known colleagues among the Inklings, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis for several reasons. First of all, I don’t believe that he is nearly as good a writer of prose as either Lewis or Tolkien. There is a lot of churn in his narrative, it is hard to tell sometimes what is going on, and he has the bad habit of obscuring his thought with what appears to be a private language.

This is especially true when he treats religious or theological material. At times he can be deciphered when he refers to a well-defined dogma of the Church in a new or novel way, but what keeps me coming back to Williams is the suspicion that, buried in the idiosyncracies of his language are orthodox truths that have been neglected or under-scrutinized and that Williams alone of all his contemporaries has been mining these neglected nodes and wrenching some fresh jewels from them.

A second complaint that I have about Williams is that his characters are not very well developed. Now that I think about it, vivid characterization is not a hallmark of either Lewis or Tolkien either. Puddleglum is Lewis’ best fictional creation, as Éowyn is Tolkien’s. Puddleglum doesn’t attain to much more than a burlesque, and Éowyn is a very minor character. If you want vivid characters, you’re better off reading Virginia Woolf or Graham Greene.

But Williams’ characters are even more iconic than anything in Lewis or Tolkien. Quite often, they exist to illustrate or incarnate one or another of the theological virtues or one or another of the Seven Deadly Sins. Justice or Temperance is who leaps off the pages at you, not a just or temperate person. And those are the good characters. Whereas in Tolkien, the evil characters have an industrial proletarian cast to them, and Lewis’ evil characters are usually consumed by some evil ideology, Williams’ villains are stultifyingly bland.

Then, finally, for Evangelical readers, Williams is obscure because he is the least Evangelical of the Inklings, as Lewis is the most. In Williams’ novels, the evil machinations of the villains are almost always undone not by heroic virtue or right belief, but often by simple courtesy, kindness, or pardon; the sort that would be sought by a middle-class housewife of her neighbor after her dog had dug up her neighbor’s gladiolas. Natural virtue gets short shrift, referred to as “works-righteousness’ or “filthy rags”, but it takes a Williams to get us to notice that natural virtue was God’s original plan, and that the small, insignificant acts of goodness we perform every day can be transformed by grace to become the building blocks of an unshakeable castle.

(from ‘A Mule In The Chapter House’ – Another (and far more literate) Inklings Blog) 7th June 2007

Jack and Joy

Joy (then) Gresham at her second meeting (September 1952) with Jack and Warnie, on being given a single glass of sherry before their meal, “I call this civilized. In the States, they give you so much hard stuff that you start the meal drunk and end with a hangover.” She attacked modern American literature... “Mind you, I wrote that sort of bunk myself when I was young. Small farm life was the only good life", she said. Jack spoke up then. Saying that, on his father’s side, he came from farming stock, “I felt that,” she said.“Where else could you get the vitality?”

George Sayer, ‘Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times’

Assessing Lewis as a broadcaster

Lewis made the connection with the audience as strongly as he could in this first broadcast. He insists that he is not preaching, and in common failings such as broken promises and excuses for bad behaviour he is no different to anyone else. He ends by saying that we can't shake off the idea that we know how to behave but in practice don't do so. We break the Law of Nature. Realising this is in fact the basis for all clear thinking.

The first talk set the tone for the remainder of the series. Lewis had found a style that suited him and the listener. It was direct, colloquial and intellectually challenging. Only one recording survives of a single talk from Lewis's eventual four series for the BBC. There is a simple explanation for this. Live broadcasts offered a number of critical advantages over pre-recorded talks. First, a live talk has an immediacy and direct conversational approach that a pre-recorded broadcast can seldom match.

Second, once cleared by the censor, a talk could be broadcast without delay. A pre-recorded talk might need to be re-recorded if circumstances had changed between the recording and broadcast.

Third, recording was an expensive process. All recordings were made on"twelve-inch metal discs with a coating of cellulose acetate. A steel needle cut the sound track into the disc, producing four minutes of airtime. With metal a costly and scarce resource, recordings were not made of studio broadcasts unless there was a special justification such as historic interest. Reporters in the field had to rely on discs entirely however to record the sounds of war.

JUSTIN PHILLIPS
C.S. Lewis at the BBC
P 121.

C.S. Lewis' first broadcast

The first talk sets out the theme for the whole series. Lewis's very first sentence and what follows is what journalists would call a 'grabber'. It engages you right away.

Every one has heard people quarrelling. . . . 'That's my seat, I was there first' - 'Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm' - 'Why should you shove me in first?' - 'Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine' - 'How'd you like it if anyone did the same to your' — 'Come on, you promised.'

The point Lewis makes is that each of us appeals to or falls back upon a standard of behaviour to which we hold others to account. We may call it lots of things, decency or fair-play, or even morality, The point of a quarrel is to prove someone else is wrong and you are right, This makes no sense unless both sides have some agree¬ment of what is right and what is wrong, just as a foul in football, for instance, means nothing unless both sides are playing to the same rules.

The rest of the talk follows in the same vein, probing and cla¬rifying, using plenty of illustrations that would ring true. He under¬lines the assumption we make that the human idea of decent behaviour is universal. If not, then all that is said about the war is nonsense: 'What is the sense in saying the enemy are in the wrong unless right is a real thing which the Germans at bottom know as well as we do and ought to practise?' This sentence, written at the height of the war, is simply put into the past tense when published in Mere Christianity. The ideas that Lewis explores on natural law do not date with the passage of time. One of the keys to Lewis's appeal was his willingness to identify wholly with the listener and to reject any sense of preaching or speaking down to people. He says that none of us succeeds in keeping the law of nature. 'If there are any exceptions among you', he tells the listener, 'I apologise to them. They'd better switch on to another station, for nothing I'm going to say concerns them.' It takes a brave broadcaster to invite listeners to switch off. Lewis could take the risk because he knew that no listeners would consider themselves to be morally perfect, certainly not in August 1941.

Justin Phillips
C.S. Lewis at the BBC
(p. 120)

Charles Williams on P.G. Wodehouse

Barbara stretched out her hands, and Lionel pulled her to her feet. "I just want to shimmer up, like Jeeves, not walk," she said. "Do you like Jeeves, Mr. Persimmons?"

Jeeves?" Gregory asked. "I don't think I know it or him or them."

"Oh, you must," Barbara cried. "When I get back to London I'll send you a set."

"It's a book, or a man in a book," Lionel interrupted. "Barbara adores it."

"Well, so do you," Barbara said. "You always snigger when you read him."

"That is the weakness of the flesh," Lionel said. "One whouldn't snigger over Jeeves any more than one should snivel over Othello. Perfect art is beyond these easy emotions. I think Jeeves -- the whole book, preferably with the illustrations -- one of the final classic perfections of our time. It attains absolute being. Jeeves and his employer are one and yet diverse. It is the Don Quixote of the twentieth century."

"I must certainly read it," Gregory said, laughing. "Tell me more about it while we have tea."

War In Heaven (Eerdmans 1978), page 157-8
Charles Williams 1930

Elizabeth Taylor's connection to the Inklings

As we all know, Elizabeth Taylor died yesterday, perhaps a good time to remember her connection with one of the Inklings.

Richard Jenkins won a scholarship to the University of Oxford at just 16; he adopted his teacher's surname (Phillip Burton) and made his first stage performance in Oxford as an extra, scrubbing steps. Soon Burton's extraordinary stage presence - one of his famous trademarks - was said to distract the audience from the Shakespearean play! However, his studies at Oxford lasted only six months 1942-3.

Much later in his career, Burton co-directed (along with Inkling Neville Coghill) a labour of love that records a performance given by Burton at Oxford University in 1966 of Christopher Marlowe's 400-year-old verse play. Burton plays Faust, a medieval doctor who sells his soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for mastering all human knowledge. The Devil tempts Faust at every turn by confronting him with the seven deadly sins, and with Helen of Troy (Elizabeth Taylor), who appears throughout the film in various stages of undress.

The production was filmed in Rome, with the majority of the cast amateur actors from the University of Oxford. (I understand that a video of the movie can still be obtained).

Very interesting man Coghill...

JRRT to Christopher Tolkien

[Image: Paul Nash]

10 April 1944

I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days - quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil - historically considered. But the historic version is, of course, not the only one. All things and all deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their "causes" and "effects." No man can estimate what is really happening sub specie aeternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labors with vast power and perpetual success - in vain: preparing always the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.

- from "The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien"

Of Tuor and his coming to Gondolin

My father said more than once that "The Fall of Gondolin" was the first of the tales of the First Age to be composed, and there is no evidence to set against his recollection. In a letter of 1964 he declared that he wrote it "'out of my head' during sick-leave from the army in 1917," and at other times he gave the date as 1916 or 1916-17. In a letter to me written in 1944 he said: "I first began to write [The Silmarillion] in army huts, crowded, filled with the noise of gramophones": and indeed some lines of verse in which appear the Seven Names of Gondolin are scribbled on the back of a piece of paper setting out "the chain of responsibility in a battalion." The earliest manuscript is still in existence, filling two small school exercise-books; it was written rapidly in pencil, and then, for much of its course, overlaid with writing in ink, and heavily emended. On the basis of this text my mother, apparently in 1917, wrote out a fair copy; but this in turn was further substantially emended, at some time that I cannot determine, but probably in 1919-20, when my father was in Oxford on the staff of the then still uncompleted Dictionary. In the spring of 1920 he was invited to read a paper to the Essay Club of his college (Exeter); and he read "The Fall of Gondolin." The notes of what he intended to say by way of introduction of his "essay" still survive. In these he apologised for not having been able to produce a critical paper, and went on: "Therefore I must read something already written, and in desperation I have fallen back on this Tale. It has of course never seen the light before... . A complete cycle of events in an Elfinesse of my own imagining has for some time past grown up (rather, has been constructed) in my mind. Some of the episodes have been scribbled down... . This tale is not the best of them, but it is the only one that has so far been revised at all and that, insufficient as that revision has been, I dare read aloud."

The tale of Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin (as "The Fall of Gondolin" is entitled in the early MSS) remained untouched for many years, though my father at some stage, probably between 1926 and 1930, wrote a brief, compressed version of the story to stand as part of The Silmarillion (a title which, incidentally, first appeared in his letter to The Observer of 20 February 1938); and this was changed subsequently to bring it into harmony with altered conceptions in other parts of the book. Much later he began work on an entirely refashioned account, entitled "Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin." It seems very likely that this was written in 1951, when The Lord of the Rings was finished but its publication doubtful. Deeply changed in style and bearings, yet retaining many of the essentials of the story written in his youth, "Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin" would have given in fine detail the which legend that constitutes the brief 23rd chapter of the published Silmarillion, but, grievously, he went no further than the coming of Tuor and Voronwë to the last gate and Tuor's sight of Gondolin across the plain of Tumladen. To his reasons for abandoning it there is no clue.

It is thus the remarkable fact that the only full account that my father ever wrote of the story of Tuor's sojourn in Gondolin, his union with Idril Celebrindal, the birth of Eärendil, the treachery of Maeglin, the sack of the city, and the escape of the fugitives - a story that was a central element in his imagination of the First Age - was the narrative composed in his youth.

Christopher Tolkien (1961) Preface to The Book of Lost Tales 2
Harper Collins

'One who dreams alone'

A pale, drawn man sits in a convalescent bed of a wartime hospital. He takes up a school exercise book and writes on its cover, with a calligraphic flourish: 'Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin'. Then he pauses, lets out a long sigh between the teeth clenched around his pipe, and mutters, 'No, that won't do anymore.' He crosses out the title and writes (without the flourish): 'A Subaltern on the Somme'.

That is not what happened, of course. Tolkien produced a mythology, not a trench memoir. Middle-earth contradicts the prevalent view of literary history, that the Great War finished off the epic and heroic traditions in any serious form. This postscript will argue that despite its unorthodoxy - and quite contrary to its undeserved reputation as escapism - Tolkien's writing reflects the impact of the war; furthermore, that his maverick voice expresses aspects of the war experience neglected by his contemporaries. This is not to say that his mythology was a response to the poetry and prose of his contemporaries, but that they represent widely divergent responses to the same traumatic epoch.

Literature hit a crisis point in 1916, in the assessment of critic Samuel Hynes: 'a "dead spot" at the centre of the war' when 'creative energies seemed to sink to a low point' among British writers. G. B. Smith and his poetry were both languishing on the Somme; 'sheer vacancy is destroying me', he said. A very different writer, Ford Madox Ford, was in a similar rut at Ypres, asking himself 'why I can write nothing - why I cannot even think anything that to myself seems worth thinking'.

John Garth
Tolkien and the Great War
Harper Collins (2003)

Venus, from 'The Planets'

Venus voyages... but my voice falters;
Rude rime-making wrongs her beauty,
Whose breasts and brow, and her breath's sweetness
Bewitch the worlds. Wide-spread the reign
Of her secret sceptre, in the sea's caverns,
In grass growing, and grain bursting,
Flower unfolding, and flesh longing,
And shower falling sharp in April.
The metal copper in the mine reddens
With muffled brightness, like muted gold,
By her fingers form'd. Far beyond her
The heaven's highway hums and trembles,
Drums and dindles, to the driv'n thunder

C. S. Lewis, The Planets (1937)

Saturn, from 'The Planets'

Goes SATURN silent in the seventh region,
The skirts of the sky. Scant grows the light,
Sickly, uncertain (the Sun's finger
Daunted with darkness). Distance hurts us,
And the vault severe of vast silence;
Where fancy fails us, and fair language,
And love leaves us, and light fails us
And Mars fails us, and the mirth of Jove
Is as tin tinkling. In tattered garment,
Weak with winters, he walks forever
A weary way, wide round the heav'n,
Stoop'd and stumbling, with staff groping,
The lord of lead. He is the last planet
Old and ugly. His eye fathers
Pale pestilence, pain of envy,
Remorse and murder. Melancholy drink
(For bane or blessing) of bitter wisdom
He pours out for his people, a perilous draught
That the lip loves not. We leave all things
To reach the rim of the round welkin,
Heaven's heritage, high and lonely.

C. S. Lewis, The Planets (1937)

Saturn, whose name in the heavens is Lurga, stood in the Blue Room. His spirit lay upon the house, or even on the whole Earth, with a cold pressure such as might flatten the very orb of Tellus to a wafer. Matched against the lead-like burden of his antiquity the other gods themselves perhaps felt young and ephemeral. It was a mountain of centuries sloping up from the highest antiquity we can conceive, up and up like a mountain whose summit never comes into sight, not to eternity where the thought can rest, but into more and still more time, into freezing wastes and silence of unnameable numbers. It was also strong like a mountain; its age was no mere morass of time where imagination can sink in reverie, but a living, self-remembering duration which repelled lighter intelligences from its structure as granite flings back waves, itself unwithered and undecayed but able to wither any who approach it unadvised. ...

C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, Chapter 15: Descent of the Gods (1945)

Jupiter, from 'The Planets'

In February 2003, Revd Dr Michael Ward, Chaplain of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge was reading the section of “The Planets” that deals with Jove, or Jupiter, when he was struck by its resonance with “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”. The poem speaks of “winter passed / And guilt forgiven” and goes on to give what is, Ward opines, ‘essentially a plot summary’ of the first book in the Narnia Chronicles:

Joy and jubilee. It is JOVE's orbit,
Filled and festal, faster turning
With arc ampler. From the Isles of Tin
Tyrian traders, in trouble steering
Came with his cargoes; the Cornish treasure
That his ray ripens. Of wrath ended
And woes mended, of winter passed
And guilt forgiven, and good fortune
Jove is master; and of jocund revel,
Laughter of ladies. The lion-hearted,
The myriad-minded, men like the gods,
Helps and heroes, helms of nations
Just and gentle, are Jove's children,
Work his wonders. On his white forehead
Calm and kingly, no care darkens
Nor wrath wrinkles: but righteous power
And leisure and largess their loose splendours
Have wrapped around him--a rich mantle
Of ease and empire. Up far beyond.

C. S. Lewis, The Planets (1937)

Silly Adventure Stories

Dear Phyllida,

Thanks for your most interesting cards. How do you get the gold so good? Whenever I tried to use it, however golden it looked on the shell, it always looked only like rough brown on the paper. Is it that you have some trick with the brush that I never learned, or that gold paint is better now than when I was a boy! [...]

I'm not quite sure what you meant about "silly adventure stories without my point". If they are silly, then having a point won't save them. But if they are good in themselves, and if by a "point" you mean some truth about the real world which which one can take out of the story, I'm not sure that I agree. At least, I think that looking for a "point" in that sense may prevent one sometimes from getting the real effect of the story in itself - like listening too hard for the words in singing which isn't meant to be listened to that way (like an anthem in a chorus). I'm not at all sure about all this, mind you: only thinking as I go along.

We have two American boys in the house at present, aged 8 and 6 1/2. Very nice. They seem to use much longer words than English boys of that age would: not showing off, but just because they don't seem to know the short words. But they haven't as good table manners as English boys of the same sort would. [...]

yours,
C.S. Lewis

Letters to Children (letter of Dec 18 1953)

C.S. Lewis by Owen Barfield (In Verse)

[Owen Barfield]

A year after Lewis' death, one of the lesser members (to many) of the Inklings,

Owen Barfield, memorialised his friend in the following:

You came to him: when will you come to me?
He knows what matters from what matters not.
I hurry to and fro and seem to be.
New tasks, new faces . . . (tiny sir, so hot?
As though there were a future for success?
He knows what matters from what matters not).
I catch sight of your unaverted face
Between two eager places . . . thus the day
Is punctuated by the silences
With which you answer every time I say:--
You came to him; when will you come to me?
O time! O night! O sun's recurring ray!
I shall forget again, as I'd forgot,
Before I crossed the Campus yesterday:--
He knows what matters now, what matters not.

Charles Williams in "Looking for the King" (II)

"What is this Holy Grail we hear so much about?" asked Williams, pacing back and forth so rapidly that Tom could hear keys or coins clinking in his pocket. "Is the Grail the holy chalice used by Jesus on the night of the Last Supper? Is it a cup in which Joseph of Arimathea caught drops of Christ's blood as he was stretched out on the cross?" Again, Williams peered into individual faces, speaking to over a hundred people, but giving each one the impression he was talking just to him. "Or perhaps you favor the Loomis school: the Grail is a bit of 'faded mythology', a Celtic cauldron of plenty that somehow got lugged into Arthurian lore?"

Williams paced back and forth some more, throwing his hands into the air, as if to say, who can answer all these imponderable questions? Then he plunged in again: "There is no shortage of texts on the subject. Let's start with Chretien de Troyes: Percival, or the Story of the Grail, written sometime in the 1180s. This is the first known account of the Grail. The young knight Percival sits at banquet at the castle Carbonek and sees an eerie procession—a young man carrying a bleeding lance, two boys with gold candelabra, then finally a fair maid with a jeweled grail, a platter bearing the wafer of the Holy Mass. Percival doesn't ask what it all means and thereby brings a curse upon himself and on the land." Williams surveyed the crowd again, as if waiting for someone to stand and explain all this to him. The room was silent as a church at midnight, so Williams went on, listing all the famous medieval texts and their retellings of the Grail legend, noting how their dates clustered around the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

"So much for the literary versions", he continued. "But what is this Grail really"? What lies behind the texts? Some describe it as a cup or bowl, some as a stone, some as a platter. The word grail, by the way, comes from the Latin gradalis, more like a shallow dish, or a paten, than a chalice." After another strategic pause, Williams exclaimed, almost in a shout, "How extraordinary! Here we have what some would call the holiest relic in Christendom, and no one seems to know what it looks like."

Pacing some more, as if trying to work off an excess of agitation and intellectual energy, Williams went back to the lectern and leaned on it heavily...

David C. Downing
Looking for the King (Chapter 3)
Ignatius Press 2010

Charles Williams from "Looking for the King" (I)

"Tom crossed the quad, following others through a large wooden door and into a narrow passageway that led to the Divinity School. Emerging from the dark corridor in to the lecture hall, Tom instantly changed his mind about the Bodleian. Entering the Divinity School room was like moving from darkness to light, from confinement to liberation, from all that weighs down the spirit to all that makes it soar. The whole room was suffused with an amber glow, the afternoon sun warming the cream-colored walls, which seemed to radiate a light all their own.

The whole interior commanded Tom to look up. The floor was unadorned flagstone covered with rows of wooden chairs. But the lofty arched windows with delicate tracery carried his eyes upward toward the ceiling, where he saw rows of ornately carved pendants, hanging like lanterns, each one radiating fan-shaped curves, like shafts of light chiseled in stone. The plain stone floor and the portable chairs, crouching humbly under that magnificent vaulted ceiling, seemed to suggest that all the richness and gladness of life comes not from the plane on which we live and walk but from higher planes of intellect, imagination, learning, and faith.

The chairs in the lecture hall began filling quickly, even as Tom was admiring the room. He had wondered what sort of audience a publisher's editor would attract, and he soon had his answer. He found a seat near the center, about five rows back, before every seat was taken as the clock neared three. There were a few men who looked like dons scattered around the room, but most of the listeners were about Tom's age, with more women in the crowd than he had seen in any one place since arriving at Oxford.

Precisely at three o'clock, Mr. Charles Williams stepped briskly to the lectern. He was a tall man in his fifties with wavy hair, wearing a black gown and gold-rimmed spectacles. Tom was not accustomed to lecturers wearing academic gowns, so his first sight of Williams made him think of a priest or wizard. Williams briefly surveyed his listeners and smiled. The furrows on his cheeks ran all the way down to his jaw, giving the impression that someone had placed his mouth in parentheses. Tom heard someone in the row behind him whisper the word ugly, but that was not quite accurate. There was a look of energetic intelligence in Williams' face, the owlish eyes and simian jaw giving a sense of endearing homeliness, not mere coarseness.

Williams set down his notes and hardly glanced at them again for the next hour. "Did any of you buy a newspaper this morning?" he began. There was a hint of Cockney in his voice, an accent that certainly wouldn't impress the person who had whispered the word ugly. Abandoning the lectern, Williams paced back and forth in front of the room, looking into individual faces for the answer to his question. Several nodded that they had, and Williams smiled to see his hypothesis confirmed. "You offered a coin and received a newspaper in return. A mutually satisfactory transaction. That is the life of the city. Exchange." Williams paced briskly back toward the lectern and continued: "And thus you took one step closer to the Holy Grail." Pausing to let this comment have its effect, Williams came out toward his listeners again and asked, "Did any of you hold a door open for someone today? Did you help someone who'd dropped an armful of books?" Seeing a few nods in the audience, Williams smiled again and continued: "Giving your effort, your labor, for someone else, perhaps a stranger—courtesy, yes. But also substitution. Another step in your quest for the Grail."

David C. Downing
Looking for the King (Chapter 3)
Ignatius Press 2010