Category Archive: Literature
The 13 Clocks
While in another sort of book, this would be incredibly purple prose, in James Thurbur’s The 13 Clocks it’s delightful and I had a great time reading it to my daughter as she snuggled in bed, eyes peaking over the covers she’d pulled up around her:
The brambles and the thorns grew thick and thicker in a ticking thicket of bickering crickets. Farther along and stronger, bonged the gongs of a throng of frogs, green and vivid on their lily pads. From the sky came the crying of flies, and the pilgrims leaped over a bleating sheep creeping knee-deep in a sleepy stream, in which swift and slippery snakes slid and slithered silkily, whispering sinful secrets (p. 73).
My daughter loves suspense and loves the scary parts of good stories. I love that about her. I often pause in the middle and ask if I should stop there, and she says, “No!” When I ask why, she says, “Because I love it!”
And so she loved the parts about the Todal, which looks like a blob of glup, is made entirely of lip, makes a sound like rabbits screaming, smells of old, unopened rooms, and moves like monkeys and like shadows, and I loved seeing her pull the covers higher until they’re just below her gleaming eyes.
Books I Enjoyed Most in 2008
For several years now, usually in January, I have posted a list of the books I enjoyed most during the previous year. This year, it got delayed. But here, at long last, are the books I enjoyed most in 2008, listed in alphabetical order:
* Joan Aiken, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. This is the first of Aiken’s alternate-England series and the only one I’ve read. I read it aloud with Moriah in the January and February nights leading up to the birth of our son, and we both enjoyed it a lot.
* Andi Ashworth, Real Love for Real Life: The Art and Work of Caring. Superb. This book reshaped the way I viewed a lot of my caring work as a pastor. See all the quotations from this book elsewhere on this blog.
* Edward Ardizzone, Tim to the Rescue and Tim and Lucy Go to Sea. I mentioned Ardizzone’s Tim series last year and these two volumes are on the list for this year. Wonderful art and good adventures. I see that last year, when I listed Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain, I didn’t mention one of my favorite scenes: Tim sitting on the edge of his chair in the old sea captain’s home, with a big jar of tobacco on the mantle of the fireplace and a bottle of grog by the captain’s side. The text says something about the captain telling Tim sea stories and sometimes allowing him to have a little sip of grog, “which made Tim want to go to sea even more.” Do you ever find that sort of thing in today’s children’s stories? I should also mention that Ardizzone did the illustrations for an edition of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales which I read repeatedly and enjoyed greatly this Christmas season.
* Doris Betts, Souls Raised from the Dead. Some parts of this story didn’t work for me, and it dragged a bit in the middle. Nor am I sure what exactly to make of the ending. Still, in places it was very moving. Okay, that’s not a rave review and my memory of the book is now fuzzy enough that I can’t recall why I rated it as highly as I did when I first read it. But there you are. I must have liked it for some reason.
* Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth. A beautiful and powerful work. Few authors present the beauty of ordinary life and the beauty of hard work as well as Berry does. How can you spot a good guy in a Wendell Berry novel? One clue is that his workspace is organized, all his tools are put away or his fences are mended or he has mastered the skills of his work.
Two passage stand out in my mind, both involving the character Old Jack, who lives in a boarding house. In one, he goes to see his old farm and notices how well the man who is leasing it is farming the land. In another, he gets fed up with sitting around and waiting to die and goes out to cultivate the entire back yard. Both are remarkably moving considering that farming is not one of the topics most people find gripping, I suspect. At the same time, though I’ve heard that Berry is a Christian, it seems to me that there’s something almost Stoic going on here. Not Stoic in the sense that a true Stoic is emotionless, but Stoic in the sense of “there’s nothing else you can do except bear the pain and keep going.” Surely the gospel offers something more than that, and so there seems to me to be a deep emptiness in this novel.
* John Buchan, The Path of the King. This is a collection of stories all based on the idea that “blood will out.” The first story presents a boy who is the son of Norse king, and so “royal blood” runs in the veins of all his descendants, whether they are rich or poor, good or evil, and so forth. Each story shows you another descendant, and you can trace the line all the way down to … Abraham Lincoln, the “last of the kings.”
The whole “blood will out” thing strikes me as silly, though I imagine a lot of people have bought into it over the years. So just ignore it and enjoy the stories. Some of them are better than others, but many of them are particularly good.
* James P. Blaylock, Land of Dreams. The blurb on the front cover of the edition I own compares the book to Ray Bradbury, likely with his Something Wicked This Way Comes in mind. That’s because this book, too, involves kids and a carnival. But it’s really nothing like Bradbury. Bradbury’s book is great, but this isn’t an imitation of it. This is vintage Blaylock, complete with weird twists, lots of humor, and a rambling plot involving food. A lot of fun.
Speaking of fun, here’s the epigram at the beginning of the book:
Saint-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter XX, which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter XXXIX, which is hearing the band play in the gardens. — Robert Louis Stevenson, “An Apology for Idlers.”
* Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part One: From Adam to Noah, Genesis I to VI 8. Cassuto is a very careful commentator and, even though he’s sometimes wrong, always worth reading because he discusses and notices things others often ignore.
* Mark Driscoll, The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out Without Selling Out. I read this book for the second time last year. There are some areas where I disagree with Driscoll, but there is still so much helpful stuff here that I’ve included it on this list.
* David C. Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith. See my blog entry for an appreciative review of this book.
* Warren Austin Gage, The Gospel of Genesis: Studies in Protology and Eschatology. I argued with this book at least as much as I agreed with it. You can find some interaction with Gage elsewhere on this blog. Sometime, I may post my lengthy list of disagreements. At the same time, there was enough good stuff, and (what is sometimes equally important) enough thought-provoking stuff, that I included on this list.
* David Hansen, The Art of Pastoring: Ministry without All the Answers. An excellent book on pastoring. Early in the book, Hansen talks about his predecessor, whose ministry seemed to be fad-driven. Hansen himself says that early in his ministry he fell into task-driven ministry, checking off items on his To Do list. Now, however, he says that he really doesn’t work. What’s the essence of his day as a pastor? “I read the Bible, pray, and visit with friends.”
Of course, that entails a lot of other stuff, but that really is the heart of the pastor’s work. In fact, after reading this book, I’ve sometimes said that it seems as if the pastor ought to be the guy who has leisure and free time so that he can spend his time with you. So much of my pastoral work in the community happens when I’m sitting in coffeeshops reading, and so much more of it happens when I’m visiting with friends.
This book caused me to reevaluate a lot of what I have been doing in ministry, and I’m still reevaluating and changing as a result.
* Judith Jones, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food. Never heard of Judith Jones? That’s not surprising. But you’ve heard of people she’s worked with. Jones was the food editor at Knopf who brought out such books as Julia Child’s big fat volumes on French cooking, among many others. Although this book, while interesting, tended to become a brief discussion of various cookbook writers, it’s included here to reflect my enjoyment of her discussion of food.
And while I’m talking about food here, let me say that one of the books I enjoyed most this year is one I didn’t read all the way through: Marion Cunningham’s The Breakfast Book. With the help of this book, I have become the breakfast chef at our house. We’ve been feasting on custard filled cornbread, wonderful buttermilk pancakes, ginger pancakes with green mango fool, superbly tangy lemon pancakes with raspberry jam, fluffy cream biscuits, butter basted eggs, and a host of other breakfast edibles.
* Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Another food book. I don’t know that I buy everything in this book, but I certainly did enjoy Kingsolver’s love of local, in-season food.
* Peter Leithart, The Baptized Body. A very helpful book, focusing on the question of what baptism actually does to the person being baptized. Leithart uncovers the assumptions about the world and about people that underlie infant baptism and believer baptism, challenges some of the terminology we often use when we talk about baptism (e.g., “sacrament,” “means of grace”), deals with the problem of apostasy, and includes a helpful fairy tale of sorts.
* Peter Leithart, Solomon Among the Postmoderns. All too brief, this book may show you that you’re more postmodern than you think. Leithart deals fairly with postmodernism, points out ways in which its critique of modernism is helpful, and shows how biblical wisdom is even more helpful still.
* C. S. Lewis, All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922-1927 and Collected Letters Volume 1: Family Letters 1905-1931. I have been reading through Lewis’s letters, accompanied by his diary for the years he kept one, for over a year now with great enjoyment and great benefit. In one of his early letters, Lewis comments (to his father, if I recall correctly) about those people who die and have their letters published in multiple volumes. How do they manage to write so many? This volume, which is itself 1057 pages long, is the first of three. I’ve been reading at the rate of roughly five pages a day on weekdays, which may be the best way to do it. Along the way, I have learned a lot about Lewis’s early life and especially the period leading up to his conversion and his return to the faith and to the church.
*C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. I have read this one several times recently, this time to our weekly Bible study group, and each time the reading has been profitable. There is a load of wisdom here!
* Gene Logsdon, The Contrary Farmer. 2008 was my agrarian year, or at least an introduction to it. No, I’m not really an agrarian. But I do believe that the agrarian writers often have a lot of wisdom to offer. Logsdon’s book contained a lot of material about farming that I don’t need to know at this point, but I found it all quite enjoyable.
* George MacDonald, Phantastes. This is the book that C. S. Lewis said “baptized” his imagination. I don’t pretend to understand it, though I can catch glimpses of what the allegorical elements might mean. Highly strange, but fun.
* A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. I don’t remember that I ever read these when I was a child. What I missed! Now, I’ve had the pleasure of reading them to my daughter and then retelling them again in the evening, sitting by her bed in the dark before she goes to sleep. It’s a shame to think that someone has now been authorized to write more official stories about these characters. Leave them alone. They’re perfect as they are.
* Alice Munro, Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories. Munro is a master of the short story.
* Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. I don’t know enough about farming and food to evaluate everything Pollan says here. But there’s a lot of good stuff in these books, and Pollan writes well. What I appreciated most about the second one is Pollan’s rejection of “nutritionism”: “Don’t eat nutrients; eat food.”
* Dave Ramsey, Financial Peace Revisited and The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness. Very practical. I wish I had learned this stuff earlier!
* Joel Salatin, Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer’s Guide to Farm Friendly Food. While it isn’t beautifully written and while I quibble with parts of it from time to time, I appreciated Salatin’s tips on buying good food from farmers.
* Eric Sloane, Diary of an Early American Boy: Noah Blake 1805 and A Reverence for Wood. These are beautiful books, full of the sort of lore about such things as barn building and the way old mills work that people knew in the past but have largely forgotten today. Sloane hasn’t forgotten.
* Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. Very enjoyable travel narrative.
* Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie. Again, I didn’t read these when I was growing up. I don’t know how I missed them. Maybe I thought they were for girls, though I’m pretty sure my sister didn’t read them either. But I’m glad I’ve read them now, with my daughter snuggled in my lap, getting ready for bed.
* Douglas Wilson, Future Men. Very solid stuff on raising boys. I have one now, and I’m realizing how I have to change and mature to be his father. Recently, I’ve been going back through this book a page at a time and praying for my children with regard to whatever is on that page.
* P. G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves. Very funny.
* Gene Wolfe, Pirate Freedom. When I read this book, I didn’t think there was much to it. It’s a pirate story, but Wolfe skips over some of the parts I expected to be the most exciting, and it’s introduced as a sort of time travel story. Later, when I read some of what others have written about it, I realized it was far more complicated and puzzling than I first thought. Ask yourself, “If the main character traveled back in time at the beginning of the story, who else might have done so? And what’s really going on here anyway?”
* Gene Wolfe, Starwater Strains. Short stories, some better than others.
* N. T. Wright, Simply Christian. Marred by a few things, this is really a very good book of apologetics, a helpful introduction to the faith.
* Vinita Hampton Wright, Dwelling Places. A very good novel.
Dandelion Fire
Nate Wilson’s new book, Dandelion Fire isn’t out yet. Any day, now. But this interview might whet your appetite. I especially appreciated this part:
Would you say that the series has an overarching spiritual message?
Not in the way that most people would think of a “spiritual message.” But also yes. Sure it does — in the same way that life has an overarching spiritual message. Only my stories are distilled and stylized. There are a lot of themes that run through the books, but one of the most important things I’ve tried to communicate is a sense of wonder. I want kids to close the book and step back into their own world with wide eyes, marveling at the grass and the wind and the sun and the trees. In some ways, this is anti-escapism. Don’t grow bored with this world and lose yourself in books. Lose yourself in books to wake up in this world. Nothing I can paint with words could ever surpass the artistry in any child’s backyard — the earth beneath, the sky above, the many narratives between.
Inkling?
In his brief review of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, published in The Times Literary Supplement (Oct. 2, 1937), C. S. Lewis writes:
To define the world of The Hobbit is, of course, impossible, because it is new. You cannot anticipate it before you go there, as you cannot forget it once you have gone. The author’s admirable illustrations and maps of Mirkwood and Goblingate and Esgaroth give one an inkling — and so do the names of the dwarf and dragon that catch our eyes as we first ruffle the pages. — C. S. Lewis, “The Hobbit,” Of This and Other Worlds, p. 110.
One word jumped out at me in those sentences. Given that Lewis and Tolkien were both members of The Inklings, where Tolkien also read aloud from his writings, is it possible that Lewis deliberately included the word “inkling” in his review as a sort of inside joke, an allusion to the group, a wink in their direction?
The Most Reluctant Convert
For some time now, I’ve been reading through C. S. Lewis’s Collected Letters. I’ve finished Volume 1, together with his diary, All My Road Before Me, and now I’m well on my way through Volume 2. The first volume ends with Lewis returning to the faith and to the church, and so when I reached that point, I paused to read David C. Downing‘s recent book The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith.
Downing is perhaps best known for his book Planets in Peril, a highly regarded study of Lewis’s Ransom trilogy. More recently, he has written Into the Wardrobe, an in-depth treatment of the Chronicles of Narnia. Both books are very helpful for understanding Lewis’s writing.
One might wonder why, in between these literary studies, Downing would bother to write a book about Lewis’s conversion. The story is familiar to most fans of C. S. Lewis, not only because Lewis himself wrote a book about it but also because it is central in most biographies of Lewis. The story has been told repeatedly. And yet Downing tells it again.
We should be glad he did. Downing’s account does not simply repeat the things Lewis discusses in Surprised by Joy; he draws on many other sources to put together a much fuller account of Lewis’s early life, leading up to his return to faith.
Along the way, I learned many things that I hadn’t from other sources. Downing begins with Lewis’s childhood in Ireland and paying special attention to how the conflict between Protestants and Catholics played out in Lewis’s own family.  He raises the question of how the death of Lewis’s mother affected his early childhood faith.
In the next chapter, Downing discusses Lewis’s boyhood years, spent in England at school, including one school that was particularly horrible. Lewis and his brother begged their father to rescue them from the school. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis says that his father chose this school.  But Downing points out that the only member of Lewis’s family to have actually seen the school, and the one who recommended it after touring it, was not Lewis’s father but rather his mother. Downing calls this
a detail that illustrates the Lewis brothers’ tendency to idealize their lost mother and to be too hard on their father…. Lewis recognized this fault in himself in later years, but even so, this instance reminds us that his judgments of his father do not always give us a fully rounded picture (p. 37).
Later on, Downing points out, as well, that, far from being mere churchgoers, as Lewis himself thought, his mother at least, and perhaps also his father, appear in their own writings to have been sincere Christians:
One of the most significant items Warren discovered in [his parents’] mountain of papers was his father’s diary, in which the latter had recorded his wife’s conversation on her deathbed. Albert wrote that Flora had advised her sickroom nurse that, when it came time to marry, she should find “a good man who loves you and who loves God.” They had been quietly discussing the goodness of God when Flora asked suddenly, “What have we done for Him?” To this quotation, Albert had added, “May I never forget that” (p. 144).
While this brief comment doesn’t reveal much about their faith, it does suggest that Lewis may have misjudged his parents at this point. Chapter 3 introduces Lewis’s atheism, but Chapter 4 illustrates the conflict that Lewis had between his atheistic materialism and his romantic bent. On the one hand, he believed that whatever appeared beautiful to him was meaningless, just a random arrangement of atoms. On the other hand, he loved the beauty of nature and saw in it “glimpses of Joy,” which “seemed to suggest some hidden glory at the center of things” (p. 62).  As Lewis said, “Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless” (cited p. 63). During this period, Lewis discovered George MacDonald’s novel Phantastes which, he said, “baptized” his imagination, even though intellectually he was still a materialist. As well, it was at this time that Lewis began writing fiction, and in this chapter Downing gives a helpful summary and examination of Lewis’s unpublished manuscript “The Quest of Bleheris,” showing its similarity at some points to things Lewis would write later.
In chapters 5 and 6, Downing describes Lewis’s dualism, his conviction that materialism was wrong and that there was something (or Something) other than the material world, and then his interest in and later repulsion from the occult. Chapter 7 traces Lewis’s journey through idealist philosophy and a sort of pantheism, ending with his embrace of theism. Finally, Chapter 8 gives us Lewis’s full conversion.
Here, Downing rightly points out that even though Lewis at first says that he was converted to theism and then to an acceptance of the claims of Jesus Christ, when Lewis starts moving toward a belief in “God,” he isn’t thinking merely of some sort of god but of the God of the Bible.
His distinction between “theism” and “Christianity” is not entirely satisfactory, for it is clear that he was surrendering for the first time to a Person visualized as the God of the Bible, not of the Koran or the kabbalah (pp. 139-140).
In fact, I would question even the phrase “for the first time.” In the story Downing recounts, as well as the story you can piece together from Lewis’s letters and diary, neither the conversion to theism in 1929 nor the conviction of the truth of Christianity in 1931 were really “first time” events.I don’t recall if Downing addresses this, but it isn’t really proper to think of Lewis’s story simply as a move from atheism to Christianity. Rather, Lewis starts out as a Christian, baptized and believing as a child, then apostatizes (even while hypocritically being confirmed in the Anglican church) and lapses into atheism, and finally returns to faith, now a mature and grown-up faith but still the faith of his childhood. This is a richer and more complex story, in other words, a story not just of a conversion but of a conversion which was a return from apostasy.
Throughout the book, Downing draws connections between elements in Lewis’s own life and elements in Lewis’s writing. Some readers may find that distracting, but I found it particularly interesting. Again and again, Downing would show that Lewis uses certain words consistently in his writings, so that things he says in his letters or diary shed light on what he says in later writings. He also shows how Lewis, in his later writings, attacked and refuted some of the false paths that misled him on his way to faith.
When I finished the book, I remember thinking that there were a couple of flaws, but at this point I remember only one: Downing doesn’t discuss Lewis’s interaction with Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood. Their friendship began when Lewis came to Oxford and lasted throughout their lives. Barfield and Harwood were Anthroposophists (though also Anglicans and professing Christians?) and Lewis and Barfield in particular engaged in what was later called “the Great War,” as Lewis rejected Barfield’s views strongly. After his conversion, though, Lewis wrote to Harwood’s wife and said he was glad she had never read what he wrote about those matters,
for all that is dead as mutton to me now: and the points chiefly at issue between the Anthroposophists and me then were precisely the points on which anthroposophy is certainly right — i.e. the claim that it is possible for man, here and now, in the phenomenal world, to have commerce with the world beyond — which is what I was denying (Collected Letters 2:107).
He goes on to mention a continuing disagreement with Barfield and Anthoposophy. But from what he says here, it sounds as if his debate with Barfield may have had some impact on him during his journey to faith. Even though he was vigorously rejecting Barfield’s arguments, he was constantly made aware of and thinking about certain matters that he would later embrace when he came to faith. Perhaps Downing didn’t spend time on this because it is discussed in depth elsewhere (perhaps in Lionel Adey’s C. S. Lewis’s Great War with Owen Barfield which I haven’t read), but I do think that by omitting this debate Downing has skipped over a significant part of the story.
In short, the book was surprisingly good — surprisingly because I thought I already knew the story from Surprised by Joy and also now from Lewis’s letters and diary, and yet Downing revealed several new aspects to the story. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about Lewis, and perhaps especially to those who think they know this story already.
Armchairs
Lady Malvern was a hearty, happy, healthy, overpowering sort of dashed female, not so very tall but making up for it by measuring about six feet from the O.P. to the Prompt Side. She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season. — P. G. Wodehouse, “Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest,” Carry On, Jeeves.
In case the end of the first sentence stumps you, as it did me, let me pass on the results of my quick research: “the O.P.” and “the Prompt Side” are terms drawn from the theater, the Prompt Side being stage left, where the prompter stands, and the O.P. (Opposite Prompt) being stage right. So Bertie Wooster, the narrator, is saying that Lady Malvern appeared to be six feet from side to side.
But it’s the second sentence that made me laugh out loud.
C. S. Lewis the Agrarian
From a 1930 letter to Arthur Greeves, in which Lewis is speaking about his friend Alan Griffiths (later known as Dom Bede Griffiths), who lived in a commune with two friends:
There is certainly something attractive about the idea of living as far as may be on the produce of the land about you: to see in every walk the pasture where your mutton grazed when it was sheep, the gardens where your vegetables grew, the mill where your flour was ground, and the workshop where your chairs were sawn — and to feel that bit of country actually and literally in your veins.
Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood — they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air & later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardised international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges & Australian wine to day) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours. — Collected Letters 1:908-909.
Never mind the stuff about nymphs and dryads. I’m not entirely sure I understand Tolkien’s argument, for that matter. And what Lewis says at the end seems exaggerated to me, too. Still, I understand the attraction of the life he depicts and I appreciate what he says about a long connection between people and place. Shades of Wendell Berry!
By the way, one of the surprises, for me, of Lewis’s letters (and also of his diary, which overlaps with some of the years in this first volume of letters) was the discovery that Lewis, bookish as he certainly was, was not exclusively bookish. Again and again, you find him washing dishes, cleaning out the hen run, digging out stumps around his house, cutting wood, and, in short, engaging in manual labor with great vigor and enjoyment. Furthermore, far from being the sort of bachelor who has little familiarity with the life of a bustling household, Lewis was thoroughly acquainted with domestic life and spent a fair bit of time helping Mrs. Moore, the lady he lived with, clean the house and do other chores, including teaching and, to a large degree, raising her daughter through her teens.
In short, Lewis has turned out to be much more well-rounded than I had previously thought.
Watching Bad Movies
In the same interview I mentioned in my previous entry, Ray Bradbury mentions that when he was young, he saw every movie that came out: “When I was seventeen,” he says, “I was seeing as many as twelve to fourteen movies a week.” That’s a lot of movies, including a lot that weren’t good, that is, that had weak plots, poor acting, flat characters, and so forth. “But that’s good,” Bradbury says.
It’s a way of learning. You’ve got to learn how not to do things. Just seeing excellent films doesn’t educate you at all, because they’re mysterious. A great film is mysterious. There’s no way of solving it. Why does Citizen Kane work? Well, it just does. It’s brilliant on every level, and there’s no way of putting your finger on any one thing that’s right. It’s just all right. But a bad film is immediately evident, and it can teach you more: “I’ll never do that, and I’ll never do that, and I’ll never do that” (Zen in the Art of Writing, p. 128).
I read this paragraph a week ago, and I’ve been turning it over in my mind from time to time ever since. There’s a lot of truth to what Bradbury says here, I think. Bad art (by which he and I mean poorly crafted art, not wicked art) can help you learn things that great art can’t, namely, what not to do. But I suspect that it teaches that lesson only to those who love great art; the rest don’t recognize the mistakes in bad art as mistakes and end up emulating them. Bad art teaches, it seems to me, only if you approach it in the right way.
Still, I think there’s more to be said, and so I invite you to interact with Bradbury on this point and to sharpen my own thinking.
Bradbury on Film
In the interview entitled “Shooting Haiku in a Barrel,” Ray Bradbury talks about working on the screenplay for Something Wicked This Way Comes. He wrote the screenplay about two hours too long, and the director had him cut it again and again until it was the right length. The interviewer asked whether it was dialogue or action that Bradbury cut, and here is Bradbury’s response, which sheds light on good filmmaking:
Everything. The main thing is compression. It isn’t really cutting so much as learning metaphor — and this is where my knowledge of poetry has been such a help to me. There’s a relationship between the great poems of the world and the great screenplays: they both deal in compact images. If you can find the right metaphor, the right image, and put it in a scene, it can replace four pages of dialogue (Zen in the Art of Writing, p. 127).
Bradbury goes on to talk about a particular scene in Lawrence of Arabia, but what immediately came to my mind was a scene in Kristof Kieslowski’s Red, which would take a lot longer to describe here than it takes to show.  The entire scene is this: the camera shows the girl, who is one of the main characters, having fun bowling with some friends, and then swings over a few lanes to linger for only a moment or two on a table at a bowling alley. On the table is a cracked beer glass, an ashtray full of cigarettes, and a crumpled Marlboro package.
That’s it. That’s the entire scene. It means nothing to you, dear reader, because you didn’t see what led up to it. But if you had watched the movie carefully up to this point, you would have understood immediately. Getting back to Bradbury’s point, what you would have understood from those few seconds would have taken a lesser director and writer many minutes of dialogue and action to convey to you. Kieslowski does it in one image.
That’s one of the glories of film as a medium. As Bradbury says, metaphor comes close to accomplishing the same thing in poetry and prose. But only in film can you use sound, music, lighting, images, and so forth to get across what would take hundreds of words to explain.
Bradbury’s Astounding Memory
Recently, I’ve been reading a collection of essays on writing and creativity by Ray Bradbury. In one of these essays, which was first published as the introduction to Bradbury’s Collected Stories, he talks about his memory, which, it turns out, is far, far better than mine. The context is a discussion of his short story “The Veldt,” and, to give you the rest of the background you need in order to see why this comment astounded me so much, this particular essay was written in 1980 and Bradbury was born in 1920:
The lions in that room, where did they come from?
From the lions I found in the books in the town library when I was ten. From the lions I saw in the real circuses when I was five. From the lion that prowled in Lon Chaney’s film He Who Gets Slapped in 1924!
In 1924! you say, with immense doubt. Yes, 1924. I didn’t see the Chaney film again until a year ago. As soon as it flashed on the screen I knew that that was where my lions in “The Veldt” came from. They had been hiding out, waiting, given shelter by my intuitive self, all these years.
For I am that special freak, the man with the child inside who remembers all. I remember the day and the hour I was born. I remember being circumcised on the fourth day after my birth. I remember suckling at my mother’s breast. Years later I asked my mother about the circumcision. I had information that couldn’t have been told to me, there would be no reason to tell a child, especially in those still-Victorian times. Was I circumcised somewhere away from the lying-in hospital? I was. My father took me to the doctor’s office. I remember the doctor. I remember the scalpel. — Ray Bradbury, “Drunk, and in Charge of a Bicycle,” Zen in the Art of Writing, pp. 53-54.
Yeats on the Victorians
In one of his letters to his brother, C. S. Lewis talks about having met William Butler Yeats, whose poetry he had once admired. The first meeting, Lewis says, was very strange. A few days later, however, Lewis visited Yeats at his home again, and this time Yeats “was almost quite sane, and talked about books and things, still eloquently and quite intelligently.”
Lewis summarizes something Yeats said about the “great Victorians,” which I found interesting for the light it sheds on that period:
The most interesting thing about the Victorian period was their penchant for selecting one typical great man in each department — Tennyson, THE poet, Roberts, THE soldier: and then these types were made into myths. You never heard of anyone else: if you spoke of medicine it meant — (some ‘THE Doctor’ whose name I have forgotten): if you spoke of politics it was Gladstone (in Lewis, Collected Letters, 1:534).
Lewis on Reading Old Books
Here’s something from a letter, dated October 18, 1919, from C. S. Lewis to his friend Arthur Greeves:
I am not very fond of Euripedes’ Media: but as regards the underworking of the possibilities which you mention, you must remember that the translation has to be rather stiff — tied by the double chains of fidelity to the original and the demands of its own metres, it cannot have the freedom and therefore cannot have the passion of the real thing. As well, even in reading the Greek we must miss a lot. We call it “statuesque” and “restrained” because at the distance of 2500 years we cannot catch the subtler points — the associations of a word, the homeliness of some phrazes [sic] and the unexpected strangeness of others. All this we, as foreigners, don’t see — and are therefore inclined to assume that it wasn’t there. — C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, 1:467-368.
What Lewis says here may be obvious, but it jumped out at me in this letter as it hadn’t before.  We must miss a lot of allusions and subtle hints, a lot of surprises and a lot of the richness of ancient literature. Perhaps we think some things are strikingly beautiful when the original audience would have found them rather dull, or vice versa. Perhaps we think that a conversation in an ancient play is straightforward when an ancient audience would have been able to “read between the lines” and hear how that superficially straightforward conversation operates on several levels at once.
What Lewis writes about here is part of the challenge we face as interpreters of the Bible, too. We read passages and they mean very little to us, or we conclude that their meaning is very slight and all on the surface, in part because we’re reading these passages thousands of years after they were written.
So, for instance, we read the line in Exodus 15:27 — “Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve wells of water and seventy palm trees; so they camped there by the water” — and we think that Moses must have suddenly felt the urge to provide a bit of color, a bit of description. Or, at most, perhaps he’s simply emphasizing how well the Lord provided for Israel after the hardships at Marah. But that’s it. Most commentaries simply skim over this verse or provide a pious comment (which is not wrong) about God’s provision. If we’re reading the text as people of our own day, this verse means little to us.
But to someone who was steeped in the Scriptures, the references to twelve and seventy, to trees and water, would stand out. He might see those twelve springs of water as a symbolic reference to the twelve tribes of Israel, for instance, and the seventy palm trees as a reference to the seventy nations of the world (Gen. 10). He might think about the connotations of water and trees, going back to the Garden (Gen. 2). His imagination, shaped by the Scriptures, might run forward to the Temple with its bronze sea and garden imagery, to Ezekiel 47 where the water flows out to the world, to Revelation 22, and so forth.
Here’s another example. When Mark starts his Gospel, he writes, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” We read through that verse and barely notice the words. But all of the words are significant. What’s the “gospel” here?  Reading this verse superficially, we might think that it’s a reference to the book Mark is writing. Or we might take it simply as referring to how the good news about Jesus began with the coming of John the Baptist.
But if we were steeped in the Scriptures, we might think back to the prophecies of Isaiah where “good news” is proclaimed (e.g., Isaiah 40), which is, in particular, the good news that Yahweh is returning to rescue and rule His people. And if we were citizens of the Roman empire, as Mark’s original readers were, there might be another connotation, as well.  A “gospel” was the announcement of the birth or the victory or the rise to power of an emperor. Mark’s Gospel is a “gospel” in the Isaiah 40 sense, but it’s also a “gospel” in this Greco-Roman sense, since it is the story of the coming of the King.  But it’s easy for us to miss those connotations.Â
What Lewis writes may incline us to give up: We can’t understand all the meanings of words, the subtle allusions that a contemporary of Euripedes would have caught, and so forth, and therefore our understanding and appreciation of ancient literature (including the Bible) are always diminished.
I don’t believe that’s necessarily true of the Bible, though. Perhaps we will struggle to understand some things. Perhaps certain words won’t jump out at us the way they would to, say, Mark’s contemporaries. But I do believe that God has given us enough to understand His Word. That isn’t true of Euripedes, but it is true of Scripture.
We may learn new things as we study the ancient world, and that may help us understand Scripture. There are words we can’t translate because they appear only once in the Hebrew Bible. For now, we make intelligent guesses.  But maybe someday we’ll discover something that helps us get the right translation of those words. But we still know enough to understand God’s Word.
But what is most important is that we be saturated in Scripture so that we catch more of the allusions, so that we know the flow of the story, and so forth. Will we ever fathom all of Scripture’s depths? No. Will our understanding always be that of foreigners who can’t grasp the richness of the story? Perhaps in some sense. But not in another. Scripture wasn’t addressed simply and solely to people of one generation. It was addressed to us also, and if we are followers of the Word then nothing in the Word can be completely foreign to us.