Archive for June, 2008

Oxford, 6/09/08

Don June 9th, 2008

Back to class today.  Dr. Bauman finished Abolition of Man and started The Pilgrim’s Regress, and I talked about the essay “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” sometimes reprinted as “Fernseed and Elephants.”

The very title of Abolition of Man implies that if the philosophy of education behind the book Lewis is critiquing (“the Green Book”) becomes dominant, we risk losing something essential to full humanity.  The authors of the Green Book had said that when the poet said the waterfall was sublime, it looked like he was making a statement about the waterfall, but in fact he was making a statement about his own feelings.  Lewis jumps all over this because it implies that value judgments are by their very nature subjective and emotional (about the poet’s feelings) and cannot be statements of objective fact (about the waterfall).  Lewis defends the objectivity of value (see my book Mere Humanity for further detail on that defense) and applies that defense to education.  If at least some value judgments are objective statements of fact about the way things really are, then education can deal with values as well as facts, with the heart as well as the head.  Bauman focused on the educational application:  we must train both mind and heart to respond appropriately to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of thing we are.  If we don’t–if we leave values out–we will not help our students to become fully human.

The claim that education is about becoming more fully human occasioned one of the most interesting discussions we have had.  Some students objected to the implication that uneducated (or wrongly educated) people are somehow less human.  Never a man to miss an opportunity to wax Socratic or play Devil’s Advocate, Bauman led them down the path of argumentative self destruction with skill, aplomb, and not a little enjoyment.  It appeared that we did not have a very good idea what we mean by human at all.  Part of the objection stemmed from the fear that defining anyone as less human might lead to rights abuses like slavery or abortion.  Yet no one could overturn the idea that if Jesus represents the idea of full and perfect humanity, most of us have at best only bits and pieces of it, and even those are corrupted.  So the idea of humanity being on a scale rather than an absolute was impossible to avoid.

The problem was that the word “human” was being used in two different senses.  In one sense, you are human if you are descended from Adam and Eve.  This is an absolute either/or: you are either a member of that set or you are not.  In this sense, you can’t be more or less human any more than you can be more or less pregnant.  The fetus or the retarded person is just as human as the fully functioning adult; the ignoramus is just as human as the PhD.  In another sense, redemption is about the restoration of what was lost when Adam and Eve fell.  Since that lost state is in the process of being restored, there is a sense in which we can be more or less human.  A person who is well developed emotionally and intellectually has more fully acheived the potential of humanity than one who is lacking in one of those areas.  A person who is more like Jesus is more fully and truly human than one who is less so.  Failure to distinguish carefully these two meanings was the source of the confusion.

The important thing to remember from my perspective is that what we call “human rights” are properly based on the first definition: you are human if you are a son of Adam or a daughter of Eve.  Rooting rights in this usage is the only way to avoid abuse.  It is nor murder to kill a PhD but only manslaughter if you kill a mere high school graduate.  It’s not murder if you kill a nice person but only manslaughter if you kill a jerk.  It is not murder if you kill a fellow Aryan but ethnic cleansing if yoy kill a Jew.  And if that is right, then it is not murder to kill an adult but only a “choice” if you kill a fetus.  The students’ uneasiness stemmed from the fear that to admit degrees of humanness in any sense would seem to favor a “quality of life” ethic over a “sanctity of life” ethic.  They were right to be concerned, but needed to think more clearly about the grounding of rights and to avoid equivocation in the use of the word “human.”  Hopefully they are getting there.

Lewis’s point then stands: something of our humanity (in the second sense) is inevitably lost if we adopt an educational philosophy that denies the objectivity of value.  Ironically, Lewis’s point actually reinforces the sanctitiy of life ethic the students were afraid it would undermine.  For if all values are inherently subjective, then there is no argument possible against someone who wants to violate the rights of those he considers, by whatever criterion, inferior.  To adopt the philosophy behind the Green Book is to ask for a world in which might makes right.  We should not then be shocked if we get what we ask for.

Well, my discussion of “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” was not nearly so interesting, but it is an important essay on a crucial topic.  Lewis gives good reasons why we should trust the New Testament more than we trust its critics.  But I have no doubt exhausted by readers’ quota of patience for one day already, so go read the essay itself, which, having been written by Lewis, requires less patience than reading me does.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Ministries Summer Oxford Studies Program 

Oxford, 6/08/08

Don June 8th, 2008

On Friday evening [the 6th], the faculty were invited to High Table at Christ Church, the largest of the Oxford colleges, whose Great Hall was used as the dining hall at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films.  Apparently, pumpkin juice is not served on those days when the Muggles are eating there, so I cannot keep my promise to report on its potable potential.  But High Table in Formal Hall is certainly worth reporting on in its own right. 

The students [at the lower tables] all rise while the faculty and their guests process in wearing full formal academic regalia and take their places at the high table on the dais, below the grand portraits of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey, the founders of ‘the house,’ as the locals call Christ Church, the only college in the world whose chapel is also the local cathedral.  Then grace is said in Latin and all are seated and served a three course meal: smoked salmon and cantaloupe salad, lamb chops, and strawberry tart on Friday.  I was seated across from the Canon of Christ Church Cathedral, who was presiding–in Dumbledore’s spot, of course.  The major duty of the presiding member of faculty is to approve the wine before it is served to everyone else, by sniffing it and then giving the butler an ever so subtle nod of the head.  Gowns are not compulsory for guests, but I was wishing mine had not been too bulky to pack.  I was feeling a bit underdressed in a mere suit and tie, though my main feeling was the wish that the University of Georgia’s colors [Go Dawgs!] could have been represented there at least that once.  At least I was not the only one in such straits.  But perhaps it helped dissuade me from the folly of arising like Dumbledore to say three words. 

On Saturday we had a field trip to the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey and the very well preserved Wells Cathedral.  According to legend, the first church in Britain was founded at Glastonbury by Joseph of Arimathea, who came there as a missionary in AD 63, dispersed from Jerusalem along with many other Christians by the Neronian persecution.  Oh, yes, and by the way, he brought the Holy Grail with him.  History cannot confirm the Legend, but it does verify a Christian presence going all the way back into the 500’s; so I for one take pleasure in the fact that, if the legendary story cannot be proved, neither has it been disproved.

In the 1100’s, monks exavating for an expansion of the church found a grave containing the bodies of a man and a woman and a plaque that read ‘Hic jacet Arturus, Rex Britannorum.’  Here lies Arthur, King of the Britons.  Though some cynical persons believe that this was just a publicity stunt on the part of monks trying to increase the traffic of pilgrims, the bodies of Arthur and Guinnevere were reinterred with great pomp in a black marble tomb under the high altar before the watchful eyes of Henry I.  If our knowledge of human nature lends some support to the cynics, it should be balanced by the fact that Glastonbury is in fact in the very heart of Arthurian country, and the nearby hill Glastonbury Tor is thought by many to be the historic Isle of Avalon, for during that period the ocean came in and flooded the land around it, so that it was in fact an island.  Topped with a  14th century stone tower, it today reminds you of nothing so much as Weathertop, giving a splendid view of the surrounding countryside.

Glastonbury became the largest and, after Westminster, the second most wealthy monastery in England.  In 1539, it was dissolved and sacked by the gold-ravenous Henry VIII, along with every other monastic foundation in the country.  So insatiable was his greed that he even destroyed the tomb of Arthur.  [The magnificent tomb of St. Thomas a Becket in Canterbury, goal of Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, met a similar fate.] Abbot Whiting, 80 years old and frail, was hanged, drawn, and quartered.  The magnificent Gothic buildings fell into ruin and were scavenged for stones that ended up in local houses and barns.  What remains is one of the most beautiful and haunting sites in all of England.   

Nearby Wells Cathedral is one of the most elegant of Gothic churches, soaring heavenward as is the virtue of the Gothic style, but without the over-business on the inside that is sometimes its fault.  It is marked by a unique set of ’scissor arches’ that look as if they were part of the original design, but were actually added later to overcome settling from the excessive weight of the tower, and by the second oldest clock in England, still keeping excellent time after 600 years.  There are two knights on horseback who joust with one another on a circular track whenever the clock strikes.  One has a hinge in his back, and the poor fellow thus always loses, only to be set upright again inside the wall so he can emerge for another go against his ever victorious rival.  It is the medieval version of Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football. 

And so we come to the Lord’s Day, a day of rest and worship that leaves one curiously unsatisfied here.  For one must choose between, it would seem, a traditional Anglican service full of beauty and devoid of the Gospel, or else pay for biblical content in the sermon by enduring something chillingly chummy.  Well, I suppose most people have the same dilemma anywhere, but it seems especially irksome here, where the local pulpits have been filled by the likes of Wycliffe, Latimer, Newman, and even one Jack Lewis a time or two.  Sigh.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program

Oxford, 6/6/08

Don June 6th, 2008

Today we looked at Lewis’s defense of the Tao, his word in Abolition of Man for the existence of a universal and objective set of moral values to which we are acccountable whether we like it or not. Dr. Bauman took Abolition because the students have already read my take on it in Mere Humanity. So I led into that small but brilliant book by looking at two essays that set the table for it: “Meditation in a Toolshed” and “The Poison of Subjectivism. ”

Imagine a beam of sunlight cutting through the darkness in a toolshed. You can look at the beam, and you will see a stream of photons. Or you can look along the beam, and you will see the sun, the sky, and the trees outside the crack that lets it into the toolshed. We can do this with anything. You can look at being in love and all you will see is hormones. Or you can look along it and you might see everything Dante saw in Beatrice. It looks very different from inside than it does from outside. Which vision is the true one?

Modernism has “privileged” (to use the current jargon) looking “at.” The “scientific” account from outside is considered true and objective; the account from inside mere subjectivism. But Lewis pointed out a fatal flaw in this assumption. It ignores the fact that every act of looking at a thing is also an act of looking along something else. When you are outside of love looking at hormones, you are inside of psychology. What if someone else looks at you while you are looking at love? He will only see neurons firing in your head. But if that is all your vision–and his–is, then neither of you actually is seeing anything. Where, asks Lewis, does the rot end? Postmodernism looks at the same set of facts and concludes that it doesn’t end anywhere. Lewis’s conclusion is that we must never let the rot begin in the first place.

We must look both at and along everything, and realize that we do not have real knowledge and understanding until we can explain how both visions belong to reality. Neither is allowed to explain the other away. If you only look at faith you will end up with skepticism; if you only look along it, you will have an unverifiable fideism. Neither will do.

Which leads us to “The Poison of Subjectivism. ” Didn’t Lewis just defend the “subjectivity” of looking along? Yes. But to attack subjectivism is not necessarily to defend objectivism. Remember that Lewis had rejected a reductionism coming from either end. Se we need to begin by seeing what he means by “subjectivism” in this conext.

When the objectivism of “looking at” has become the default position for knowledge, then anything that can’t be put into a test tube must be reduced to a merely subjective response. If I say, “Murder is wrong,” then, it might have the form of a statement of fact, but all it can really be is a subjective feeling: it reduces to “I don’t like murder.” Subjectivism then is the belief that nothing unscientific can be objectively true. Lewis finds three reasons for rejecting this view.

First is the inmpressive agreement on basic principles of morality through time and culture. (Lewis would go on to document this in the appendix to Abolition of Man). Second is the fact that if you accept the modern account, you cannot make moral judgments. You cannot say that the Nazis(or, to update the discussion, islamofascist terrorists) are wrong if by definition they just feel differently about morality than you do. Third, moral progress becomes impossible on the subjectivist theory. How could we conclude that, say, racial equality is better than Jim Crow? We could not. We could only say that we like it better, and some people don’t.

As I added by way of explanation, you can hold to moral relativism as long as you bottle yourself up in a protected cocoon of theory, but it cannot survive contact with reality. “So, if I were strong enough to get away with beating you up and selling your wife and daughter into sexual slavery, that would be OK?” Of course it wouldn’t. And it is not just that my victim would not like it. The basic principles of morality are universally and objectively true whether anybody likes it or not. To deny this is to leave oneself and one’s culture open to predation by removing one of the essential brakes to the expression of man’s depravity.

This afternoon some of the students are going to a cricket match over in University Parks. We won’t see them for a while! The faculty have been invited to High Table in the Great Hall of Christ Church–i.e. , the dining hall at Hogwarts–tonight. I’ll let you know if pumpkin juice is any good.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program

Oxford, 6/5/08

Don June 6th, 2008

Dr. Bauman took the whole day’s lecture time today to talk about “The Personal Heresy,” Lewis’s debate with E. M. W. Tillyard. Lewis objected to Tillyard’s emphasis on poetry as revealing the personality of the poet. The poet is not talking about himself, Lewis argued, but about his subject. A poet writing about a sunset is not saying, “Oh, what an interesting person I must be to say such clever things about this sunset.” He does not want you to follow his pointing finger back to him, but to look at what he is pointing at. Lewis is arguing for a text centered, not a writer centered, view of poetry. On the other hand, Tillyard argued, you can tell a poem by Shakespeare from one by Pope because they have different mental patterns revealed by different styles, and that is what he meant by personality. So the poem does reveal the author after all. Lewis replied, that’s such a truncated definition of personality that it proves nothing very significant.

Bauman had the students arguing on both sides and turned all their arguments on their heads. Finally he brought out five poems by an anonymous contemporary poet and asked the students what they could tell about the poet’s personality from the poems. They couldn’t even agree on whether they were by the same person, though they did interestingly come to something about a consensus about the meaning of each poem. So the results of that thought experiment seemed to favor Lewis more than Tillyard in the debate. (I was the poet, by the way, but only two out of twelve even suspected it–based on stylistic characteristics reminding them of other poems of mine they had read. And they could not connect those stylistic features with much very specific about my personality. )

My own take is that it is an important debate because it has implications for reading. What should you be trying to get from a work of literature? A sense of the author’s personality? A personal emotional reaction? Fodder for contemporary arguments about politics, race, class, and gender? All that may be there to be had, but unless you see what the author wanted you to see you have missed the main thing. Lewis was certainly right to this extent: if you assume that what the writer wants you to see is always himself, you will often miss the main thing and have an impoverished if not wrong headed readings as a result. Instead, follow the author’s pointing finger, not back to the author, but out to the thing he is pointing to.

Tillyard’s side of the debate shows that in the middle of the 20th century we were still stuck in the Romantic period, not in terms of sensibility, certainly, but in terms of assumptions. And some of the students’ comments show that this is still true in the 21st. For the Romantics the lyric was the default setting in poetry. And a lyric poem is one in which the author expresses his feelings. (Even that may not be the same thing as espressing his personality or his self.) Lewis was no doubt writing from his sense of the sweep of literary history, in which the lyric has not always been the default position. In real poets it ceased to be so rather quickly, in fact, giving way in just one generation to things like Browning’s dramatic monologues, in which the whole point is to be able to distinguish between the speaker’s voice and the poet’s. The same thing is true in a different way of much metaphysical poetry from the 17th century, and before that it was the epic that was considered the highest form of poetry.

I think that Lewis then was basically right, but that in the heat of battle he sometimes stated his objections so strongly that they ironically risk compromising the equally important point of the primacy of authorial intent. I say this is ironic because Lewis was really upholding the principle of authorial intent: look at what the author wanted to show you, not at something else. But because of the way Tillyard framed his definition of personality, Lewis had to seem to argue that we do not even see the poet’s mind in the poem. But surely we can sometimes learn what the poet thought about his subject. Tillyard was close to the truth when he spoke of poetry as an act of communication between the poet and the reader. After all, it was Milton who said that a book (including a poem) is not an absolutely dead thing, but doth contain as in a vial the living essence and potency of the mind that bred it. Was Milton on Tillyard’s side then, against Lewis?   Not exactly. Lewis should not be seen as arguing against that important insight, but as reminding us that what the poet is sharing with us is not himself but his poem.

And this is what we and our students are thinking about on Thursday of our first full week of classes in Oxford.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program

Oxford, 6/4/08

Don June 6th, 2008

So what did Lewis learn from Tolkien on Addison’s walk that led him to call Tollers one of the two most direct human causes of his conversion?

If in your atheist phase you cared only about Balder and other myths and believed only in atoms, and you have discovered that atheism and materialism are not philosophies that can be lived by and become a theist, you need three more pieces put in place before you have a bridge to full Christian belief. Tolkien’s doctrine of sub-creation, worked out fully in the essay ‘On Fairie Stories’ and shared with Lewis first on Addison’s walk, supplies all of them.

Lewis was still saying to Tolkien something like, “Dash it all, Tollers, the myths are still lies, even if they are lies breathed through silver.”  What are myths but stories that make you feel that the world is full of meaning and significance? You need to be able honestly to believe first that the myths are not necessarily all lies, i.e., that meaning and significance are actually part of the world. You need to believe, in other words, that a myth can be true.  Then, secondly, you need to be able to believe honestly that Christianity is a myth–that the Gospel is a story that can fill the world with meaning and significance. Then, thirdly, you must be able to believe that Christianity is the one true myth (today we would say ‘metanarrative’ ), i.e., that it can function like a myth while still being factually true.  As Dorothy L. Sayers put it, ‘Jesus is the only God who has a date in history.’

Tolkien’s doctrine of subcreation allowed Lewis to see all three of these ideas as true and connected. Man makes stories because he is part of a story, because he was made in the image of the maker. Man is creative because he is made in the image of the Creator. What follows from this? Bare theism is not enough. It takes specifically Christian theism with its doctrines of creation and the imago Dei to explain the world we actually live in, i.e., the world that contains us. Man’s stories [myths] are indeed laden with significance because they are reflections of the Story [capital S] made by the Creator. The story of Jesus is not less mythical [i.e., for Lewis, significant] than other myths. It is not less than a myth by actually having happened in history, but more.  As Lewis himself would put it later when he had digested this and was able to use his own words, it was ‘myth become fact.’

Then we all went to Magdalene College and took Addison’s Walk, where the conversation took place. It is a lovely path, a tunnel through green trees occasionally opening out onto a meadow, sometimes the Magdalene deer park. They must have gone round it several times that day, because after dinner they continued the discussion in Lewis’s rooms until the wee hours. In less than two weeks Lewis realized, on the way to Whipsnade Zoo in the sidecar of Warnie’s motorcycle, that he now believed Jesus was the Son of God. And the rest, as they say, is history.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Gandalf

Donald T. Williams, PhD
Co-Director, Summit Oxford Studies Program

Oxford, 6/3/08

Don June 6th, 2008

We are into our classes full bore now. My colleague Dr. Michael Bauman, Director of the Christian Studies Program at Hillsdale College, began with an overview of Lewis’s life. I then focused in on his conversion, but from a particular standpoint. Here’s a radically  condensed version of my intro:

Lewis wrote an incredible amount and variety of literature: science fiction, poetry, children’s stories, popular Christian apologetics and theology, literary scholarship, and letters. Yet his friend Owen Barfield said that it was all really one work,
that everything Lewis thought was present in anything he said, that it was a tapestry every thread of which led to every other thread. Let us begin by supposing that Barfield was right. Lewis’s work is not just a huge collection of random but unconnected brilliant soundbytes; it is a coherent view of the world that derives its unity from certain basic first principles.
If so, what are they?

After some discussion, with students making not implausible suggestions, I offered my thesis: that the answer can be found by looking at the keys to Lewis’s conversion. In his atheist phase he cared only about Balder and other myths, but believed only in atoms.  This was rather a bummer because neither Goodness, Truth, nor Beauty can be reduced to atoms without
disappearing altogether. So what Lewis needed was a way to believe without dishonesty that myths were more than lies. [The 'without dishonesty part is what made Lewis great. Lots of people just pick a myth they like and believe it because they like it, however intellectually dishonest this was of avoiding despair may be. Lewis would not.]

This missing piece of the puzzle was provided by Tolkien in Addison’s Walk [part of the Magdalene College gardens] on Sept. 19, 1931. Within twelve days of that conversation Lewis’s conversion to Christianity was completed on the trip with Warnie to Whipsnade Zoo. Now, I think we can pinpoint what Tolkien said to alleviate Jack’s difficulty, because Tolkien refers to the conversation in his essay on Fairie Stories. The friend who said that myths were ‘lies breathed through silver’ was Jack, and the response Tolkien gave in the essay is quoted from a letter he wrote as a follow up to the conversation.
You may ask what it was. Ah, stay tuned.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD
Co-Director, Summit Oxford Studies Program

Oxford, 6/1/08

Don June 6th, 2008

The group today took a jaunt back into an even more distant past than the one that surrounds us daily here in Oxford: we drove out to the Roman baths in Bath, stopping at Stonehenge on the way.

One thinks of Legolas meeting Fangorn and commenting, “Now this makes even me feel young!”

No one even knows who built Stonehenge, which goes back to 3,000 BC–someone who was here before the Celts conquered by first the Romans and then the Saxons in the Christian era–and no one really knows how, and no one is even quite sure why. It is a kind of solar calendar to mark the summer solstice, but no one knows exactly how that figured into the religion of those people, whose thoughts and the tongue they framed them in are utterly lost to us. The ridges surrounding the monument in the Salisbury Plain are all topped with burial mounds: Tolkien’s Barrow Downs
incarnated right before our eyes. But even I, who go back to the Third Age of Middle Earth, could shed no light on the mystery. For the North Kingdom of Arnor built its barrows and Arvedui Last King fell even before this time, a part of your prehistory I seem to have slept through.

The pavements, hot springs, monuments, and pools used by the Romans occupying Britain between the first and
fourth centuries AD gave us a connection to an ancient people we can actually remember, the direct ancestors in unbroken line of our own civilization. And Chaucer’s Wife of Bath no doubt rested her weary old bones in those same springs when she got back from her pilgrimage to Canterbury. But that was a paltry 600 years ago–a mere blink of the eye of Father Time. So what does that make the three weeks we have left here?  I leave the calculations to the mathematically inclined, and remain your humble servant, reporting

From the Dreaming Spires,

Gandalf

Oxford, 5/31/08

Don June 6th, 2008

Some of us went out to the Trout Inn for lunch today.

SAY IT AIN’T SO!

The Trout was an old inn that you walk to past the ruins of Godstowe Abbey on the Thames River Path.  Except for the addtion of electric lights, it seemed unchanged since the 17th century. You almost expected to see Isaac Walton walk in with a mess of trout right out of The Complete Angler. And then they would serve them to you on the patio by the river, with swans and houseboats floating by and peacocks wandering through the tables looking for handouts. The peacefulness and charm of the place was indescribable. The Inklings used to love to walk out there for dinner. You had to have been there. And now you can never know what it was like.

THEY HAVE MODERNIZED IT!

Sometime since 2005, some Business Major with a mind full of numbers and metal gears, some despicable descendant of Ted Sandyman, some vile agent of Sharkey, has ripped out the heavy dark wood and old plaster of the interior and replaced it with metal, plastic, and glass. The patio by the river with its peacocks remains, but the tables and chairs have all
been replaced with modern looking things that do not fit or harmonize with or belong in such a setting.  The hike is still worth taking, and the outside of the inn is as rustic and picturesque as ever. But don’t spend your 10-15 pounds for dinner. Just shake your fist, sigh, turn around, and head back.

No taunting today, folks; no snide remarks about envy.  I am in high dudgeon and serious mourning over here.   Sic transit gloria mundi. Ubi sunt? Sigh.

From the dreaming spires,

Don

Oxford III

Don June 6th, 2008

Today we get our Bodleian Library cards.

This is a big deal. Have you ever seen a library card that was a picture ID?

Well, the Bod [as it's known to us Oxonians] is like the Library of Congress–a copy of every book that’s published automatically goes there–but they’ve been doing it about 400 years longer than we have. And it is not open to the general public. Only those who are members of an Oxford college are allowed in. As visiting scholars at New College [one of the oldest--it seemed like a good name at the time], we qualify. There are a couple of guys standing at the door who look like refuges from Men in Black [only with bowler hats] whose job is to prevent any mere mortals from profaning the sacred precincts. But we, the true elect, may flash our cards at them, whereupon they will very obsequiously usher us in to the intellectual holy of holies. To be granted this privilege, we must first swear a solemn oath never to remove any book from the Library or to deface the same, and never to bring fire into the Library or kindle it therein.

The Bod consists of several parts. The most easily recognizable is the Radcliffe Camera, a round, domed, neoclassical edifice, which is the main reading room. The American “Shadowlands” showed Lewis working there because it was easier to shoot film in that more open space, but this was one of the movie’s many inaccuracies. Lewis would actually work in Duke Humphrey’s Library, a splendid Gothic room that is the equivalent of an American library’s rare book room. And we shall have free access to it all. [Do remember that Envy is one of the Seven Deadly Sins.]

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Oxford II

Don June 6th, 2008

Today went we to Windsor Castle.  The castle goes back to William the Conqueror, and has been added to by practically all
his successors. It is the Queen’s other residence, besides Buckingham and Balmoral. She did not deign to receive us personally for some strange reason.

I was struck by a portrait of Edward VI as a small boy, imitating, as small boys will, his father’s famous stance–though in fact it looked as if he might turn out very different from Henry VIII had he lived.  Across the fireplace therefrom was his sister Elizabeth at 13, with her fingers in a book to mark her place against the ending of the portrait session.  So young, so innocent, with no idea of what was coming, and now all turned to dust. ‘They weep for the way the world goes and our life that passes / touches their hearts,’ said Aeneas of the Carthaginians. We saw a special window that was built in St. George’s Chapel so Katherine of Aragon could attend mass without disturbing the service with all the pomp of her queenly presence. Was there ever woman with a sadder story? Rejected for no fault of her own and left to die alone in a cold castle in a strange land, with all her pitiful letters to Henry ignored. The story of our race is a sad one always; and yet we have also found joy in simple pleasures and in friendship, and the honey of peace in old poems.  Let us keep our hearts unjaded and alive to both joy and sorrow, for that is what it is to embrace life, until our Lord returns.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

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