Book 10 of 15: The World's Last Night and Other Essays by C. S. Lewis

One of the other readers in this 15/15 project read some Lewis and that reminded me that it'd been way too long since I'd read any myself, so yesterday I tackled "The World's Last Night and Other Essays."

The titular essay was my Lenten meditation during the first year I really observed Lent, back in college, and I have to say, I found it just as convicting and heartening yesterday as I found it then. He says of Jesus: 

His teaching on the subject quite clearly consisted of three propositions. (1) That he will certainly return. (2) That we cannot possibly know when. (3) And that therefore we must always be ready for him.

Note the therefore. Precisely because we cannot predict the moment, we must be ready at all moments. Our Lord repeated this practical conclusion again and again as if the promise of the Return had been made for the sake of this conclusion alone. Watch, watch, is the burden of his advice. I shall come like a thief. You will not, I most solemnly assure you you will not, see me approaching . . . The point is surely simple enough. The schoolboy does not know which part of his Virgil lesson he will be made to translate: that is why he must be prepared to translate any passage. The sentry does not know at what time an enemy will attack, or an officer inspect, his post: that is why he must keep awake all the time. The Return is wholly unpredictable. There will be wars and rumours of wars and all kinds of catastrophes, as there always are. Things will be, in that sense, normal, the hour before the heavens roll up like a scroll. You cannot guess it. If you could, one chief purpose for which it was foretold would be frustrated. And God's purposes are not so easily frustrated as that.

Reading that, I remembered that it was in Lewis' writings that I first saw the obvious: that the "wars and rumors of wars" passages in the Bible didn't mean the times before the End would be extraordinary, but rather that they would be normal: there are always disasters. (If you don't believe me, just look at any newsfeed you care to name.) Once again, I appreciate Lewis' common sense; his ability to state the obvious and make it stick.

But here is the part that always makes me stop and consider and repent and go forth with renewed purpose:

We have all encountered judgments or verdicts on ourselves in this life. Every now and then we discover what our fellow creatures really think of us. I don't of course mean what they tell us to our faces: that we usually have to discount. I am thinking of what we sometimes overhear by accident or of the opinions about us which our neighbours or employees or subordinates unknowingly reveal in their actions: and of the terrible, or lovely, judgments artlessly betrayed by children or even animals. such discoveries can be the bitterest or sweetest experiences we have. But of course both the bitter and the sweet are limited by our doubt as to the wisdom of those who judge. We always hope that those who so clearly think us cowards or bullies are ignorant and malicious; we always fear that those who trust us or admire us are misled by partiality. I suppose the experience of the Final Judgment (which may break in upon us at any moment) will be like these little experiences, but magnified to the Nth.

For it will be infallible judgment. If it is favorable we shall have no fear, if unfavorable, no hope, that it is wrong. We shall not only believe, we shall know, know beyond doubt in every fibre of our appalled or delighted being, that as the Judge has said, so we are: neither more nor less nor other. We shall perhaps even realise that in some dim fashion we could have known it all along. We shall know and all creation will know too: our ancestors, our parents, our wives or husbands, our children. The unanswerable and (by then) self-evident truth about each will by known to all.

I do not find that pictures of physical catastrophe - that sign in the clouds, those heavens rolled up like a scroll - help one so much as the naked idea of Judgment. We cannot always be excited. We can, perhaps, train ourselves to ask more and more often how the thing which we are saying or doing (or failing to do) at each moment will look when the irresistible light streams upon it; that light which is so different from the light of this world - and yet, even now, we know just enough of it to take it into account. Women sometimes have the problem of tryign to judge by artificial light how a dress will look by daylight. that is very like the problem of all of us: to dress our souls not for the electric lights of the present world but for the daylight of the next. The good dress is the one that will face that light. For that light will last longer.

Whew. A lot to type and a lot to take in. Is it any wonder I could spend a whole Lent thinking about this essay? (and the Donne poem from which it takes its title?)

There were, however, six other essays in this collection, and all of them were worth a re-read too. "The Efficacy of Prayer" talks about what prayer actually is (a relationship, not a magical transaction) and "The Obstinacy of Belief" talks about why Christians think it is good to persist in their faith even when it is tested. "Lilies that Fester" was about education, and I found it particularly interesting now that I'm teaching my own children. I also liked this quotation, which seemed to address the problem I have with Modernist literary theory:

For it is taken as basic by all the culture of our age that whenever artists and audience lose touch, the fault must be wholly on the side of the audience. (I have never come across the great work in which this important doctrine is proved.)

True! How, for instance, could Shakespeare have become as famous as he was unless his plays were actually intelligible and interesting? Do we take it as the audience's fault that Henry VI, Part II is so seldom performed or do we just admit that, you know, sometimes even a great man is off his game?

There was more along this line in "Good Work and Good Works". In talking about how some work would be worth doing even if we weren't paid for it, and how that is the work you want to try to get (and get paid for, because a man must earn his living), he does get to talking about art and says:

But though we have a duty to feed the hungry, I doubt whether we have a duty to "appreciate" the ambitious. This attitude to art is fatal to good work. Many modern novels, poems and pictures, which we are brow-beaten into "appreciating," are not good work because they are not work at all. They are mere puddles of spilled sensibility or reflection. When an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing taste, interests, and capacity of his audience. These, no less than the language, the marble, or the paint, are part of his raw material; to be used, tamed, sublimated, not ignored or defied. Haughty indifference to them is not genius or integrity; it is laziness and incompetence. you have not learned your job. Hence, real honest-to-God work, so far as the arts are concerned, now appears chiefly in low-brow art; in the film, the detective story, the children's story. These are often sound structures; seasoned wood, accurately dovetailed, the stresses all calculated; skill and labour successfully used to do what is intended. Do not misunderstand. The high-brow productions may, of course, reveal a finer sensibility and profounder thought. But a puddle is not work, whatever rich wines or oils or medicines have gone into it.

This made me reflect that the high-brow puddles are really the same kind of thing as the Mary Sue fan-fic story: in both cases, the writer is primarily thinking of his or herself, not the audience.

I also like that Lewis points out that Christians have an example to follow when it comes to doing whatever work is their own really, really well:

When our Lord provided a poor wedding party with an extra glass of wine all round, he was doing good works. But also good work; it was a wine really worth drinking.

Amen! and don't you wish you could have been at that party?

The final two essays were "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" and "Of Religion and Rocketry" but I'm sure I've quoted enough Lewis for the day! That's the problem with reviewing the man: all I really want to do is retype the whole book. My congratulations if you've made it this far. :)

More on the 15/15 project can be found here.

peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Book 1 of 15: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

If women are by nature inferior to men, their virtues must be the same in quality, if not in degree, or virtue is a relative idea; consequently, their conduct should be founded on the same principles and have the same aim. - Mary Wollstonecraft

I've wanted to read this book in its entirety for a long time. I read large excerpts of it in college, and last year, when I read Dorothy Sayers' "Are Women Human?", my desire to read Wollstonecraft was reignited, and I ordered my own copy.

It sat on my bookshelf till GirlDetective's 15 books in 15 days challenge, and now (after staying up way too late last night, perched on the top bunk in the kids' room next to a small sconce, 'cause we have no good bedside light in our bedroom, and we had a guest on the pull-out couch downstairs) I have read it.

It was good. The main thesis is - and you must remember that this was written over 200 years ago - that women are not as weak and devious as they seem due to their nature, but rather to their education. Wollstonecraft argues that even if women cannot be virtuous to the same degree as men, because they are also human beings their virtue must be of the same kind, and therefore they ought to be taught to use their reason (the exercise of reason, in her very Aristotelian view, leading to understanding, which will lead to virtue) just as men are taught to use theirs.

She also argues that this will not make them less womanly, but more, because they will then be fit to be good mothers and wives, capable of friendship with their husbands, capable of ordering their households and capable of educating their children. She argues that if the only education women receive is how to adorn and comport themselves to snare a husband, it is not a wonder that they are incapable of rising above trivial thoughts or infantile behavior. At the end of her books she says: 

. . . I have endeavoured to shew that private duties are never properly fulfilled unless the understanding enlarges the heart; and that public virtue is only an aggregate of private.

There were several things I found very interesting in the book, but one was that it became clear to me that her argument - which is, indeed, the basis for all other feminist arguments - is only possible because of her Christian worldview. It is, to be sure, a sort of Enlightenment Christianity, but the reason she is able to jump from Aristotle's view of reason leading to virtue leading to happiness for men to reason leading to virtue leading to happiness for mankind is because Christianity allows women to have immortal souls. Wollstonecraft, arguing against current moralists who argued that women need no more education that that which fits them for marriage, dryly observes:

How women are to exist in that state where  there is to be neither marrying nor giving in marriage, we are not told.

It's a good point, and well-made. 

It is also a point made over and over and over. She has one real argument, and spends two hundred pages trying to show how true it is from many points of view, using as many examples as she can muster. It's good public relations to make your point a hundred times rather than one, so that hopefully it gets through at least once, but it did make for slightly wearing reading after awhile.

Still, however much you might disagree on minor points here and there, I think any woman reading this - any woman with a college degree, any woman who enjoys her right to vote, any woman grateful for the equal protection of law - ought to make her polite curtsy to the shade of Mary Wollstonecraft. It's thanks to this brave and bright manifesto of hers that the conversation about the humanity of women really got started in modern times.

peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

ETA: A couple more quick notes:

-M. W. is pro-life and pro-breastfeeding*. Interesting both because it shows that those debates are not at all new and also because it points out the vast gulf between Wollstonecraft's feminism and modern feminism.

-M. W. advocates chastity (more of that gulf) - and advocates it for both women and men (the latter was the radical part in her day). This is more of the virtue-in-one-sex-being-virtue-in-the-other thing.

-Reading this book takes away the illusion, if the reader had it, that the good old days were good. Every age has its corruption: political, moral and otherwise. Her rant on education, not just of girls, but of children in general, was fascinating. It was also interesting to read some of her disdain for ostentation in government - things that I'd probably find picturesque if I visited England - things like horse-mounted guards at government offices.

*Modern feminism is usually pro-breastfeeding too, but theirs is a "if you wish to do it, you should certainly have the right to" whereas M. W.'s pro-breastfeeding viewpoint is more along the lines of "if you pass your child along to a wet nurse out of laziness or a desire to retain your sexual appeal, you are being a negligent mother." 

Shakespeare

I recently read a couple of great posts about Shakespeare, and so, wanting to hear a bit of the Bard myself, I put the soundtrack to this excellent performance of Twelfth Night on while I was doing the dishes. 

And, hands deep in the suds, I felt like thinking something deep about Shakespeare. But I couldn't think of anything deep. So instead, I just thought about why Twelfth Night is my favorite play of Shakespeare's. 

I don't think it's the best. (My vote on that - at least currently - is for Othello.) It's just my favorite.

And I'm still not sure why (Ben Kingsley's Feste doubtless has something to do with it), but I think part of it has to do with the cross-dressing part. Not because I think cross-dressing is a good idea. But because in the play, it's used as a device that allows the hero and heroine to fall into friendship before they fall into love. (Well, at least the hero falls into friendship first.)

And the more I think about it, the more I think that Twelfth Night is my favorite for a very biased reason: I fell into friendship before I fell into love (no cross-dressing involved). And I like reading a love story that reminds me of mine.

And my own love story? Probably not the best. But it's absolutely my favorite.

So, I'm curious, what's your favorite Shakespearian play? And which do you think is the best? And - here's the kicker - are they the same play? Or not?

peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

p.s. Anyone want to do a challenge to read the Complete Works of Shakespeare? (Not to be confused with the Cmplt Wrks of Shkspr, Abridged.) Like I need another challenge. But . . . maybe in 2011?

100 push-ups and 20 pull-ups challenges are a go!

We started Sunday night. And I am SO SORE. My whole upper body aches.
"Challenge" is the right word for it. Ouch, ouch, ouch . . .
And after that inviting report, is anyone else in? C'mon - show folks that "mom" can be synonymous with "buff"!
Getting in shape is interesting because your body is constantly changing, but staying in shape can get monotonous, because there aren't any exciting weigh-ins anymore - no new clothing sizes to shrink into. With these challenges, I'm experimenting to find out if fitness challenges are a good way to keep myself motivated to stay in shape. Though I wouldn't mind it, I don't necessarily need to lose any weight (though I think these challenges would help you if that was your goal, because building muscle is the best thing you can do to lose fat), but I like the idea of getting stronger as a motivator. I'm hitting the point where keeping boredom at bay is a good idea, and this seems to be working.
At least so far. I'll let you know if it gets boring by the second week. If being in pain can be boring . . . ;)  
(Actually, I think it can. But that's an opinion that should be explored in a more serious post than this one is.)
peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

100 push-ups, 20 chin-ups, and a hand-stand just for fun

My husband and I are contemplating (contemplating! I'm not quite sold yet, though I'm close) taking on a couple of fitness challenges. If I were a running type, this would be going for my first half-marathon. But I'm not a running type, I'm a strength-training type, and so here's what's piqued my interest:

-One Hundred Push-ups: it's a six-week training program that gradually builds you up to the point where you can do 100 push-ups. My reason for wanting to try it: being able to do 100 push-ups would be hecka cool (as my Texan friend Linds would say). And I'm not getting younger, so if I'm ever going to do it, now would be the time. Downside? Push-ups stinkin' hurt. But I tried their initial test, to see what level I'd be starting at, and I actually managed to do 20 regulation push-ups. I was kind of surprised - guess the Shred really works. But I have the sinking feeling that doing 100 push-ups wouldn't just be five times as much; it feels like it would be 20x20x20x20x20 times as much. 

I argued with Adam that surely there's a set point of push-ups beyond which your body just will not go, and he argued back that he was pretty sure that set point was well beyond 100, because eventually, it'd just be like walking: once you've got the muscle to do it, it's really more aerobic than anaerobic. I'm not sure it's exactly the same, but it's not a bad point. 

-The Twenty Pull-ups Challenge: I have to admit, this one intimidates me way more than the push-up challenge. I can do 20 push-ups; I'm not sure I can do even one pull-up.

Okay, I just went and checked. No, I can not. I can almost do one. I can do it if I jump, but if I hang, I can get my forehead level with the bar, but not my chin.

See, this makes it much more intimidating.

Happily, the challenge has an option at starting at Week -1, or even Week -2, rather than jumping in at Week 1. In Week -2, you start with negative pull-ups, i.e., climbing up to the top and then slowly lowering yourself down.

Would it work? I don't know. But honestly, even being about to do 5 pull-ups would be pretty cool.

(btw, we do not actually have a pull-up bar at our house, however, our children's trapeze swing, which is hung underneath our stairs, can be adjusted up to pull-up height, and I think that'll do as a substitute. It's what I just tested myself on anyways.)

-The Handstand Challenge - this one is entirely made up by my husband. Adam just thinks it would be fun to learn how to do handstands. There once was a time when I could do a handstand for, oh, 15 seconds at a time, and I think it'd be cool to get at least that good at it again. Adam's goal is to be able to hold a handstand for at least 30 seconds.

I am not the most coordinated person in the world, so I think this one might be the challenge that plays most to my weak points. But spotting each other doing handstands in the living room makes for a good date night, right? right? At least it costs less than two tickets to the movies and a couple of hours of baby-sitting. :D

And knowing us, it'll probably make us laugh a lot more.

So . . . do any of those look like fun to anyone else? Or do you have a fitness goal you're working towards, or a different challenge you're taking on?

peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell