An online commonplace book
“There is endless room for rebellion against ourselves.”
– George MacDonald
From the tidy and often forgotten C.S. Lewis book: George MacDonald.
It’s Lewis’s tribute to the writer who influenced him most.
It’s great to carry around like a smartphone and scroll through.
Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald. United Kingdom, HarperCollins Publishers Limited, 2016. pg 53.
Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither…
– William Shakespeare
As read from John Hendrix’s The Mythmakers.
Hendrix, John. The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien (A Graphic Novel). United States, Abrams Fanfare, 2024. pg 154
Haven’t posted a Four Panel Fridays in ages. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s friendship revived it, for this week anyway…
Hendrix, John. The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien (A Graphic Novel). United States, Abrams Fanfare, 2024.
For man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something
Go! Create!
As read from John Hendrix’s The Mythmakers. The best type of book – part prose biography, part comic, part picture book.
Doubles as a commonplace book, chock full of fantastic quotes.
Picture books are underrated.
Hendrix, John. The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien (A Graphic Novel). United States, Abrams Fanfare, 2024. pg 101
What he does best is fantasy — fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man. The critical problem with which we are confronted is whether this art — the art of myth-making — is a species of the literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the Myth does not essentially exist in words at all.
– C.S. Lewis
From the beginning intellectuals were trying to figure out where to classify fantasy and myth. Is myth-making a literary species?
MacDonald, George. George MacDonald. United Kingdom, HarperCollins, 1946.
Ohtani as proof mythical men did exist:
Ohtani makes me believe that many of the stories of the heroes of old, of Greek myth, or Mesopotamian myth, Arab or African myth, or whatever myth, that such men did walk the earth
– David Bentley Hart
Damn. Some men have it all. Ohtani is baseball’s George Clooney.
And lets admit it. It’s annoying. He’s tall. And handsome. And suave. And you know, its just, he makes the rest of us feel just slightly less human.
– David Bentley Hart
And Ohtani’s underrated, but awe inspiring skill:
The thing that amazes me most when I’m watching him is not necessarily the massively soaring home runs, or the one hundred and one mile per hour fastball on the corner. It’s actually watching him run the bases, because he does it like a gazelle. He’s moving as fast as some of the fastest runners in the game, but he looks like he’s just taking long, easy, loping strides when he does it. He’ll steal without a slide half the time, because he doesn’t have to slide. He’s an amazing specimen. And happily plays the only game in the world worthy of his skills.
– David Bentley Hart
I echo that last statement. Once, I watched Ohtani stretch out a double and his helmet flew off while he was running. I couldn’t help but smile. I thought “man this guy is having fun”.
This excerpt begins at 12:40. Watch the interview in full from the C.S. Lewis foundation below.
St. Paul’s job was tent-making. When the two coincide I should have thought there was a danger lest the natural interest in one’s job and the pleasures of gratified ambition might be mistaken for spiritual progress and spiritual consolation: and I think clergymen sometimes fall into this trap.
Contrariwise, there is the danger that what is boring or repellent in the job may alienate one form the spiritual life. And finally someone has said ‘None are so unholy as those whose hands are cauterised with holy things’: scared things may become profane by becoming matters of the job. You now want truth for her own sake: how will it be when the same truth is also needed for an effective footnote in your thesis? In fact, the change might do good or harm. I’ve always been glad myself that Theology is not the thing I earn my living by. On the whole, I’d advise you to get on with your tent making. The performance of a duty will probably teach you quite as much about God as academic Theology would do. Mind, I’m not certain: but that is the view I incline to.
Published letters as a genre, is still underrated.
Lewis, C.S.. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C.S. Lewis. Harper One, Toller Fratrum, New York, 2008.
Shasta cried only a very little; he was used to hard knocks.
Lewis. C.S.. The Horse and His Boy. New York: Harper Collins, 2002.
Annie. Jay-Z. C.S. Lewis. The phrase “hard-knocks” has been around since 1870.
First appearing in his Essay “On Living in an Atomic Age“. Lewis answers the question – how to live in a time of uncertainty?
Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plagued visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat at night….The first action to take is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb come when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
Baxter M. Jason, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2022. (see page 14)
Whatever 2023 brings, let’s heed these words.
Do human things. Live.
Happy New Year!
Floodlights and Goalposts 