George MacDonald, Lilith

Introduction

Opening Passage:

I had just finished my studies at Oxford, and was taking a brief holiday from work before assuming definitely the management of the estate. My father died when I was yet a child, my mother followed him within a year, and I was nearly as much alone in the world as a man might find himself.

Summary: Mr. Vane is staying at his family house, which seems to be quite big, and whose first floor is almost entirely taken up by the overflowing library. This suits Mr. Vane, because he's more interested in books than people. He soon discovers that the library appears to be haunted by a librarian who had served in the family long before, a Mr. Raven. He sees him on occasion and one day, following him through a mirror, finds himself in an entirely new world.

Mr. Raven, now in the form of a raven, gives him riddling advice; he soon finds himself back in his garret. At a later time, however, he follows Mr. Raven again and goes with him to his house, which turns out to be the House of Death, where those who die eventually go to sleep until their morning comes. Mr. Raven and his wife try to convince Mr. Vane to sleep as well, but instead he flees the house in fear, and finds himself finally in his own home again. He's later ashamed of this, and, passing through the mirror again, finds Mr. Raven to tell him that he has reconsidered, but Mr. Raven says that his flight shows that he was not ready; he must find his own way home.

In his attempt to do so, he undergoes many adventures, including meeting a group of children called the Little Ones, who hide from giants called the Bags; nursing an emaciated woman back to health, who turns out to be the princess of the vain and self-important city of Bulikia, where nobody works but live instead on the savings of past generations and on precious gemstones they occasionally find in their cellars. It gets stranger from there, and by the end we have met Adam and Eve, and Lilith, the wicked angel who was Adam's first wife, and Mara the Lady of Sorrows, and, fleetingly, The Shadow, who is of all creatures the one furthest from God's light.

In a very great measure the book is about the crucial importance of sorrow; no one can come properly to the House of Death without the help of Mara, the Lady of Sorrows, and, in general, staying a bit in her house, the House of Bitterness. Sorrow is essential to repentance; repentance is necessary for true joy; so none can have true joy without first being taught by sorrow. It is through sorrow that we learn how to let go of our ideas of ourselves and to see ourselves as we truly are; it is through sorrow that we learn how to let go the things that mar us; and it is through sorrow that we learn how to face death, not with fear, but with a recognition that it is only the next step; and it is through the sorrow of repentance that we cease to be shut up inside ourselves, which is hell, and become open to the joy of heaven. The book is also about death: dying to one's self and the world, the death of the old Adam (the death of repentance), the death of the body.

This would be a very difficult book to get through if it were not for two things: (1) the surreal, fantastic setting means that much of the book is carried by symbolism and allusion, and (2) MacDonald's universalism, which does not deny the existence of hell (because hell is to shut oneself off from true love and life and light, which is a thing we must all overcome), but nonetheless allows the possibility that even Lilith, even The Shadow, can in the end repent, means that the overall thrust of the book is optimistic. Most of the book is under the shadow of the seemingly endless evening of sorrow and death; but there is still joy within it, death is not the end, and there is a morning to come.

Favorite Passage:

Then," I said, feeling naked and very worthless, "will you be so good as show me the nearest way home? There are more ways than one, I know, for I have gone by two already."

"There are indeed many ways."

"Tell me, please, how to recognise the nearest."

"I cannot," answered the raven; "you and I use the same words with different meanings. We are often unable to tell people what they NEED to know, because they WANT to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said. Home is ever so far away in the palm of your hand, and how to get there it is of no use to tell you. But you will get there; you must get there; you have to get there. Everybody who is not at home, has to go home. You thought you were at home where I found you: if that had been your home, you could not have left it. Nobody can leave home. And nobody ever was or ever will be at home without having gone there."

"Enigma treading on enigma!" I exclaimed. "I did not come here to be asked riddles."

"No; but you came, and found the riddles waiting for you! Indeed you are yourself the only riddle. What you call riddles are truths, and seem riddles because you are not true."

"Worse and worse!" I cried.

"And you MUST answer the riddles!" he continued. "They will go on asking themselves until you understand yourself. The universe is a riddle trying to get out, and you are holding your door hard against it."

Recommendation: Don't expect to understand most of it even after several readings and it is not light reading; but it is a haunting and beautiful book: recommended for those who like symbolism or fantasy or both.

Links and Notes

* The US drought map is starting to look a little dire (see also the current Palmer Drought Index map). This is a big issue, and not just for Americans: the United States is the world's biggest exporter of corn, wheat, and sorghum and is neck-and-neck with Brazil as the biggest exporter of soybeans. It is also a significant exporter of rice and barley, although it's a relatively minor player on both fronts in comparison with the other major exporters. Due to our very high production per acre, our relatively good distribution systems, and lots and lots of good agricultural land, the breadbasket of the United States is one of the breadbaskets of the world; severe drought in the US means harder times elsewhere. It still isn't 1930s bad, but by some measures we are currently in the worst drought since the 1950s.

* Greg Forster corrects David Barton's errors on John Locke.

* A Mosaic Depicting Envy at "Laudator Temporis Acti"

* A website on the Scotist version of the doctrine of the primacy of Christ.

* You can often find people saying that Theodosius I abolished the Olympic Games in the fourth century. As Roger Pearse notes, however, the evidence is not quite so clear.

* David Goldman on circumcision.

* Michael Habib on flying lizards and gliding snakes.

* An interview with Hadley Arkes

* Schwitzgebel on the external world. His posts on this always remind me of Lady Mary Shepherd's approach to the question -- different specific arguments, but the same general idea and inference-structure.

* "The Homeless Adjunct" gives us How the American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps. Not all the details are entirely plausible -- for instance, at several points there is an assumption of deliberateness for things that were probably not at the forefront of most people's minds and were probably mostly due instead to not thinking things through adequately -- but the basic outline seems right.

* I just recently learned that Alan Saunders died this past June. Saunders was the very excellent host of what was the best philosophy-focused radio program in the English-speaking world, The Philosopher's Zone, which was one of the gems in the crown of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

* Liam Heneghan discusses Konrad Lorenz and Nazism. I think there are actually more options on the table with regard to Heidegger, whom Heneghan uses as a comparison case, than are suggested here. It's not all-or-nothing. The position I've advocated with Heidegger has been that the best way to handle it is to read him but accept nothing from him that cannot clearly or rigorously be disconnected from anything even suggestive of Nazi political thought.

I think this is harder to do than many of Heidegger's fans think; I think most of the quick dismissals of the difficulty are due to a naivete about what Nazi political thought actually was, since it was not all of a piece and there was a lot of in-fighting over the precise direction the Nationalist Socialist party and state should go. When you look at early Nazi political philosophy I don't think there's much room to be in doubt that Heidegger's philosophy, while more sophisticated, fit right in; which explains quite easily why Heidegger also had problems with the Nazi Party, since most of the more conservative Nazi philosophers and thinkers had serious problems with the direction they thought Hitler was taking -- and Hitler and his immediate circle, of course, thought that they were refusing to follow through on the principles they claimed to uphold. It's often forgotten, for instance, that Kurt Huber, the famous hero of the White Rose who was executed for stirring up resistance against Hitler, was actually a Nazi philosopher himself, as is clear from his interrogation interviews; he claimed that he was in favor of National Socialism but that he thought that the NSDAP old guard should push for a constitutional regime and that the Hitler faction within the Party was pushing the Party in a leftist direction, of which he regarded the alliance with the Soviet Union as a symptom. (Huber thought that the most natural ally of a Nazi Germany, if the Nazism were old-school rather than Hitlerism, was Britain, and that Britain and Nazi Germany should have joined together to fight Bolshevism as soon as the Nazis took power.) There were multiple philosophical positions vying for power in the Nazi Party, all of them consistent with the general ideology but disagreeing as to details and priorities. Yet I've repeatedly seen people point to Heidegger's difficulties, and the suspicion with which he was viewed, as if it somehow were evidence of a sharp disconnect between Heidegger's philosophy and Nazism. To be sure, some of the connection may well just be general folk conservatism, which is what attracted quite a few people to the Nazi party originally; but this needs to be shown rather than airily assumed. But regardless of the difficulty, it needs to be done. I suspect that this denazification is much easier with respect to Lorenz than Heidegger, I would advocate the same thing with regard to him, as well: nothing accepted that can't be replicated in ways inconsistent with Nazi ideology. And the cautionary tale that Heneghan mentions is also quite important.

* Richard Langworth looks into the matter. Richard Langworth is pretty much the source to go to for determining whether Churchill quotes are spurious or rightly attributed. Did Churchill say:

If you make ten thou­sand reg­u­la­tions you destroy all respect for the law.

The Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.
The best argu­ment against Democ­racy is a five-minute con­ver­sa­tion with the aver­age voter.
Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
A fanatic is someone who won't change his mind and won't change the subject.
There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess -- and there are few mistakes they have ever avoided.
Another tidbit: What did Churchill think of the novel, Gone with the Wind, as well as its movie version?

Facts, Hercule, Facts!

Peter Sellers having recently come up in the comments, I am reminded of this, the second best scene in the best Pink Panther movie, A Shot in the Dark.



The best scene, of course, is the confession scene, especially when Sellers looks with complete bafflement at the audience as the case solves itself. A Shot in the Dark is interesting in that it was not originally written to be a n Inspector Clouseau movie; it was supposed to be a movie adaptation of a stageplay, Harry Kurnitz's English adaptation, also called A Shot in the Dark, of Marcel Achard's adultery-themed comic mystery play, L'Idiote. It was then rewritten (massively) at the last minute to make Inspector Clouseau the detective, due to the kind of chain of events that dominates Hollywood movie-making -- they wanted Sellers for the story, who was reluctant to do it, but who had enjoyed doing The Pink Panther, which he had just finished; he asked if Blake Edwards, the director for The Pink Panther, could direct this one; Blake Edwards's condition for directing was that it be a Pink Panther sequel; the producers, who had been losing money in delays and false starts , agreed, despite the fact that The Pink Panther hadn't been released yet, and nobody could have guessed how popular it would be. I think this greatly contributes to the film's success; it is, for instance, the reason that Clouseau's obtuseness is not mere incompetence (which gets very tiring, as can be seen in some of the later Pink Panther films) but partly due to the fact that he is obviously and foolishly head over heels in love with the obvious suspect, since this is in the original, although played by a much more straightlaced character than Clouseau. A number of other things were done last minute with the film, including the introduction of the famous exaggerated French accent with the meurths in the closet, the beump on the head, and the exploding beum, and another one of the great scenes, the watch synchronization scene, which was done completely impromptu. Sellers thought the movie was a disaster and tried to convince the production company not to release it (Sellers seems to have had this kind of reaction more than once) and reviewers thought it confusing and shallow, but audiences loved it and it has become widely regarded as one of the great comic films, in part because it is the last very popular film where we see almost all the major forms of Hollywood humor -- silent-film-like sight gags and slapstick, classic comedy, situation incongruity, farce, screwball, sophomoric humor -- all holding together in a form that makes at least some kind of loose sense.

Two Poem Drafts

The Thieves of Night

The thieves of night have stolen sleep
and I abetted them;
the moon is high, my heart is hot,
the world is evendim,
I wonder if you walk somewhere
beneath a sickle slim
of moon that hunts the wayward stars.
Unslept, I wonder where you are.

With ink of night I write a verse
but understand it not;
my heart unknowing lyrics writes
with subtle pen of thought;
but at the end oblivion
will come and take the lot:
my thoughts are stolen with my sleep --
save wondering what paths you keep.

The night itself is stolen, too,
in cunning con and heist:
the bait is laid, the trap is set,
the prey thereby enticed,
the spring is sprung, the teeth close down
with ruthlessness of vise;
impressive, but my mind still strays
to wonder if you'll chance my way.

A Poet Is No Dancing Horse

Envoy
A poet is no dancing horse;
I cannot prance on your command,
nor steeplechase across a course
with shouting thousands in the stands.
To bet on me is like to lose --
I keep no beaten track --
my frenzies are not mine to choose,
my reins are always slack.
And if perhaps you are confused,
I'll summarize with force:
you are not God, nor yet my Muse,
nor I your dancing horse!

Post-scriptum
But do not think I speak with gall.
Such trees are fallen where they fall.
A poem does not come at call,
but as the God has set.
An angel, by some unknown fate,
will stir the waters by the gate,
and if you will with patience wait,
you may get a poem yet.

Logic and Science

The sad thing is that you can find people who reason that way.

If you don't at least occasionally read the Girl Genius webcomic, you are missing out on some great panels. If you've never read it at all, of course, you should start at the beginning sometime when you have a few hours free.

Phoenix Requiem is another good story-arc webcomic, too; it has a sort of fantasy alternative-Victorian feel to it. (It's also a bit shorter, and its story arc is completed, and not extending apparently into infinity like Girl Genius with its ten-thousand-member ensemble cast.) Precocious is another one; it handles the long-arc problem by breaking things up into smaller stories. But all these are long-time survivors; I don't know of any good recently new ones.

MacDonald on Philanthropy

The part of philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbour good must first study how not to do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye.

George MacDonald, Lilith, Chapter XIV.

Taken Up

Today is the Feast of the Assumption. Some relevant links:

(1) Gregory DiPippo notes the medieval allegorical reading of the original Gospel reading for the Feast, at "New Liturgical Movement".

(2) Mark Gordon reflects on Mary as the icon of the Church, at "Vox Nova"

(3) I was interested to discover that the Feast of the Assumption is actually a big thing in Cleveland, Ohio, of all places; it has been consistently celebrated in Cleveland's Little Italy for 114 years, and has grown to be quite the celebration, with dinners, raffles, music, and fireworks for several days. Here is the schedule of events for Feast of the Assumption 2012.