Post #4027294
2026-07-23 04:54 UTC
So The Pilgrim's Regress contains dreary stereotypes of all the academic disciplines which Clive Staples Lewis regarded as corruption and subversion of his prim desiccated academic culture.
If you read George Orwell's Such, Such Were The Joys you'll get a taste of how absurd and rigid and limited the much-vaunted "British public-school education" (i.e. costly and violently abusive boarding schools) was in preparing British professionals for their jobs. There's truth in all the jokes about colonial Brits imagining they'd learned all about administering conquered foreign peoples by memorizing a bit of De Bello Gallico. Lewis upheld THAT dismal intellectual culture and it shows. Oh holy heck does Lewis let all his bigotries hang out...in children's books.
(cont'd)
Replies (1)
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@mxchara@seattle.pink 2026-07-23 04:57
I have been reflecting on that, on how the children's books are where C. S. Lewis really...lets himself go. He abandons all restraint and there is so much that he sheds along the way that I think we're seeing the disintegration of his own psyche and personality and his SOUL as that book winds up to a devastating and extraordinarily inappropriate sort of climax as Lewis is writing. I will go so far as to suggest that it's for this reason that the books have an unholy degree of esteem among Christians. They sense power of that sort, it's like they can smell it. They don't care what sort of power it is. All power is God's power, they tell themselves. (cont'd)