Post #4027600

2026-07-23 05:08 UTC

I doubt any readers of mine have read The Place of the Lion, a very difficult and opaque book which yielded to my understanding only after multiple attempts. In it, the fabric of reality is torn open. That fire which breaks through the Earth is like a rift and everything round it begins to lose its material coherence. Archetypal beings roam free: the Serpent, the Horse (and the Unicorn, like yet unlike) and above all the Lion. Lewis thought he could grab a piece of THAT and use it to power his half-baked children's books. It's a fatal mistake. I feel as if the narrative of #Narnia is one of collapse. There's a reason only the first book feels quite real somehow, anchored in reality as if by that iconic lamp-post, the piece of solid Earth brought into Narnia. (cont'd)

Replies (2)

@mxchara@seattle.pink 2026-07-23 05:15

Well. Perhaps I should get back to that ghost. He found a place for himself in the Grey Town, which seems limitless in The Great Divorce but is in fact quite insubstantial. Napstablook has seen him (though I don't think the ghost wanted to see Napstablook) thus I can report that the ghost has settled in somehow at a place with the very worrying name of The Kilns. He's alone, although Napstablook says that the ghost keeps saying the name "Warnie" in a way that suggests conversation. But who doesn't have conversations with imaginary friends named Warnie? It's all the rage now, talking to oneself, or oneselves. (cont'd)

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@Quasit@beige.party 2026-07-23 16:22

@mxchara@seattle.pink When you say "the first book" (of the Narnia series), do you mean "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe"? Or "The Magician's Nephew"? I know that TLTWATW was the first written and published book in the series, but for some idiotic reason "The Magician's Nephew" has been officially marked as the first in the series in many later printings. I quite appreciate your take on all this, by the way. I mean on CS Lewis in general. He really does display the classic zeal and arrogance of a typical convert. Can't resist grabbing the microphone to lecture the reader a lot of the time. Robert A. Heinlein did the same thing, although the God that he was promoting was himself—or more likely, Virginia Heinlein. I'd have said that his Good was Ayn Rand, but that doesn't feel quite right somehow.

Open ##4040692