entertain...er...depress me?

I enjoy depressing movies. Maybe that goes along with my love for depressing 20th century American fiction, which is why I'm taking a class for it.

I finished Absalom, Absalom! today and it was sufficiently depressing, but it also made my head hurt because it was mostly stream-of-consciousness. I can do stream-of-consciousness, but reading 80 pages of it in one sitting is kind of overwhelming. Oops, sorry for the digression.

Anyway, my roommate and I both enjoy heavy movies more than light, happy movies, unless it's a Jeeves and Wooster or Black Adder episode. Looking at our desks, you can see plainly that we own more depressing movies than we own chick flicks. Shawshank Redemption, Hotel Rwanda, The Patriot, Jakob the Liar, Road to Perdition, and so on. We just go for heavier subject material when we pick out a movie. I think I enjoy being compelled to care about the characters when it's a heavier read. I enjoy a good satire or comedy, but I think what is most meaningful to me in books or movies is being made to care about characters that are twisted or are in the middle of twisted situations. The least depressing book we read this semester was my least favorite, because when I read it I wasn't thinking too much about the characters or why they meant anything to me, because they really didn't.

Now that I've made huge blanket statements, it's time for me to get under some blankets and sleep. Oh, one more thought--depressing movies have the best soundtracks. It's true. Thomas Newman is wonderful.

absalom, absalom!....olympics

I take a break from my intense (and confusing) reading of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! to mention the Olympics. I love them. My family has never been into watching sports, though throughout my childhood I took swimming lessons, and played some basketball and soccer here and there. We have never had a favorite sports team, or worn sports paraphernalia on purpose. But we eat up the Olympics. Ever since I was pretty small, I can remember all of us cheering and getting excited over speed skating, gymnastics, swimming, figure skating, skiing, you name it. Once we got a little older we would stay up with mom and watch until we could hardly keep our eyes open.

Tonight, Heidi (my roommate) and I searched high and low for a TV to watch the Olympics. We tried the one in our dorm's basement. No dice. Some very awkward couples watched a movie as we waited, doing our homework at a study table, and then the couples decided to watch another movie. Rude. We trekked through the snow to another building, but there was no room for us around that TV. So, we tried the Student Union, and found an Olympics-friendly TV in the commuter lounge.

I am reading the Faulkner novel while watching figure skating, which might not be a good idea, considering Faulkner has sentences that last for half a page sometimes, and it's easy to get lost. I like Faulkner, but I'm looking forward to class tomorrow, where Dr. Messer will tell us what in the world Faulkner is trying to communicate. It's beyond me.

henry buhl library

Well, I'm a doofus.

I studied in the stacks today at the library (on a Saturday, I know). I left my things in there to go to dinner, which is a very safe thing to do at Grove City College, especially since we are all issued the same computer when we come in, and everyone hates them, because they're always crashing. No one would want to steal one of those.

So I went off to dinner, and came back to the library around 6:30. I scanned my student I.D. It did the weird beep that means your card has been rejected. I tried again. No dice. I walked around to the front of the library, and that's when I noticed that all of the lights inside were dimmed. Yes. I was locked out of the library, and my homework and computer were locked inside. I felt just brilliant.

The good news is I really don't have that much homework to do this weekend, and I can get my stuff tomorrow when the library opens at 2. If I had been working on a paper this weekend, I might have just spiraled out of control and broken into Henry Buhl Library, which probably wouldn't look that strange here. You know that you're a Grover when you stare up in despair at the library on a Saturday night and wish you could get in.

(this, plus one foot of snow)

mind the gap.

I'm attempting to change the nature of this blog to something more than short blurbs about books. It's going to be an odds and ends of things, that will hopefully be more updated once I graduate and stop doing homework. That's not a good excuse, I know! It's pretty terrible. So, I'll start out by posting some pictures from the January Intersession trip that 10 of us from Grove City took a few weeks ago.

This was a class called "Modern Christian Writers," where we studied works by Chesterton, Lewis, Sayers, Eliot, and Charles Williams. It was the most enjoyable class I've ever taken, both because of the actual subject material and because we got to visit England! Most of us had never been there before (except for our seasoned, quintessential English professor), so it was wonderful for us all. I read some old favorites and made some new ones as well--the Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, which seem m0re beautiful each time I read them; "The Weight of Glory" and "Learning in Wartime" by C.S. Lewis, and some of his poetry which I had never come across before; and Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. Those were my favorite out of the works we read.

Canterbury

in Oxford...I forget the name of this building!

Les Miserables in London!

the group, haha...first day in Oxford

Magdalen College, Oxford

Till We Have Faces

For my Modern Christian Writers class, we had to write a response to reading Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, addressing whether or not Lewis intended for his story of Orual and Psyche to mirror particular truths in Christianity, and why the title of the work is appropriate. I read this book a few times before I read it again for class, and I get a new appreciation and love for it each time I read it. This time was especially wonderful because I got to hear it explained more fully and to be in a discussion about its significance. I think one of the most memorable things I came away with was realizing Lewis's talent even more, since he was able to write this story so convincingly from a female perspective. How many male authors can do that?

Lewis does suggest some similarities between Christianity and Orual’s struggle. The process of Orual slowly discovering her spiritual ugliness and realizing that she can have no complaint to bring against the gods is a process very similar to what Christians must come to terms with. Like Orual, Christians all struggle with the question of whether God is a good God. It’s one thing to believe that God exists; it’s another to believe that He is really good. At the end of her book, Orual discovers that the complaints that she brings against the gods for what she has supposed to be her own concern and love for Psyche is actually all about her own selfishness and bitterness that she can’t have control over Psyche and have Psyche’s love all for herself. In reality, Psyche’s “death” involves her being freed by being taken away from Orual. It is merciful of the gods to keep her from being drained by Orual as Bardia was.

When Orual “loses” Psyche to the god of the mountain, she displays the ugliness of her heart in her fierce desire to bring Psyche back to her and in her disregard for Psyche’s ultimate good. The word she uses over and over again in her complaint to the gods is “mine.” When people ask questions of the Christian God and demand that He tell us why he has done something, such as take away a loved one, the most common thing they say is “how could God be a good God and still cause this pain?” What we hardly ever realize is that such a question is more about us than it is about that person that we miss. Though death is awful and Christians can’t escape being hurt by it, when a loved one dies “in the Lord” we know that God is still good, and that that person always belonged to God to begin with, and not to us.. It is significant that Lewis constructed this story of Orual and Psyche to be parallel to some important questions in Christianity, because before writing this book he had lost his own wife and had to work through that grief himself.

The title of the book is very appropriate to the work, and is explained in the last chapter. Most of the book is Orual’s depiction of her life and justification of her actions—her complaint to the gods. But for much of the story she is shrouded in a veil, faceless to her kingdom and friends, hiding the physical ugliness that closely mirrors her spiritual ugliness. She is like Ungit—faceless, thirsty for people that she can suck the lives from in order to feel fulfilled. She steals Bardia from his wife, draining him emotionally, all the while believing that she was loving him, just as she thought she was loving Psyche. Orual is able to get away with many things because she is faceless and does not acknowledge the weight of the things she has done, and it is not until the gods strip her of her clothing and veils that she is exposed in all her ugliness and selfishness. The ugliness that she has hidden behind her veil directly symbolizes the distorted, egocentric intentions with which she has treated all people. Until her “face” is revealed to her, her real self, all that she has are her endless words of bitterness and accusations, not resolution or peace. As the Fox says, Ungit’s false image is “too true an image of the demon within” (295). When Orual’s face becomes known to her, and she knows “as she is known,” then her questions become meaningless and the face of God becomes the answer.

I really want to make it a tradition to read this book again every year. I love books that you can read over and over and still receive such meaning and enjoyment. And I hope that I didn't ruin the plot for anyone patient enough to read this entire post. :)

famous last words

These are some of my favorite endings to books (or stories) that I've come across. I'll add more when I think of them. Comment with your own!

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms farther.... And one fine morning---

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

"I ended my first book with the words no answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. Long did I hate you, long did I fear you. I might--

--C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

"And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Amen."

--The Apostle John, John 21:25

"A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are--oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.

Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that."

--Mark Twain, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences

"The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam."

--Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

"Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."

--James Joyce, Araby

"But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

--C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

The Slacker revisits Screwtape

Well, I think it's obvious how much progress I am making on Les Miserables. Little to none, lately. I am still determined to finish it by the end of the summer, but I have been less and less motivated to finish, especially when I have to sludge through chapter after chapter of plot-interrupting material about Paris and Napoleon, cloisters and politics. Somehow I'm just not constructed to appreciate battle strategies and political gymnastics and such. Poor me. I have come up with a way to get through it, though--when I get fed up with excess information that breaks the plot, I switch to reading another book. Then I have another wack at it. Right now, I'm reading The Screwtape Letters again. I've been thinking lately about how easily my mind is distracted from God by countless things that I come up with to deceive myself, so it has been great reading this Lewis book and seeing new phrases and ideas register in my mind.

I'm also rediscovering the Psalms. Quality.

Here is some food for thought:

"Remember, he [the human being tempted] is not, like you [wormwood the demon], a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy's!) you don't realise how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary."

It's funny how little things like putting aside prayer or communion with God to fix lunch, take a nap, or make a grocery list can be used effectively against the human heart. Especially when you tell yourself that you'll carry on whatever thoughts about God later when you have more time, feel more awake, etc. It's cheated me out of a lot, for sure.