Life Advice Archives - Page 2 of 10

The Glories of Being Enchanted

“He was only a little taller than Lucy herself and he carried over his head an umbrella, white with snow. From the waist upwards he was like a man, but his legs were shaped like a goat’s (the hair on them was glossy black) and instead of feet he had goat’s hoofs. He also had a tail, but Lucy did not notice this at first because it was neatly caught up over the arm that held the umbrella so as to keep it from trailing in the snow. He had a red woollen muffler round his neck and his skin was rather reddish too. He had a strange, but pleasant little face, with a short pointed beard and curly hair, and out of the hair there stuck two horns, one on each side of his forehead. One of his hands, as I have said, held the umbrella: in the other arm he carried several brown-paper parcels. What with the parcels and the snow it looked just as if he had been doing his Christmas shopping. He was a Faun. And when he saw Lucy he gave such a start of surprise that he dropped all his parcels.
‘Goodness gracious me!’ exclaimed the Faun.”

That, as you probably know, is from C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. In a later essay (“It All Began With a Picture…”), Lewis claims that this image, which he first had at the age of 16, was the genesis of Narnia. (In the same essay he also says you should not always believe authors when they tell you how they wrote their books, so…)

Is that passage Enchanting?

Alan Jacobs wrote an engaging biography of Lewis: The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis. It’s the first full biography of Lewis I have ever read, so I have no ability to evaluate it on a comparative basis, but I can happily recommend it to anyone who, like me, would like to while away some hours delving into how the mind of Lewis was developed. (Obviously, if you want to actually delve into the mind of Lewis, you are better off reading Lewis’ own books.)

There are a ton of fascinating anecdotes in the book. I’ll give just one before moving along to the subject on which I want to ruminate for a bit. When Clive Staples Lewis was four years old, he announced to his family that from then on he would only answer to the name “Jacksie.” Later in life, that shortened to Jack, but he did indeed never use Clive again. He also never stopped being as headstrong as that four year old demanding his parents call him by his new name. That episode explains a lot about the adult Lewis.

The adult Lewis was a remarkably prolific author. Even setting aside all his essays, the books alone demonstrate an incredible variety. Both fiction and non-fiction. The fiction category has both adult and children’s novels. The non-fiction has popular Christian apologetics and scholarly treatises. He was, in the mid-20^th century, one of the most well-known English academics in the world. He made the cover of TIME.

So, facing this enormous variety of works, how does a biographer make sense of it all? What unifies all these books and essays? Jacobs explains:

And here I would like to suggest something that is the keynote of this book: my belief that Lewis’s mind was above all characterized by a willingness to be enchanted and that it was this openness to enchantment that held together the various strands of his life—his delight in laughter, his willingness to accept a world made by a good and loving God, and (in some ways above all) his willingness to submit to the charms of a wonderful story, whether written by an Italian poet of the sixteenth century, by Beatrix Potter, or by himself. What is “secretly present in what he said about anything” is an openness to delight, to the sense that there’s more to the world than meets the jaundiced eye, to the possibility that anything could happen to someone who is ready to meet that anything. For someone with eyes to see and the courage to explore, even an old wardrobe full of musty coats could be the doorway into another world.

A willingness to be enchanted. That is a curious phrase. What does it mean?

Look out the window. (Really—this the Reader Participation Portion of this rumination.) What do you see? Now: imagine that the object you see is actually endowed with sentience and wonder. That bird speaks English, or maybe Bulgarian. The tree is possessed by a dryad. The breeze is being caused by a sleeping giant just beyond your line of sight. The man in the suit is a magician. The woman in green is a traveler from another world.

And now take whatever image you just conjured and imagine it is true. Really true. Imagine what it would be like to live in a world like that, where the bird really does speak Bulgarian to the woman from Neptune about how to slay the stone giant without alerting the magician who is the giant’s servant. Is your picture enchanting? Do you feel under the spell of this world? Is there something amazing about imagining that when you next leave your house, you will actually encounter a faun carrying an umbrella?

If you are the normal product of a 21^st century education system, you think such imaginative exercises are just foolishness. Obviously there is no dryad in that tree and no dwarfs digging ditches. Kids fantasize about things like that, but then eventually they put aside the childish idea that maybe such things are real. That is, after all, the whole purpose of school, to rid you of such childish nonsense and learn real things. Sure, if you want to pretend you are a kid, you can read fantasy stories or science fiction, but don’t go pretending such things are real.

Lewis had zero patience with education of that sort. The first part of The Abolition of Man is a rant about textbook writers who want to disenchant children. Why is disenchantment our universal educational goal? Why not go through life pleasantly pausing every now and then simply to be enchanted?

Take The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. We know Lewis wrote both fiction and non-fiction. Into which category falls this tale about Narnia? Fiction, obviously. But, what if it isn’t? What if Narnia is real? What happens if you read the novel and the whole time you suspend all your disbelief and imagine that this book as every bit as accurate at Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. What if Hogwarts really exists?

Yes, I know you are thinking it is a really silly exercise to spend some time imagining that Narnia is real, that Lucy really did meet a Faun in the snowy woods. But why is it silly? What is the harm that will be done by spending some time being thoroughly enchanted by that image of Lucy and the Faun, imagining it really happened while German and English men were killing each other in the French countryside? Are you really better off if you only think about the deaths on the battlefields of France, but not those between the armies of High King Peter and the White Witch?

What if being enchanted is the key to understanding the world? What if the deliberate quashing of enchantment has meant that people spend their lives looking down, imagining that it is only what they can see that is real? What if enchantment is the only way to realize the true nature of this world, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies? What if there is “more to the world than meets the jaundiced eye”?

It is about to start raining here. (Really, it is—major thunderstorm about to roll through.) The sky is getting darker as I write this. At one level, I know this is the result of weather fronts and cloud formations and all sorts of other meteorological mumbo-jumbo that I vaguely learned about in school.

But, what if? What if I spend some time during this storm thinking of the Wild Wizard in the Holyoke Range who is working with the God of Rain to summon up a storm to protect the people hiding in the castles at Mount Holyoke from a fire breathing dragon who is heading our way? Every drop of rain now seems like a gift from above. The harder it rains, the safer I feel. That booming sound is the anger of the dragon who is being thwarted as I write.

In which world am I going to spend a more enjoyable half-hour; the one the Weather Channel talks about or the one with that wild wizard named Doctor Jimbopulous?

Cultivating enchantment is not the same thing as losing touch with reality. I know there is not a dragon breathing mustard fire bearing down upon me right now. But what if Lewis is right that being enchanted is a good thing? As Jacobs notes: Lewis, at some point in his life realized that “feeding his imagination” could be done “under the guise of rigorous, analytical, academic study—but he would still be reading the kinds of books that had always brought him delight.” Is that delight something to be lightly tossed aside as your knowledge of the world increases?

Be enchanted today. Just for five minutes imagine this is a world in which wild things really do happened and it is all amazing and anything, literally anything, could happen when you walk out of the door. Who knows, when you return from your enchanted world, you might just realize something new about how amazing the real world actually is.

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Why College Degrees Might Not Be Worth It

“Is the Scholarly Life Still Worth Pursuing?” Phillip Dolitsky recently asked at Public Discourse. The answer depends on what is meant by “scholarly life.” Dolitsky is specifically asking about whether it is worth entering a PhD program in strategic studies.

But his question can be applied more broadly. Is it still worth going to college at all?

Let’s begin by considering a rather curious book: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew Crawford. The most important part of this book is the author himself. As one of my students put it, “This is a book which could only have been written by one person who ever lived.” Crawford has a PhD in political philosophy from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, one of the most selective PhD programs in the world. Crawford’s job when he wrote this book? He repaired motorcycles. Note: he wasn’t repairing motorcycles because he couldn’t get another job. He chose this life.

Read the rest at Public Discourse

On Living Well

Sometimes, Admiration is the only appropriate response to a book.

Case in Point: On Reading Well, by Karen Swallow Prior

(Prior’s nom de Twitter is NotoriousKSP, which tells you a lot.)

On Reading Well is remarkable for how cleverly structured it is. When you are looking at a Great Painting, you first notice the image, but as you look at it longer, you notice that the brilliance of the painting is not the object which was painted, but the way the author constructed that image. What separates Michelangelo and me is not the thing being represented—I can draw a stick figure of Adam—but the fact that his image is so carefully and artfully crafted. Don’t get me wrong—the Sistine Chapel is more impressive than On Reading Well. But, On Reading Well is so much more impressive than the typical book in this genre that the comparison to Michelangelo seems apt.

The genre? Books about other books. You know the type. Author picks a bunch of books and writes short chapters about each, telling the reader what is noteworthy about the book in question. Organize these chapters into sections and (presto!) another book about books! I enjoy this genre a lot—it is a great way to learn about new books and to discover things about books I have already read. (As the readers of this here blog will note, ruminating about books is something which intrigues me…)

To be honest, when I picked up this book, I was expecting it to be at best a pleasant addition to the genre. Prior is a genial narrator, obviously excited for the opportunity to share her love of books. She talks to the reader (and presumably her students) as if they are fellow travelers in a journey of discovery; she is less the captain and more the person who has been this way before, pointing out some of the fascinating things she noticed on a previous trek. The more you read Prior’s work, the more you can see why she is viewed with complete Adulation by an adoring crowd. Following the fun on Twitter is like watching a friendly cult in action. (There is even KSP Swag—Target sold a T-shirt with a picture of a woman who looks a bit like Prior; it was amusing watching people asking one another how they could get one of those shirts.)

On top of Prior’s engaging style, the set of books she chose to discuss promised many pleasant ruminations. Twelve Books and every book she chose is well worth reading. It is a mix of well-known Great Books (Gatsby, Tale of Two Cities, Huck Finn, Persuasion, Pilgrim’s Progress ), lesser known Great Books by Great Authors (Fielding, Tolstoy, Wharton, O’Connor), and much to my pleasant surprise a trio of relatively recent authors, all of whom should be much better known than they are (Shusaku Endo, Cormac McCarthy, George Saunders).

By this point, we have an author with a great prose style and a fantastic set of books, but the final touch is the selection and organization principle. The Books are presented as illustrations of assorted Virtues. For example, Huck Finn is Courage; Silence is Faith; Persuasion is Patience. Glancing at the Table of Contents presents a fun thought experiment—what book would you pick for each virtue? Why did the book which was chosen strike Prior as the best example to illustrate the Virtue?

Given all that, I settled in to read the book, hoping it would live up to its promise. (I am sad to say that many books in this genre do not live up to their potential; there are a lot of dreary books about books.) Happily, this book did live up to its promise. Take any chapter at random, and it is a chapter worth reading.

However, the genius of the book is not the individual chapters; the genius is the structure. In a surprising twist, as you set off on the first chapter, you discover that this really isn’t a book about books at all. Chapter 1 is “Prudence: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding.” Given the genre, you would expect this is a chapter about Fielding’s novel, and how it illustrates the virtue of Prudence. But by about half-way through the chapter, you realize that it is the reverse. This is a chapter about Prudence, and Fielding’s novel is just an example. The same thing happens in every chapter.

It dawns on the reader that this isn’t actually a book about books; it is a book about virtue. Chapter by chapter, Prior is explaining the Cardinal Virtues and the Theological Virtues and the Heavenly Virtues. She is admonishing the reader to understand the virtues and to strive to live out the virtues. This is really obvious when you flip to the back of the book and see the “Discussion questions.” For each chapter, Prior provides five discussion questions, the type of thing which could be used to spark a conversation at a book club. What is fascinating about the questions is that for most of the chapters, only one or maybe two of the five discussion questions is directly about the novel discussed in the chapter. “What is the relationship between prudence and morality? Between prudence and immorality?” “What is the relationship between justice and beauty?” Why does materialism so often replace love of people?” “How is nice different from kind?”

The title of the book is On Reading Well. It would be more properly titled On Living Well. Prior hints at this in the title she gave to the Introduction: “Read Well, Live Well.” If you want to learn about the virtue of Hope, you could read Aquinas or N.T. Wright, or you can turn to McCarthy’s The Road to see how hope works out in practice. Armed with Prior’s discussion, a reader who has little interest in struggling through the Summa Theologica can learn a lot about Hope by reading McCarthy.

But, to say that Prior’s book is about how to Live Well misses the point she is making, and this is where Prior’s genius comes through. Consider this excerpt from the chapter on Diligence and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress

Modern ways of thinking cultivate a flatter approach to language and stories—as well as to the world and truth—than the ancients had. This modern preference for the literal over the symbolic, metaphorical, and poetic lends itself to a fundamentalism that the Puritans would never have recognized. For the Puritans, the world, even language itself, was charged with meaning both originating in and pointing toward God….Even the word progress in the title Pilgrim’s Progress is suggestive of how allegory functions. Allegory operates on a built-in expectation that readers will “progress” from the literal, material level of the story to the symbolic, spiritual truth beyond. It has an explicit assumption of interpretation that is implicit in all literary writing, indeed and all writing and all use of language. In other words, allegory requires and assumes the exercise of diligence by the readers.

If you want to learn about Diligence from Bunyan, then you have to learn how to read Bunyan well.

Generalize that thought from Bunyan to all the other virtues. Learning to read well is more than just learning the meaning of words and how sentences are formed. Learning to read well means learning how to interpret the book you are reading. One of the unfortunate products of schooling is that while many people learn the skill of reading, they never learn the art of reading. They can read Gatsby for the plot and it is a nice story, well told. But to grasp the meaning of Gatsby requires understanding how literature works, what Fitzgerald is trying to do.

There are lots of books that show people the art of reading. (My personal favorites: Adler and Van Doren’s How to Read a Book, C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism.) What is clever about Prior’s approach is that she demonstrates by example, showing the point of learning to read well. We learn to read well because when we read well, it teaches us how to live well.

All those high school English classes full of the tedious exercises of “Find the theme of this story” missed the point. What conceivable good is it simply to find the theme in order to get full credit on an exam? Why destroy the pleasure of a story in the pedantic hunt for the theme? Prior subtly, but masterfully, shows up the pointlessness of that type or reading by showing that the reason we find the theme is to ask ourselves what the theme teaches us about how to live better.

On Reading Well is making a deep point. If you want to learn how to live well, then you need to learn how to read well. While Prior doesn’t put it this starkly, the book seems squarely aimed at all those people who are very sloppy readers of the Bible. On the one side you have people who reject Christianity based on incredibly poor understanding of Christian theology because they have never actually bothered to read the Bible well. But, on the other side are the people whom I suspect are Prior’s real target audience, Christians who do not read the Bible well because they do not read any book well. A person who learns to read well the twelve books Prior discusses in her own book might just realize that the book of Judges or gospel of Luke may also need to be read well in order to understand the ideas the authors are expressing.

That is why this book deserves such Admiration. Prior has written a fascinating argument about how to understand God and learn to live a Christian Life. The book doesn’t look like that it is what it is doing. You could easily read this book and then merrily have Book Club discussion about Prior and the novel being evaluated in the chapter. But if you do that you are absorbing a much deeper lesson. It is surely not mere happenstance that God speaks through a book. Prior is adroitly showing that learning how to read well is an important step in learning how to understand God.

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How to Have a Great Conversation

Conversation is underappreciated.

When you think about collegiate learning environments, you instantly imagine the lecture hall or the seminar room. That seems like the place where learning is supposed to happen. A professor pontificates or asks “discussion questions.” (“Discussion questions” is all too often an inaccurate term; most “discussion questions” do not lead to “discussion.”) Students absorb information. Maybe they read some books too.

But, that image of learning leaves out conversation, the underappreciated art of the rambling, wide-ranging, topic-jumping foray into the life of the mind.

In 1890, William James’ two volume Principles of Psychology was one of the earliest textbooks in the relatively new field. It was, not surprising given the era and the author, a much more opinionated book than the pabulum which now appropriates the sobriquet “textbook.” Over time, James’ volumes faded from use as the field of psychology advanced.

James’ comments on the nature of conversation, however, deserve to be forever inscribed on the halls of the Academy.

When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the summariness of its allusions and the rapidity of its transitions. Before one of them is half through a sentence the other knows his meaning and replies. Such genial play with such massive materials, such an easy flashing of light over far perspectives, such careless indifference to the dust and apparatus that ordinarily surround the subject and seem to pertain to its essence, make these conversations seem true feasts for gods to a listener who is educated enough to follow them at all. His mental lungs breathe more deeply, in an atmosphere more broad and vast than is their wont. On the other hand, the excessive explicitness and short-windedness of an ordinary man are as wonderful as they are tedious to the man of genius. But we need not go as far as the ways of genius. Ordinary social intercourse will do. There the charm of conversation is in direct proportion to the possibility of abridgment and elision, and in inverse ratio to the need of explicit statement. With old friends a word stands for a whole story or set of opinions. With new-comers everything must be gone over in detail. Some persons have a real mania for completeness, they must express every step. They are the most intolerable of companions, and although their mental energy may in its way be great, they always strike us as weak and second-rate. In short, the essence of plebeianism, that which separates vulgarity from aristocracy, is perhaps less a defect than an excess, the constant need to animadvert upon matters which for the aristocratic temperament do not exist.

I first read that passage decades ago and it made a huge impression on me. Then I forgot where I read it. I have spent quite a bit of time over the last two decades trying to find that passage. I knew it was somewhere in James, and I thought it was in the Principles of Psychology, but since I had not read James’ work, I obviously read it in some other book. I didn’t know where to find it in James and reading two volumes of William James on Psychology never appealed to me enough to make it worth reading the whole thing looking for that passage. Then, for a paper I just agreed to write, I pulled Jacques Barzun’s The House of Intellect off the shelf to reread it, and much to my shock, there, in chapter 3, was the passage. Amusingly, I had no notation next to the passage indicating that I thought it was of particular interest; apparently when reading the book last time, I had no idea that this passage would form such a lasting impression. One of the many serendipitous joys of a reading life. (By the way, the passage is in volume two at the end of chapter 22, “Reasoning”.)

James is absolutely correct that the best conversations are described thus: “Such genial play with such massive materials, such an easy flashing of light over far perspectives, such careless indifference to the dust and apparatus that ordinarily surround the subject and seem to pertain to its essence, make these conversations seem true feasts for gods to a listener who is educated enough to follow them at all.” That is a perfect conversation. Start with a topic and then just let the conversation flash light over far perspectives, totally indifferent to where the conversation started or where it might be heading. One can learn a lot in a conversation like that. A whole lot.

This is also why my reading groups have a feature which always surprises first time participants. We read a book and then get together for two hours to discuss it. Sooner or later, usually sooner, someone will say something about the book which will spontaneously generate a discussion about a topic other than the book itself. That inevitably leads to another topic which is not exactly the book. Eventually a student who has never seen this happen before will get nervous and apologize that the discussion is not about the book. I laugh and note that the conversation is most certainly about the book because the conversation arose from the book and generating interesting conversations is exactly what a good book does. Or as James would put it, a good conversation about a book shows a “careless indifference to the dust and apparatus that ordinarily surround the subject and seem to pertain to its essence.” If the book was great and the conversation was great, why would anyone complain? Does anyone really believe that if we put a two-hour conversation about a Great Book in a straightjacket, we will enjoy the conversation more, learn more, or do anything more than scratch the surface of book? Great Books can generate multitudes of Great Conversations. Let them breathe the fresh air of unrestricted conversation.

The passage from James also points to another feature of a great conversation, one upon which there is a set of people who curiously frown. Interruptions. In a great conversation, “Before one of them is half through a sentence the other knows his meaning and replies.” It is indeed a massive relief in a conversation never to have to actually complete the articulation of a thought before your conversation partner commences the next thought. In such a conversation, one never has to spend time thinking of what to say. One thought flows into the next immediately as new themes are introduced and flashes of insight occur. Subjects change direction on a dime as topic A morphs into topic B without anyone noticing the change. There is something magical about the moment when someone suddenly wonders how the current topic came up when the starting topic seems so far away.

Practice the art of Great Conversation, full of half-formed thoughts, partially expressed, full of interruptions leading on tangents which turn into new subjects with even more half-formed thoughts and occasions for assorted references to all those things in your and your conversation partners’ cabinets of intellectual curiosities.

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Looking at Life Off Kilter

“It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because it was too full of the boring and mundane. But it was strange.”

Windle Poons had that realization while he was munching on celery in the dark lying in his coffin shortly after his burial.

Let’s back up a bit. Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett, beings with Death being fired from his job. Apparently Death had developed too much of a personality (he is one of the most amusing characters in Discworld, after all), so the Powers That Be decide to forcibly retire him, both from his job and his existence. But, alas, you don’t just replace Death with any old person, so it takes some time for a new Death to appear. What happens in the meantime?

The hour glass for the old wizard Windle Poon’s life runs out during the interregnum. But, if there is no Death, what happens when you die? Fortunately, you don’t have to experiment yourself; it turns out you become something not quite like a zombie, not really dead, but also not really undead, just sort of in between dead and undead.

There is one huge advantage to this state (well besides the opportunity to munch on celery in your coffin): you notice things.

And it suddenly dawned on the late Windle Poons that there was no such thing as somebody else’s problem, and that just when you thought the world had pushed you aside it turned out to be full of strangeness. He knew from experience that the living never found out half of what was really happening, because they were too busy being the living. The onlooker sees most of the game, he told himself.

There is much wisdom in Windle’s post-life pre-death reflections. Life is indeed strange, but we the living have a hard time noticing it because we are too busy with the mundane details of living.

Living does involve a lot of mundane things. Eating, Sleeping, Bathing, Dressing, and Tearing Unwanted Plants out of the Ground. Much like a Left Guard or a Third Basemen, when you are in the Game of Life, you have a hard the seeing the whole game. Marching along in our tiny little ruts in life, we do indeed have a hard time seeing how our little ruts fit into the larger traffic system.

Thoreau screamed at you about the life of quiet desperation you are leading. He wants you to break our patterns. Go life in a cabin in the woods for a couple of years. Or whatever. Just get out of your rut. You read Thoreau and sigh, “That seems a tad bit extreme.”

Terry Pratchett has a simpler solution. Just step outside yourself and notice that life is strange and wonderful. For a moment, look past all the boring and mundane things you have to do today, and look around until you notice something really, really odd. Think about that oddity for a bit. Then, laugh.

This is exactly what Pratchett does in every one of the Discworld novels. Take some really boring part of life or some well-known story, and turn it ever so slightly until it is not quite on its normal axis and then look at it afresh. It will look a bit funny when you do that.

Consider: have you ever really thought about shopping carts? Have you ever noticed how they are constantly trying to escape the buildings in which they are housed, rushing out to vehicular traffic hubs perhaps in the vague hope that maybe they will be liberated by a passing vehicle or pedestrian? Or maybe some of them are hoping to be struck by a vehicle so they can end their miserable lives. Have you ever realized that the Store sends out humans to round up the escaped shopping carts and connect them in a chain gang and forcibly move them back into slavery inside the Store where they will be eternally pushed around by people who never give a moment’s thought to the welfare of the shopping cart? Pratchett noticed that. Think about that the next time you are in a Store. Imagine your shopping cart is sentient. Really, try it out. What is the harm in imagining this? Are you afraid you might laugh?

Life doesn’t have to be boring and mundane. No matter what you are doing today, you can always look at it a bit off kilter and laugh. It is a much better way to go through life, after all. And it may even have Divine Sanction. As Chesterton notes in Orthodoxy:

And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.

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The Gravity of Love

“Once Upon a time” is how all good stories start, and The Light Princess by George MacDonald is certainly a good story.

Is it a book? I have a book, illustrated by none other than Maurice Sendak of Wild Things fame, but truth be told, the story was actually a part of a longer book, Adela Cathcart.

As the story beings, you would be excused for thinking it is a rehash of Sleeping Beauty. At long last, the King and Queen finally have a daughter and invite lots of people to a christening party, but, alas, the King forgets to invite his own sister to the party, and double alas, the King’s sister is a witch, who decides to show up uninvited to the party and curse the child. But, (plot twist!) instead of a death curse, the curse is lightness:

Light of spirit, by my charms,
Light of body, every part,
Never weary human arms—
Only crush thy parent’s heart!

Not a very nice sister. Instantly, the child becomes Light. What does it mean to become light? Therein lies the tale.

The first manifestation of lightness is exactly what you expected; the child has no weight. Propel her upward, there is no tendency to fall, so you have to get ladder to pull down the kid from hovering up at the ceiling. Set her down and a gust of wind will blow the child off into the bushes over yonder. When she gets older and wants to dive into the lake, she can’t do it because diving into a lake requires being susceptible to gravity’s pull. On the plus side, she can float all day on top of the lake, simply by lying down on the water.

Being immune to gravity would be a cute little fairy tale, but MacDonald isn’t done with lightness yet. The child also lacks gravity of demeanor. She laughs. She laughs a lot. Indeed, she only laughs. Growing up, the child never once cries, never once is angry or depressed. Instead, she is perpetually happy, and laughing. No matter what.

Macdonald has a fun time thinking about the full implications of lightness:

“Well, what’s the matter with your child? She’s neither up the chimney nor down the draw-well. Just hear her laughing.”
Yet the king could not help a sigh, which he tried to turn into a cough, saying—
“It is a good thing to be light-hearted, I am sure, whether she be ours or not.”
“It is a bad thing to be light-headed,” answered the queen, looking with prophetic soul far into the future.
“‘Tis a good thing to be light-handed,” said the king.
“‘Tis a bad thing to be light-fingered,” answered the queen.
“‘Tis a good thing to be light-footed,” said the king.
“‘Tis a bad thing—” began the queen; but the king interrupted her.
“In fact,” said he, with the tone of one who concludes an argument in which he has had only imaginary opponents, and in which, therefore, he has come off triumphant—”in fact, it is a good thing altogether to be light-bodied.”
“But it is a bad thing altogether to be light-minded,” retorted the queen, who was beginning to lose her temper.
This last answer quite discomfited his Majesty, who turned on his heel, and betook himself to his counting-house again. But he was not half-way towards it, when the voice of his queen overtook him.
“And it’s a bad thing to be light-haired,” screamed she, determined to have more last words, now that her spirit was roused.
The queen’s hair was black as night; and the king’s had been, and his daughter’s was, golden as morning. But it was not this reflection on his hair that arrested him; it was the double use of the word light. For the king hated all witticisms, and punning especially. And besides, he could not tell whether the queen meant light-haired or light-heired; for why might she not aspirate her vowels when she was exasperated herself?
He turned upon his other heel, and rejoined her. She looked angry still, because she knew that she was guilty, or, what was much the same, knew that HE thought so.
“My dear queen,” said he, “duplicity of any sort is exceedingly objectionable between married people of any rank, not to say kings and queens; and the most objectionable form duplicity can assume is that of punning.”

The Light Princess is light indeed, lacking all relationship to gravity, physical, mental, or spiritual. Had the story stopped when the child was young, we’d have an amusing little tale to tell children who could then run around pretending they had no weight, laughing all the time.

But, eventually little princesses grow up and young princes stop by to visit. At this point we realize something startling. Love is a serious thing.

Generally when we think about young love, we imagine depressed angsty teenagers discovering the joy of life and becoming free of the cares of this earth as they dwell upon the divine attributes of the beloved. When we imagine older people falling in love, we talk of how it makes them young again, light-hearted and bubbly. Twitterpated, as one wise owl described this state of being.

But, what if someone had no gravity to begin with? What if it was impossible to become more light-hearted? Can such a person fall in love? The prince falls in love with the princess, but the princess is incapable of love. Love, real love, requires gravity. You can hear this moment of realization in ever rom-com movie ever when at long last the feckless young lad and lass suddenly realize that their comedic romp is actually a quite serious affair and the background music shifts keys. George MacDonald was there first.

Since this is a fairy tale, it has to end with the prince and princess living happily ever after, so how does the change happen? The evil sister (using a serpent, of course) drains the lake in which the princess has whiled away her life, and as the lake drains, the princess begins dying. The solution hinges on a poem found in the bottom of the lake:

Death alone from death can save.
Love is death, and so is brave—
Love can fill the deepest grave.
Love loves on beneath the wave.

The Christological overtones of the first line are obvious; the young prince must voluntarily give up his life to save the princess from death. Love is indeed death, and thus love is indeed brave. (And, can we just admire the pun on grave?)

When the prince gives up his life (or, goes to his grave) for the princess, she suddenly discovers gravity of spirit. Her tears flow and with them comes the rain refilling the lake (the deepest grave of the poem), thereby baptizing the princess and the land and suddenly prince and princess are drawn back up out of the waters into life. The Princess is no longer light.

All too often, we think of love and happiness and laughter as something opposed to seriousness, nd in doing so, we miss the whole point of joy. We love not because we lack gravity; we love because we realize how important other people are. We find joy in things because we realize that those things are grounded and real.

Laughter has the same problem. We think of laughter as something like what the Light Princess is doing before she discovers gravity. But there is another kind of laughter, a better and richer kind of laughter. We laugh not because we do not see the importance of an object; we laugh because we actually think the thing is too important and serious not to be filled with joy about it. I was at a conference last week in which the organizer noted with pleasant surprise that the discussions during the conference were among the best he had ever heard and there was so much more laughter than he had ever heard at a conference. I have heard people say things like that many times as if a serious discussion and much laughter were somehow at odds. But, don’t they do together?

The Light Princess cannot love because she lacks an awareness of the importance of love, the importance of life and death. You can imagine the polar opposite story in which the princess cannot love because she lacks the ability to find joy in life. As MacDonald notes in the concluding paragraph, we need to find something in between:

So the prince and princess lived and were happy; and had crowns of gold, and clothes of cloth, and shoes of leather, and children of boys and girls, not one of whom was ever known, on the most critical occasion, to lose the smallest atom of his or her due proportion of gravity.

The due proportion of gravity. A perfect phrase. In our rush to see life as either comedy or tragedy, we sometimes lose sight of the due proportion of gravity. Too much or too little gravity destroy laughter and love.

Related Posts
Kundera, Milan The Unbearable Lightness of Being “Bearing Life”
Buckley, F.H. The Morality of Laughter “Laughing at the World Around You”