“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-20th 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 21st 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.
Related Posts
Lewis, C. S. The Reading Life “C. S. Lewis and the Reading Life”
Pratchett, Terry Reaper Man, “Looking at Life off Kilter”
As someone who has had an aversion to all things fantasy and sci-fi most of her life, I’m starting to enjoy it more now, and you’ve helped to convince me that there is value in it.
I’m teaching 7th grade English/Language Arts in the Austin public school system now. We finished the year with Alice in Wonderland, and I throughly enjoyed it and it’s probable commentary on childhood and the awkward process of growing up. I also inherited an elective class on Harry Potter about which I previously knew nothing, but am now starting to appreciate. So maybe there’s hope for me in the “being enchanted” department.
I hope all is well there!