The Times They Are A-Changin'

 

Late on Easter Eve, before going to bed, I made an inspection tour around my flat, setting my manual clocks + watch to "summer time"... (I nearly always forget at least one. If I did this year too, I have not yet discovered it.)

Did I hear someone ask "How many clocks does one woman need?" Answer: As I don't like to wear a watch at home (only put it on when I go out), I have clocks in every room. An alarm clock beside my bed. One standing on the cooker hood in the kitchen. A wall clock in the hall (can also be seen from some positions in the living room, and from the bathroom if the door is open). Another one on the wall in my study. And an extra smaller clock by the TV in the living room. 

Somewhat to my surprise, I actually did manage to wake up in time to be able to get myself off to the Easter Sunday church service as well (at 11 am in the same church I also visited on Thursday and Friday). Again not raining, so also a nice walk there and back.

Photo discreetly snapped at the very end of the service.

 

▲Things that caught my eye on my way back home.▼

On Easter Eve (before my clock round) I watched Shadowlands, an old favourite of mine (from 1993) which I managed to find and buy on DVD some time ago. It's based on the growing friendship, love story and marriage between the author C.S. Lewis (played by Anthony Hopkins) and a Jewish American woman, Joy Davidman Gresham (Debra Winger). Their time as husband and wife was cut very short by Joy getting cancer - but at the same time, that was also what brought them really close. (If like me you're a C.S. Lewis fan, my guess is you've probably already seen this film at some point.)

Once Upon A Wardrobe (Book Review)

Once Upon a Wardrobe
by Patti Callahan (2021)

(Read on Kindle, January 2022)

I loved this book, which manages to combine fiction and biography (of C.S. Lewis) in a rather unique way. Having read biographies about Lewis before (you know I'm a Narnia fan, and I have also read several other books both by and about him), I recognized a lot of details, and throughout the book I felt that Patti Callahan captures 'Jack' (as he preferred to be called by his friends) as a person very well - and also his brother Warnie.

The other main characters, including the "narrator" Megs, are entirely fictional, though - and so (obviously) never met the Lewis brothers in real life - although that is almost hard to believe when reading the book. 

The story is set in 1950, when The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book in the Narnia series, was first published. Megs Devonshire is a student of mathematics and physics at Oxford. She has an eight-year-old brother, George, who is sickly and pretty much bound to his bed. He is given this book, and gets deeply fascinated by it. He also gets obsessed with questions like where Narnia "came from" and if it's "real". Knowing that his sister studies at Oxford, and that Lewis is a professor there, he asks her to find out for him.

As Megs is not a student of literature, but of science, she struggles to understand her little brother's more philosophical questions. She is also hesitant to approach the famous author, as he is not her teacher. But eventually, she ends up doing so anyway - and this leads to a series of meetings with both C.S. Lewis himself, and his brother Warnie, in their home. Somewhat to her frustration, rather than answering direct questions with straight forward explanations, Lewis chooses to just tell her "stories" from his own life, though. About his and his brother's childhood and youth, and the literature he read, etc. After each session, Megs writes down these stories in a notebook, and when she goes home to visit her brother, re-tells them to him. George also has a habit of sometimes hiding in his own wardrobe to sit there and "take himself to that imaginary world, where he can have his own adventures, where he can escape the very real world, where his body won't get old, and where his mum doesn't cry in the kitchen". And when his sister is home and reporting back to him from her talks with Lewis, instead of just the ordinary "once upon a time", they fall into the habit of starting each reading with the phrase: "Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago, and not very far away". Rather to Megs surprise, her little brother seems to get the significance of the stories about Lewis's life, related to his book, better than she does herself. But gradually, she also finds her own understanding deepening. George's illness, and his way of handling that his life in this world will probably be short, makes it all too obvious that not all the questions in life can be answered by math and science.

In the midst of everything, between worry about her brother and wrestling with life's Big Questions, there is also room for a bit of romance in Meg's life. 

All in all, it's a warm and beautiful book, and I'd gladly recommend it to readers of any age as introduction to both the world of Narnia and the life of C.S. Lewis. 

At the end of the book, there is also a note from C.S. Lewis's stepson, Douglas Gresham, saying (among other things): "This is not merely a book worth reading, it is a book that will drive us through the difficulties of love and sorrow, to struggle, gasping onward and upward, our emotions surging with us until we are brought, once again, to love. --- For while it may not be Narnia, there is magic in it, and that deeply moved me."

 

Skywatch Friday

The week gone by has been very windy, even stormy. 

I started on this post a couple of days ago, but got struck by Writer's Block - a condition that I regard as secondary effect of the corona virus (never mind if you've actually got the virus or not). (Adding for clarity: I'm still feeling OK as in no signs of infection.) 

The WB seems to occur at that stage when pandemic news start repeating and multiplying itself daily at a speed that makes it increasingly hard to separate one day from the other and to remember what happened when, and hasn't it always been like this.*

Let it be enough to summarize that numbers are still increasing, and restrictions and recommendations still tightened from one day to the next.

Before I find myself stuck in the labyrinth of my thoughts again, I'll move on to just report from my own personal little bubble, that today I made a brave (?) foray into a chemist's shop in town, for some prescription medicines + some other stuff. I have passed by chemist's shops a few times before over the past couple of weeks without daring to go in (because of too many customers). Today, being a Saturday morning, I went for the largest of our inner city chemist's, and to my relief found it not too crowded. (And tape strips on the floor to mark keeping distance.)  

I got most of the things on my list; the most important ones being my blood pressure and allergy medicines. There was one other prescription one that I could not get, not because it was out of stock, but because of a new restriction forbidding stock-piling... The pharmacist kept on kind of apologizing for this, even though I in turn kept saying that's okay, I had heard about that, I just hadn't paid attention to the date when I made my list (5 more days until allowed to buy more of that one), and I'm not out of it for a while yet, so no emergency... (I do respect why they introduced that rule just now - to prevent another "toilet paper" situation, but even more serious...) 

Of course there was also (still) no hand sanitizer to be found. I did not even have to ask, because I heard another customer asking about it as I came in (and she obviously did not really expect a positive answer either). 

I still have a few precious drops of such liquid in a tiny bottle in my handbag, though - and used some of those before leaving the shop.

Dear Prince, you are very sick. There is no land called Narnia.' [said the Witch]
'Yes, there is, though, Ma'am', said Puddleglum. 'You see, I happen to have lived there all my life.'
'Indeed,' said the Witch. 'Tell me, I pray you, where that country is?'
'Up there,' said Puddleglum, stoutly, pointing overhead. 'I - I don't know exactly where.'
'How?' said (Corona) the Queen, with a kind, soft, musical laugh. 'Is there a country up among the stones and mortar of the roof?'
'No,' said Puddleglum, struggling a little to get his breath. 'It's in the Overworld.'

C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (Chapter 12, The Queen of  Underland)

Reading By Ear

This summer most of my reading has been in the form of audio books – of which quite a few have been old favourites revisited.

At bedtime, for example, I often prefer a familiar story that doesn’t require too much concentration…

One of the many things I appreciate with Amazon’s Kindle/ Audible is that with many free Kindle classics, it’s also often possible to find Audible recordings of them quite cheap. At best they are even synced so that (if you’re on wifi) you don’t even have to remember yourself which device you last used to read or listen… The next one you pick up will check it for you and ask if you want to go to the furthest read location.

On my re-reading/listening list this summer have been the classic novels by Jane Austen: Mansfield Park, Emma, Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, Northanger Abbey (listening to that now) and Persuasion (downloaded, but remains to listen to).

I think Northanger Abbey may still be my favourite, because of the way she makes fun of the whole Gothic Horror Romance genre that was popular at the time. (Finding it even more amusing now, after actually reading Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho some years ago – which is frequently referred to in NA.) A strong contender is Emma, though, because in that one too, Austen manages (and in a more subtle way) to present an ‘imperfect’ heroine.

In between the Austen re-reads I’ve been listening to some other audio books as well, though.

Last week, for example, I was held captive by a new  biography about Joy Davidman, the woman that C.S. Lewis married rather late in life. This I bought only as audio (not finding any “package” deal).

Joy: Poet, Seeker and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis – by Abigail Santamaria

Some of you may know a bit about their love story from the film Shadowlands (1993). It’s been a good while since I last saw or read Shadowlands (I think I shall have to return to both book and film for comparison). But my impression is that this biography gives a fuller portrait both of Joy’s early life (including her first marriage), and of the complexity of the relationship that grew between her and Lewis. And one thing I did not know or did not remember from before was that besides being Jewish and having been (for a while) a member of the Communist party in America, Joy was also (for a while) a follower of L.R. Hubbard (the founder of Scientology) and a practiser of Dianetics. (I suppose I may have read this before, without paying much attention – but as it happened now, by pure coincidence, only a week or two before I bought this biography I had watched a TV documentary about Scientology, from which I learned a lot more details about that movement than I ever knew before.)

I found Joy: Poet, Seeker… (etc) a very interesting read, easy to follow and with facts well presented. I also found the audio narration by Bernadette Dunne quite excellent and easy to listen to. (I have to confess I sometimes find it harder to listen to audio books in American accent –being more used to British English myself – but in this case it was no problem; and as Joy was American, it also ‘felt right’.)

Weekend Reflection

“You could almost feel the trees
drinking the water up with their roots.”

“I don’t believe this wood is a world at all.
I think it is just a sort of in-between place.”

The Magician’s Nephew: The Wood Between The Worlds
~ C.S. Lewis ~