C. S. Lewis - Tumblr Posts
i can NOT stop thinking about when c.s. lewis introduced a character by saying “his name, unfortunately, was Eustace Scrubb” like BRUH no need to do him dirty like that 😭😭 you GAVE him that name. tf
“Chorar funciona mais ou menos enquanto dura. Porém, mais cedo ou mais tarde, é preciso parar de chorar e tomar uma decisão.”
📖 A cadeira de prata — C. S. Lewis
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion: At the beginning of the world there were two trees, one silver and one gold, brought forth by the song of Yavanna, Valar of Earth, and the tears of Nienna, Valar of Mercy.
C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew: At the beginning of the world there were two trees, one silver and one gold, because some coins fell out of a guy's pocket lol
“Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
—The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis.
Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties.
Be weird. Be random. Be who you are. Because you never know who would love the person you hide.
-C.S. Lewis
Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.
-C.S. Lewis
30 Days of Narnia | Day 7 | Favorite Female Character and Why? | Lucy Pevensie
♥️ ‘Courage, Dear Heart.’ ♥️
You can make anything by writing." --C.S. Lewis
The fact that the first book literally opens with C. S. Lewis saying, “But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again,” should tell us everything we need to know about Susan’s story after The Last Battle.
on Edmund, sea serpents, and silence
so for a while now I’ve been meaning to do a little meta piece about the Dark Island and Edmund’s trauma, because Lewis has an interesting pattern of silence on difficult emotion and this is something that changes a lot in adaptation
the dark island the place where your dreams come true, in the most literal sense - if you have dreamed it, the island will make it real (sort of) - it has a line to your subconscious, to your worst fears. to this extent, the film was pretty much in line with the book
except in the book, it’s so much worse. Rhoop, the lord who was trapped there, is absolutely demented. the whole crew is terrified and row like mad to get out of there. Caspian orders them to flee because, he says, there are ‘some things no man can face’, and after it’s over he sends the crew to bed to recover
but what I really noticed last time I read it is that, once the Dark Island takes hold, we hear scraps from every major character about what they’re feeling/seeing - except one. you know who’s totally silent the whole time, and at no point says anything or is described?
Edmund.
literally not a word about him apart from Lucy wanting to be near him, after the Island starts to work on them. we don’t get anything at all about what he’s doing or saying or looks like, and we certainly don’t hear what it is that he sees - which is odd, given that he’s one of the most major characters.
In the film, they gave him a fear of sea serpents, which is fine I guess for an action sequence, but doesn’t feel right for Edmund to me - he’s known so much darker and more human horrors
the film briefly references his trauma with the Witch by having her appear, but it’s both short and a bit weird. the book - as covered - doesn’t mention what he saw at all, and that’s what I think is super interesting, because Lewis has a bit of a pattern of leaving gaps of silence on characters whose emotions are too difficult/dark/adult for a children’s book in a particular moment
the most major instance of this is Peter, Edmund and Lucy in TLB, when they tell Tirian that Susan is no longer a friend of Narnia. Edmund and Lucy are absolutely silent on the matter and Peter only gives a short statement of what has happened and doesn’t elaborate - all the other stuff comes from Eustace, Jill and Polly. And I always thought that into that silence you can read so much grief, and so much complex emotion that doesn’t really have a place in a children’s book
like when Lewis said in a letter that he thought of writing the story of what happened to Susan after TLB but it would be ‘too much like a grown-up novel’, so we know that he conceived of his characters as having ‘grown up’, adult emotional depth, but it’s not something he would put in his children’s books. and when there’s a moment in which it makes sense for one of the characters to be in an emotional situation that is too adult for a children’s book, he goes very quiet on them
hence why the complete lack of description of Edmund once the Dark Island begins to bring to life the crew’s worst nightmares sort of troubles me, because, in the context of Lewis’s writing, it hints at darker and more complex things for him there than Lewis would really go into, because, after all, that’s what makes sense for his character, having the past experiences that he does.
that’s magnificent
i smiled at the professors words,
for once I agreed,
Something I’ve come to discover is that for some reason this scene between Peter and Aslan is incredibly soothing. I’ve had talks about it with several people and we all say the the same thing,but none of us can really pinpoint why.
So I’m curious to see if any of y’all feel the same way about this scene and if you have any theories or ideas as to why it’s so calming?
Knowing St. Jack, my guess is that the strictest interpretation is the closest to his thought. Women fighting makes battles ugly. Why? Because they are women and they are fighting. This is a combination Lewis finds ugly. Ugly specifically.
It's about archetypes and qualitas, about what is fitting and therefore in some sense beautiful (men defending their land and people while adorned for the service of Mars and following a strict manly code of honor and valor). And what is unfitting and therefore not beautiful (women whose blood is already being taxed in service of childbirth being double-taxed in battle, for instance.)
I find that if it's possible to use feeling words (like 'nasty' and 'nice') precisely, this is the man who will do it. The emphasis is on "ugly," not on some imagined protest like "incompetent."
justice for C. S. Lewis’s line “battles are ugly when women fight” being read as “women are bad fighters” and not “when women are forced to go to war, that means that the atrocities have come too close to home” and like in context of, you know, when he was living, and like, also, now, it kinda makes sense what he’s getting at
Lucy, explaing how narnia is in the Wardrobe:
Her family:
