Taking a break

I am not even going to think about things other than packing and farewells for the next week or so. I am reading Bleak House (and loving it) and I just finished a collection of Roald Dahl's short stories for adults (I didn't know he had a lot of stuff for adults) and I am looking forward to The Good Soldier Svejk - but I won't even attempt to talk about them until after I am back in the US. In a week.

The Flanders Panel

I just finished reading The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte. It was pretty good, right up until the end. It wasn’t exceptional, and if I’d had anything waiting that I was anxious to read, I doubt I would have finished it, but I did enjoy it – right up to the end.

See, here’s the thing. You can’t do something “for” somebody when the somebody DOESN’T WANT YOU TO DO IT. And most of the time, when someone uses the excuse “I did it for you!” they’ve done something either illegal or really, really ill-advised that they knew (or at least suspected) you wouldn’t like. In the book, it’s killing people. In real life, it’s often breaking up with someone else, or moving, or something slightly less extreme but still life-changing.

Rule of thumb: unless the person says the words “do this for me,” you are not doing it “for” them. You may do it in the hopes that the person will like it, but you are not doing it “for” them.

Every time I have had someone tell me that they’ve done something “for” me, it has been something that I don’t want. Earrings, plans, breaking up with their girlfriend….it’s become kind of a peeve of mine, which is why I think I hated the ending of The Flanders Panel so much. Granted, killing people is a little bit more extreme than any of my stuff, but still – if the person doesn’t want you to do it, you are not doing it for them. You are doing it for yourself. Just admit it already.

The excuse wasn’t the only bad thing about the ending of the book, though – it kind of didn’t really make sense at all. But it’s the part that bugged me the most about it.

The Pilgrim's Regress

After talking about how much I like C.S. Lewis, I have to confess that I am giving up on The Pilgrim's Regress. It was the first book he wrote after his conversion, and it's a variation of The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan.

I am about halfway through the book now, and it's losing me. There are several different reasons for this:

First, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress used easily recongnizable and definable concepts as allegorical characters: people like Timorous (fear), Piety, Christian (the main character), and Evangelist. In order to understand the characters of The Pilgrim's Progress, all you really need is a dictionary. Lewis, however, is using philosophical movements. These are almost incomprehensible if you haven't studied them. You can look them up in a dictionary or encyclopedia, of course, but without a philosophical background, you (I) may not understand their references.

Second, Lewis sometimes throws in Greek, Latin, or other linguistic quotations. These are neither translated or attributed. I have studied Greek and Latin; I could figure them out if I worked at it. But it's very distracting. And if it's distracting for me, when I know the languages, what must it be like for people who don't?

Third, the continual references to the dream framework make it too easy to dismiss the points that Lewis is trying to make. If you can say, "Oh, but it was just a dream," it almost invalidates the reality of the situation. Dreams are supposed to be unreal and illogical; the allegory that I think Lewis is trying to convey is not.

Basically, I'm just too stupid ignorant to read this book right now. It's more work to understand the layers than I'm willing to put in, and it's not interesting enough on a story level to make it worth reading without that deeper understanding.


It's really too bad, though, because it's the type of book I think I would really enjoy if I understood it better. Maybe I'll keep my eyes out for an annotated version or see if someday I can take a class on Lewis that explains it better. But right now, I'm giving up and moving on to The Other Boleyn Girl.

Humility and Inferiority

I finally read The Screwtape Letters a few months ago. I really did enjoy it – overall I really like C.S. Lewis. I trust him as a theologian, because he came to Christianity as a skeptic. He doesn’t come from the perspective of “I’m right because I’m right and now here are things that back me up.” He comes from the perspective of “I’m right because I found these things that convinced me that I had been wrong.”

Screwtape is interesting because it’s written from the point of view of a devil, a tempter. Mostly Screwtape points out all the ways that modern society and modern ways of thinking are ungodly. Like with the other Lewis books I’ve read, I understand his point on pretty much all of it, and I agree with let’s say 90% of it.

The one bit of Screwtape that got me thinking, more than any other, was the part about the illusion of equality. He says that when someone says “I’m as good as you,” that person is coming from a sense of inferiority. You never tell someone whom you feel is inferior that you are as good as they are, unless you are being patronizing and condescending.

My problem with this comes not from the statement itself – I do agree that when someone says “I am as good as you are” they are usually speaking from a sense of inferiority – but from the implication that trying to overcome a sense of inferiority is an ungodly thing.

I think that Lewis is probably trying to make a point about the lack of humility in today’s society, which is probably a valid point. But I think that there is a difference between feeling humble and feeling inferior.

Humility is internal. If it is imposed by anyone/anything, it is imposed by God. Humility says “I am not the best at this” but humility also allows you to say “I will try.” Inferiority, on the other hand, is imposed externally – by individuals or by society. Inferiority says “You can’t do this” and inferiority says “Why should you even try?” Humility is not a bad thing. False humility is, but that’s a different discussion. Inferiority, especially inferiority based on unchangeable factors like gender/race or subjective factors like beauty, is a bad thing and should be fought against wherever it is found.