Lewis and Myth 2024

  I pride myself on being a very logical, pros and cons type of person. And while I am a crybaby, I really don’t like people who make emotional decisions – I’ll even think about what type of bread to buy for at least 2 days before actually going out and buying it to make sure its what I really want. I struggle in particular with consuming media with tons of plot holes and reading books that defy all laws of the universe. That being said, I don’t hate fun in it’s entirety. I can enjoy a weird, confusing movie or nonsense book if done well. One of my favorite books is the definition of a nonsense book, actually (Neil Gaiman’s Fortunately, the Milk , which is a whole trip in and of itself). The only condition it has to meet is that it seems like it’s intended to be weird – which both that book and Big Fish do well. Of course, no normal person would every believe 100% of the father’s stories in that movie, and I really enjoyed having the son’s perspective there because it made sure t...

  I am not a science fiction buff. I don’t understand science, I get irritated when I don’t understand things right off the bat, and usually tend to give up very quickly when both of these things are combined together. I talked in a previous blog post about how this happened with the guest speaker’s book and how everything was almost too new, causing me to strongly dislike it. However, Lewis manages to avoid this just like he did with Narnia when writing Out of the Silent Planet. He begins it will a very easily digestible, conventional plot about a standard kidnapping (much like how UFOs abduct cows in fields). The people behind it? Very standard villains: a mad scientist and greedy assistant. While very common, it’s still enjoyable (even my favorite movie ever relies on this last mad scientist trope). It’s very simple to get accustomed too and doesn’t throw the reading right into the middle of a new world without warning. We watch as Ransom (quite literally) moves from our ever...

  My favorite band Young the Giant has a song title “I Bite.” One of the lyrics in it is “love is unconditional under the right conditions” and I’ve always really liked listening to this song because of that lyric – I think it’s genius. Like I said with the whole gift giving and agape debate in an earlier blog post, I also find it hard to grasp agape and find unconditional love to be something pretty much impossible (that said, I’m open to objections). For storge, we see that a parent must want the child or the child must get good grades – there are countless cases where a parent’s love for their child is entirely conditional. For philia, friends can’t be selfish, but a lot of people won’t hang out with certain people because they have a reputation or image to maintain – the condition must be that they’re socially acceptable in some way. Even in eros, the condition is that they must feel romantic attraction and feel emotions, things that some people (like psychopaths) physically ca...

  In Borderlands , the mother preserved her child’s image of his father to protect him and keep him away from the harsh realities of the world. She hid that he was a violent alcoholic and throughout the movie accepted her son’s hatred to barring him from the man without complaint because she loved him just that much and wanted him to grow up happy and innocent. I believe that this is an example of storge (familial affection) as used in Lewis’ Four Loves . I remember reading Catcher in the Rye way back in high school. I really really loved the book, and if you can’t tell from my other blog posts, I’m really fascinated by storge,so I think it may be why I like Catcher in the Rye so much – it’s another perfect example of storge. Holden’s desperation to preserve the childhood innocence of his sister, Phoebe, is the main premise of the book. At the end of the book, he dreams of catching children in the rye field (childhood innocence) to stop them from falling over the cliff into the h...

  My final paper for my honors seminar was about how Americans form their moral compasses and one of the things I researched for it was called the “Social Ethic.” It describes the tendency to submit yourself, as an individual, to the whims of the group, such as religious organizations or political parties. I think that myth can be a tool of the social ethic – in this sense, reason can function as an organization or group. Reason relies on imagination (we perceive the senses through it), and while too much pure logic can be bad, so can too much imagination. For example, back when the pandemic hit there were a bunch of people who said that they were immune to covid because they didn’t have the right “waves” for it to transmit to them because their political party and the people within it told them so (a view relying almost entirely on imagination with very little science to back it up, if any at all). It was almost like mob mentality. We saw this happen in Big Fish . The son was affe...

     In Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet , when the protagonist has his revelation about the nature of Space and its true identity as the Heavens, he is realizing that the maps of the storytellers are more accurate than any map that science can produce. And if the storytellers can chart the stars better than the physicists, then perhaps the storytellers also charted the seas better than the satellites have.      Many older maps feature creatures and gods. Even when the explorers had discovered the world was a sphere and that there was not a giant cliff at the end of a flat world guarded by dragons, storytellers continued to etch their maps with "Here there be dragons." The winds remained portrayed by the four wind gods perched in the map corners, and the sketches of great serpents in the oceans were kept. The storytellers understood that it did not matter whether there were literal dragons and wyverns lurking in and above the ocean, the danger they represent...