On the Re-reading of Favourite Books

There is a power in books not generally recognized. That is the reason why I go back and reread books by C. S. Lewis that I have read very many times before; in this case the last volume of his “Space Trilogy,” That Hideous Strength. I can go back again as often as I wish to relive an old conversation, a dialogue of sorts, a meeting of the minds that frequently brings new insights. Although I have never met Lewis I have read most of what he has written, even some of his literary critical works; those I understood least of all. Frequently I pick up one of his books for a good soak, and read, and listen, and think.

A soak was an old custom of Lewis, who with a couple of like-minded friends or even alone, would find a leafy glade, lie down in the sunshine, and just soak. This soaking, this reading and re-reading of favourite books, this meeting of minds, is not a new thing with me. As a child I spent several summers floating down the river with Huck and Jim, swimming naked off our raft, and eating catfish (I don’t even like catfish, but it sounded like a nice idea at the time).

These idyllic summers finally climaxed in a grand adventure at the age of twelve when Gilbert and I, inspired by Huck and Jim, packed our kit bags and ran away. Fortunately we were picked up by an off duty police officer who dropped us off at a handy police station twenty miles down the road. What ended these idylls with Huck and Jim was my twelve year old post-evaluation of the event. All we had packed was a blanket, fifty books of matches, and a couple of cans of pork and beans. When I looked at our supplies in the cool light of the police station even I could see that it was a case of dim-witted planning.

The simple fact was that Mark Twain was not a safe mind for me to be meeting with; even though in later years those meetings gave me a deep appreciation for the American South, and the issues of race relationships. If you remember the story and consider that I was a young Canadian boy you might understand why I thought the Grangers were a grand family well worth meeting. If you don’t know the Grangers, I guess you will just have to read Huck Finn; but if you are young and impressionable, be careful.

In my aimless journeying through the world of books I sailed the seven seas with Mr. Christian, fought in the American Revolution with Johnny Tremain, went on undersea adventures with Jules Verne, and spent a summer drifting with the current on the reed boat Kon Tiki with Thor Heyerdahl and his companions. Seeing the ocean from the deck of a destroyer escort turned out to be nothing at all like seeing it with Thor Heyerdahl.

In all of my journeying I met minds couth and uncouth, safe and profane, tapping here and there into the echoes of a lost Eden that are interwoven through the very fabric of poetry and prose; coming into sharp focus is such diverse works as William Morris’ News From Nowhere and Tolkien’s The Hobbit. There is the thread that I was chasing, a fresh breeze blowing from a secret place, a place of warmth, joy, and holiness; my heaven, my home, my alright place.

But there was another beckoning aroma, an air mixed with a certain tingling of excitement, a rough catch at the back of the throat, a dark mist that flowed through the uncouth voices of the Beat Poets, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, and Gregory Corso. Their inspiration best summed up by Corso, “... It comes, I tell you, immense with gasolined rags and bits of wire and old bent nails, a dark arriviste, from a dark river within.” That dark river has all the charm of the old Love Canal and threatens to break into hell-fire at the slightest provocation.

No wonder The Book of Common Prayer asks, “Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?” Or has some sophisticated but frightened mind told you that these forces don’t exist? More respectable? but perhaps more insidious was Samuel Becket whose council of existential despair resonated with so many of us in the sixties. If they were crying they were living and in them I met the twisted, dark and bent in contemporary literature and art and discovered that I liked better the more wholesome light of the Impressionists and the long tradition of otherness that bore the airs of Eden.

After the ancient council of darkness and despair, the mellifluous light playing through the paintings of Monet, Renoir, and the Continental Impressionists and through their American counterparts like John Henry Twachtman, shone brightly with divine light. I traced that golden thread and its interwoven echoes of a paradise lost but hovering just beyond consciousness, first through William Morris, then through Tolkien’s Hobbit, and then with utter fascination in the middle of a final exam week I chased the ever brighter beams of nobility and honour, of light and love, through the Lord of the Rings, then later through C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.

It was another one of the Inklings, Charles Williams, who through his novels taught me the true nature of evil, that sent me fleeing back to refresh myself by encountering once more the mind of C. S. Lewis, reading voraciously everything he had written that was already published. I even understood parts of it; but of much greater importance I met a mind, a man whom I could trust, and through him a holy comitatus, a holy warband, striding joyfully together on the King’s highway to Zion.

I had at last encountered the best of minds, not just one mind but many minds as fascinated as I with the divine light that lightens every man that comes into the world, and still that circle ever widens discovering with amazement that same light in such diverse sources as Christina Rosetti, or Burton Raffel’s Poems and Prose from the Old English, and so many of the poets stretching down through the centuries to this present hour.

Now! This very moment, once again, I will renew my mind encountering one or another of these old friends. But you should suspect, if you don’t already know, that I am no dispassionate reader. I don’t just read a story; I plunge in to walk with Frodo and Samwise through the Dead Marshes of this Middle Earth, and at last to sail with Frodo, Bilbo and Gandalf into the Golden West.

Guided by the Lonely Star,

beyond the utmost harbour-bar,
I'll find the heavens fair and free,
and beaches of the Starlit Sea.
Ship my ship! I seek the West,
and fields and mountains ever blest.
Farewell to Middle-earth at last.
I see the star above my mast!

Bilbo’s Last Song at the Grey Havens