endless iterations

As so often happens with nonfiction books, the subtitle of C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature is quite misleading. It suggests that the book is full of interesting tidbits about, say, Chaucer, whereas in fact the book is much more focused on the classical authors who shaped the medieval image of the heavens - hence “the discarded image,” largely swept away by later thinkers, but still surviving in odd phrases here and there.

I was particularly fascinated by the chapter about which ancient authors were popular and relatively accessible during the medieval period. For instance, their most direct access to Plato came through a Latin translation of Timaeus, but they had many works by neo-Platonists, and it was through this neo-Platonist filter that they had their own Platonic age of thought. (The neo-Platonists had actually been the last great holdouts against Christianity, so it’s fascinating to see them simply get folded into it here.)

The book also goes into great detail about the Image itself. I won’t try to summarize it all here, but a few bits I found especially interesting:

1. The medieval model was indeed geocentric, but Lewis points out that this does not mean that medieval thinkers considered the Earth especially important. In fact, they considered the Earth a mere infinitesimal dot, the lowest spot in the universe and the ultimate destination for the universe’s refuse. A person standing on Earth was looking up and up and up into infinitely more beautiful, perfect, higher and more important spheres.

2. The medieval thinker also thought the universe was suffused with sunlight and music (the music of the spheres); the idea of space as cold, dark, and scary came about later.

3. The belief in the influence of the planets on earthly life remained strong, and the Church had to exert a great deal of energy against the idea of astrological determinism.

4. There’s also a chapter about the longaevi, the Good Folk, with a fascinating discussion about the different meanings assigned to these beings - meanings so divergent that Spenser could write The Faerie Queen as a compliment to Queen Elizabeth, while at the same time people were sometimes tried for witchcraft on the charge of traffic with the fairy folk. (As Lewis notes, witchcraft trials were far more a Renaissance than a medieval phenomenon.)

Also, book gives insight into certain aspects of Lewis’s own fiction, in particular that bit in That Hideous Strength where Lewis starts talking about the seven genders and then just sort of wanders off in the middle of gender #4. “How can you tell us there are seven genders and then only give us four?” I demanded. Well, now I think that to Lewis (the medievalist) it was perfectly obvious that the seven genders were male, female, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury. The other planets weren’t discovered till later and Earth of course doesn’t count on account of being the cesspit of the universe.

And he didn’t spend much time explaining what exactly Jupiter gender was like because, to his steeped-in-medieval-literature mind, this was perfectly obvious. The Jupiter character is “Kingly; but we must think of a King at peace, enthroned, taking his leisure, serene. The Jovial character is cheerful, festive yet temperate, tranquil, magnanimous.” I believe extrapolating this temperament into a gender is Lewis’s innovation, but he could be working off a classical source.

However, sadly, this book does not cast any light on what crimes the star might have committed in order to be banished to an island in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. However, it seems likely these also have an ancient or medieval source, so perhaps someday I will find out!

I was cautiously optimistic about this year’s Newbery winner, Renée Watson’s All the Blues in the Sky, because I liked Watson’s earlier book Piecing Me Together. However, these hopes collapsed when I realized that this is yet another example of my least favorite Newbery genre: Books in Verse About Death.

There is probably someone, someone, who could make me enjoy a Book in Verse about Death, but unfortunate Watson is not that person, or at least this book is not that book.

Our heroine is Sage, who recently lost her best friend when she was hit by a drunk driver while walking to Sage’s house for Sage’s birthday. Sage is now part of the grief group at school, where she sits inwardly sneering at the two members who lost people after a long illness (a grandmother to dementia, and a twin sister to leukemia), because THEY don’t know what it’s like to lose someone unexpectedly.

And, you know, technically this is true. But one feels that at some point someone should point out to Sage that she doesn’t know what it’s like to live in the Valley of the Shadow of Death for years, watching a loved one slowly wither away.

And okay fine, Sage’s Aunt Ini does eventually point out that everyone grieves differently and you can’t directly compare grief etc etc. However, there’s a scene where Sage screams at these girls that they don’t understand anything, and I really, really wanted one of them to scream back that they might not understand her grief but at least they’re TRYING, unlike Sage who very obviously doesn’t give a damn about them. Like, her disdain is so obvious that the other members of Grief Group (the ones who also lost people unexpectedly and are therefore acceptable to Sage) comment that Sage doesn’t like the girls whose relatives died long, slow, agonizing deaths, and Sage responds that it’s because they “don’t know how good they had it.”

But of course no one screams back at Sage. Of course when Sage apologizes, everyone accepts it, instead of telling her to stuff her apology where the sun don’t shine, or at least pointing out the fact that she blew up about how the others don’t understand her pain when she hasn’t been trying even slightly to understand theirs.

And then! And then! ( spoilers for the ending )