#Joy Davidman

[oneminutefiftysixseconds]

Stage 15 of the 2024 Tour de France and Shadow Dance by Joy Davidman

[shiroikabocha]

aw man, they deleted it. Somebody reblogged my old post about the sudden change in C.S. Lewis’s writing of female characters after he met, fell in love with, and married Joy Davidman (ie, the characters got a lot better—Oural is a massively complex woman, and largely inspired by Joy. By contrast, Jane Studdock feels like a confused cardboard cutout of various ‘cosmic feminine’ ideals, not a person.)

The reblogger pointed out that, well: Lewis had no sisters, his mother died when he was very young, he went to all-male boarding schools—his unfamiliarity with adult women was largely a product of environment, not from some kind of dedicated misogyny. And reblogger is right! They’re absolutely correct, and it’s part of what I find fascinating about C. S. Lewis’s life and writing. How much your understanding of your fellow humans can change when you meet a new, different kind of human! It’s wild!

I hope they didn’t delete it because they thought they were being rude. I hope they know their nuance is appreciated.

[violettesiren]

When the sun poured hot silver on silver-cool water, And in green tree-shadow our rowboat lay, And a brown fly buzzed till you reached and caught her What was the dream that caught us, that day?

We were lazy as leaves in the windless willow, Summer-drowsy with sunlight and murmuring bees, Yet I lifted my head from a pine-needle pillow To watch a red bird among the trees.

And your eyes were lit with the glancing fire Of the blue lake gleaming in hot blue sky, So, it perched unseen on the warm sweet briar, Or fluttered, perhaps, through the reeds near by.

It was nothing brighter than the bright weather, No magic more deep than the lake, we knew; A passion light as a floating feather, Born of a hill-lake's noonday blue.

The moon's coin-silver leaves water tainted With the moon-mad desire of too many men; Will the dark lake here ever flash, sun-painted, The fire of that brief laughing passion again?

Midsummer Madness by Joy Davidman

[muse-write]

It is interesting that all my life I’ve heard of Joy Davidman as C.S. Lewis’s wife—not as the writer and poet and convert that she also was. And now I’m reading Patti Calahan’s Becoming Mrs. Lewis, in which a large part of Joy’s character is the desperate wish to be known as more than a housewife. I hope that irony comes up in the later part of the book.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?

How often - will it be for always? - how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realised my loss till this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.

-  C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman, who died from cancer.

[thomasstaples]

hello! I have a few questions for you! :)

what is your favorite CS lewis book?

do you like tolkein's work (fantasy or theology) just as much?

and if you could have a 2 hour conversation with Peter, Susan, Edmund, Lucy, Polly, Diggory, Eustace, Jill, Shasta, Aravis, or Caspian, who would it be?

Favorite C.S. Lewis book (also just my favorite book) is Till We Have Faces. It's Lewis' retelling of the Greek myth about Psyche and Eros. If you are familiar with his book The Four Loves, that book is largely him writing out the main theme he explored in Till We Have Faces, because a lot of people didn't really get it. The main character is also his best written female character. Oh, and his future wife Joy Davidman had a large influence on the book! I could go on for a long time about it. I plan on reading it at least once a year for the rest of my life.

I read LOTR for the first time this year, but it's not one I think I'll return to very often. The first book of his I read was the Silmarillion, and I enjoyed the creation story in it, but the rest not so much. I loved The Hobbit. His beliefs in sub-creation are really interesting to me. I haven't read much of his works tbh, I am way more familiar with Lewis.

I'd love a two hour conversation with Diggory. He witnessed both Narnia's beginning and end, and I'd love to hear him talk about it.

[daily-rayless]

Orual the veiled queen from Till We Have Faces.

I've wanted to do a companion picture to my Psyche for a while. While Psyche is intriguing as an ideal, I think Orual is one of CS Lewis' most ambitious and psychologically authentic characters. An antagonist who's poignantly sympathetic, a protagonist who's frustratingly weak -- protective and powerful, self-deluding and dependent, deeply loving and endlessly devouring, mythically heroic yet the reader will see many of their own failures in her.

Lewis gets grief for some of his female characters, but with the help of his wife Joy Davidman (who was an actual genius, by the way, and doesn't deserve to exist in Lewis' shadow), Orual feels so believable to me. Faces isn't an easy book to read (and definitely isn't for kids), but I think it's fascinating, and Orual's a big part of that.

[oakashandwillow]

[giffingthingsss]

Joy on the TWHF process

We're all hard at work here; the house is practically a book factory. Warnie’s deep in the life of Gramont (dashing 17th century bloke), I’m putting Mme. M. together, and Jack has started a new fantasy — for grownups. His methods of work amaze me. One night he was lamenting that he couldn't get a good idea for a book. We kicked a few ideas around till one came to life. Then we had another whiskey each and bounced it back and forth between us. The next day, without further planning, he wrote the first chapter! I read it and made some criticisms; he did it over and went on with the next. ---------- If you ever feel it would be any help, don't hesitate to consult me on any plot you're having trouble with, and we can maul it over all night by air-mail! I don’t kid myself in these matters — whatever my talents as an independent writer, my real gift is as a sort of editor-collaborator like Max Perkins, and I’m happiest when I’m doing something like that. Though I can't write one-tenth as well as Jack, I can tell him how to write more like himself. He is now about three-quarters of the way through his new book (what I’d give for that energy!) and says he finds my advice indispensable.

[lewisiana]

'Let's Do It Again!'

Lewis describes his first meeting with his future stepsons -

Last week we entertained a lady from New York for four days, with her boys, aged nine and seven respectively. Can you imagine two crusted old bachelors in such a situation? It however went swimmingly, though it was very, very exhausting; the energy of the American small boy is astonishing. This pair thought nothing of a four mile hike across broken country as an incident in a day of ceaseless activity, and when we took them up Magdalen tower, they said as soon as they got back to the ground, ‘Let’s do it again!’

The 'American lady' describes the same event -

We had a very relaxed and friendly visit, though physically strenuous enough; long walks through the hills, during which Jack reverted completely to schoolboy tactics and went charging ahead with the boys through all the thorniest, muddiest, steepest places; Warnie and I meanwhile toiling behind and feeling very old. Also we climbed Magdalen Tower to the top, up a twisty spiral medieval staircase barely wide enough, and a steep ladder; and the boys were let into the deer park and spent half an hour stalking the deer. Jack gave them the typescript of the next Narnia book, The Horse and His Boy, which is dedicated to them. I shouldn't dream of visiting Jack often — we’re much too exhausting an experience for that quiet bachelor household; but a little of it’s probably good for them.

[mereinkling]

C.S. Lewis & Assassinations

The brilliant author C.S. Lewis died on the same day that an American president was assassinated. The violent death of John F. Kennedy in November of 1963 eclipsed Lewis’ own passing, so many people were unaware of it for some time. Yet on that autumn day, both Camelot and Narnia lost their inspirations. Unfortunately, Kennedy’s shooting was not the only political assassination that was…

[violettesiren]

Like patterns of moons across the sea The flying fishes glimmer and skip Drunk on the moon and ecstasy.

The frothy eyes of ripples see Fishwing and birdwing glide or dip Like patterns of moons across the sea.

Wave and wind illusively Make flurries of a silver whip, Drunk on the moon and ecstasy.

And the small waters flickering flee Silkily parted from a ship, Like patterns of moons, across the sea.

Sharply the tide curves silently Moonward over the pale world's lip, Drunk on the moon and ecstasy.

Icily bursts an entity Into a million shapes that slip Like patterns of moons across the sea, Drunk on the moon and ecstasy.

Villanelle of Moonlit Sea by Joy Davidman

[ronnydeschepper]

Dertig jaar geleden: première van "Shadowlands"

Shadowlands is een Britse biografische dramafilm uit 1993 over de relatie tussen academicus C.S.Lewis (gespeeld door Anthony Hopkins) en de Joods-Amerikaanse dichteres Joy Davidman (gespeeld door Debra Winger ), haar dood door kanker, en hoe dit zijn christendom uitdaagde. De film werd geregisseerd door Richard Attenborough met een scenario van William Nicholson, gebaseerd op zijn televisiefilm…

[denimbex1986]

'Even though I had already heard that it will disappoint high expectations, I wanted to be in on the conversation...

...it...is a thoughtful period piece. It’s more interesting than the next Marvel installment.

Though it almost drowns in the unwieldy plot, this is a movie about talent. Hitler was alienating and killing Jews in Germany, which affected the kind of talent mobilized on both sides of the war. There are several explicit references to antisemitism and motivation among physicists. Matt Yglesias observes, “They beat Heisenberg to the bomb — in part because Niels Bohr refuses to help the Nazis…”

I had written about talent and wars earlier, also concerning World War II but a different kind of doctor. “In 1939, Keynes had hired János Plesch, a Hungarian Jewish doctor who had relocated to London after fleeing Nazi persecution.”

How to manage talent becomes the challenge once brilliant scientists have been recruited to Los Alamos. The scientists did coordinate their activities enough to succeed in making the bomb, but some of the drama hinges on their rebellions against Oppenheimer. Now that machines are becoming smart, this ties into a previous post about managing artificial intelligence. “A question this raises is whether we can develop AGI that will be content to never self-actualize.”

Yet another theme of the film is the Communist movement in America in the 1930’s. I have studied this through the biographies and essays of Joy Davidman. Davidman was a committed member and then left the Party, as did several characters in the film.

And yet another tiny theme was women scientists on the project. There is a woman who complains that she was asked to be a typist even though she went to Harvard for science. Oppenheimer briskly puts her on one of the scientist teams. It goes by fast. I felt like the director was saying, “If you went to see Hidden Figures, here’s a 20 second recap of Hidden Figures for the people who like that, NEXT!” This is an example of hurrying everything in order to stuff 8 movies into 3 hours. The Advanced Placement Program® (AP) has a blog on “Women Scientists of the Manhattan Project” I know from my research on getting people to code, that women today study AP Computer Science at a considerable lower rate than male high school students.'

[thomasstaples]

Narnia, Till We Have Faces, and Joy Davidman

After reading Till We Have Faces either 4 or 5 times in about a year, and having recently read some of Joy Davidman's poetry, I really wonder what the Narnia series would have been like if it had gotten the same amount of influence from Joy Davidman that TWHF did. I mean, I look at how perfectly Orual is written, and if I am to be honest, as much as I love Lewis, I don't think he was capable of that on his own. While I would argue against people who say that Susan, Lucy, Polly, or Jill were badly written characters, I do think there is room for improvement, and I think Joy could have helped a lot.