#tossing the top of the wave into foamy shapes and ruffling the smooth water all round them. it lasted only a second or so

[stanfordsweater]

#god! the validation! #i'm gonna quote the coleman cooler account here -- #'the show ends narratively with Dean being told in no uncertain terms that his presence was wanted' #'that who he is was entirely enough.' #i think that's really it #that even if he died (as we all have to eventually) #even if sam had to live without him #we return in the end to what matters: #the two of them against the world #and at the end of the world #still together #it's so kind as a continuation of all that went before #that it was right and that they made that choice and are still making it ( @zmediaoutlet ) ( @thegreencooler bluesky post )

—Anne Sexton, from A Self-Portrait in Letters

[nothinggold13]

“What they saw - eastward, beyond the sun - was a range of mountains. It was so high that either they never saw the top of it or they forgot it. None of them remembers seeing any sky in that direction. And the mountains must really have been outside the world. For any mountains even a quarter of a twentieth of that height ought to have had ice and snow on them. But these were warm and green and full of forests and waterfalls however high you looked. And suddenly there came a breeze from the east, tossing the top of the wave into foamy shapes and ruffling the smooth water all round them. It lasted only a second or so but what it brought them in that second none of those three children will ever forget.”

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

~C. S. Lewis

[legacysam]

🎀 three books that affected you? How? ♥

oh good lord I was an English major for 10+ years and that’s just from college on do you know how many books I’ve read????

1. Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I read all the Narnia books as a kid and while I have mixed feelings about it now as an adult, this one stuck with me. There’s a character whose goal throughout is basically to reach the horizon, where they sky meets the sea, and see what’s beyond it (I am intentionally glossing over all the religious allegory bc reasons). And at the end they actually get there, and it blew my mind as a kid and I still think it’s one of the most beautiful moments in fiction. (I’ll put it under a readmore at the bottom bc it’s LONG lol)

2. Mrs. Dalloway. So, because of the way I grew up and the way my family was and probably just my natural disposition, reading was never really difficult for me. I read A LOT and enjoyed it, but I didn’t encounter a whole lot that was really difficult like Mrs. Dalloway was. But difficult in a really, really good way, where I could wrestle with it and always be rewarded for it, intellectually and emotionally. I read it in college and it was the first time I felt a real relationship with an author as a person and as an artist, and that experience (and the class I read the book for) became a driving force even beyond being part of the chain of events that led me to grad school. It really became part of who I am in ways that are really hard to explain but like. If you want to know me, read Virginia Woolf. You don’t even have to read a whole novel, there’s a short story called “A Haunted House” that’s like two pages long and feels like somebody put my soul on paper.

3. Leaves of Grass. Whitman as a poet is one of my favorites, but I think he comes to mind for this question in particular because he makes me feel a connection to parts of my heritage that are. hm. complicated (tl;dr I had relatives on both sides of the civil war and there were absolutely slave owners on that list). I’ve read a lot about that period and a lot that was written during that period and I’ve read a lot that humanizes people in good and bad ways and it’s all very complicated but... idk, Whitman’s voice resonates with me and reminds me of the voices of the people I received that heritage from. I’m struggling to put this into words but his voice... feels like my roots. And maybe...the good aspects of a side of my family that I often feel very alienated from.

From Dawn Treader: “It was as if a wall stood up between them and the sky, a greenish-grey, trembling, shimmering wall. Then up came the sun, and at its first rising they saw it through the wall and it turned into wonderful rainbow colours. Then they knew that the wall was really a long, tall wave--a wave endlessly fixed in one place as you may often see at the edge of a waterfall. It seemed to be about thirty feet high, and the current was gliding them swiftly towards it. You might have supposed they would have thought of their danger. They didn’t. I don’t think anyone could have in their position. For now they saw something not only behind the wave but behind the sun....What they saw--eastward, beyond the sun--was a range of mountains. It was so high that either they never saw the top of it or they forgot it. None of them remembers seeing any sky in that direction. And the mountains must really have been outside the world. For any mountains even a quarter of a twentieth of that height ought to have had ice and snow on them. But these were warm and green andfull of forests and waterfalls however high you looked. And suddenly there came a breeze from the east, tossing the top of the wave into foamy shapes and ruffling the smooth water all round them. It lasted only a second or so but what it brought them in that second none of those three children will ever forget. It brought both a smell and a sound, a musical sound. Edmund and Eustace would never talk about it afterwards. Lucy could only say, 'It would break your heart.' ‘Why,’ said I, ‘was it so sad?’ ‘Sad! No,’ said Lucy.”

[supposewehaveonlydreamed]

Voyage of the Dawn Treader

You know the end of VotDT when there’s that quote like

“And suddenly there came a breeze from the east, tossing the top of the wave into foamy shapes and ruffling the smooth water all round them. It lasted only a second or so but what it brought them in that second none of those three children will ever forget. It brought both a smell and a sound, a musical sound. Edmund and Eustace would never talk about it afterwards. Lucy could only say, 'It would break your heart.' ‘Why," said I, 'was it so sad?' ‘Sad!! No,' said Lucy.”

well i was listening to Spotify classical shuffle and this song came on and it reminded me of that quote. Listen! lemme know what you think

http://bit.ly/2JxRTXq

[queenlucythevaliant]

The concluding chapters of VDT are the clearest and loveliest glimpse of heaven that Lewis ever wrote: the sensation of drinking light, the wild, fresh smell of lilies, water so clear that you can see straight to the bottom, the ability to stare into the face of the sun without being blinded… there’s a kind of diffuse elegiac quality to it alongside all the beauty, a solemn pain best exemplified in Caspian that the journey cannot yet be completed (nevertheless, to abide in the flesh…). Light permeates everything. It’s so, so lovely.

As far as quotations go, it’s difficult to isolate a favorite, but I want to discuss the children’s reactions to the Very End of the World: “And suddenly there came a breeze from the east, tossing the top of the wave into foamy shapes and ruffling the smooth water all round them. It lasted only a second or so but what it brought them in that second none of those three children will ever forget. It brought both a smell and a sound, a musical sound. Edmund and Eustace would never talk about it afterwards. Lucy would only say, ‘It would break your heart.’ ‘Why,’ said I, ‘was it so sad?’ ‘Sad!! No,’ said Lucy.”

This is the moment in which the children are given their greatest glimpse of Aslan’s country. They can see it through the wave, and now they have heard and smelled it. It’s powerful and, what’s more, it’s inarticulable. Biblically speaking, heaven is left largely mysterious. We get a much clearer picture, from the OT prophets to the Gospels to Revelation, of what the New Heavens and the New Earth will be like; details on the present heaven are contrastingly sparse. Likewise, Narnia really gives only this one glimpse of Aslan’s country, yet several chapters advancing further up and further in in LB. This glimpse is beautiful and has stayed with me always, but at the same time it really doesn’t tell us anything, does it?

It’s those two exclamation points that get me. Lucy’s glimpse of Aslan’s country “would break your heart,” but it is emphatically not sad. Intuitively, I understand exactly what that means, but when I break it down further, I come away with several possible interpretations. Perhaps the joy of it breaks your heart. Perhaps it sends your own flawed humanity into sharp focus with its utter perfection. Perhaps you long so deeply to go through the wave and find that music that it breaks your heart to know you cannot. Perhaps all, perhaps something else. What gets me is that Lucy, the girl who gave us “a dim, purple kind of smell,” isn’t able to say anything more than “it would break your heart.” This girl is extremely good at abstract descriptions of numinous sensations throughout the Chronicles, yet here words fail her. Edmund and Eustace are unable even to say that much.

It’s a moment that puts me in mind of the titular quotation from another of Lewis’s works, Till We Have Faces: “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

When I reach heaven, my sanctification will be finished. I will be like Christ, in spirit and in character. Perhaps then, when the race is complete and when I am complete, I will finally have the words to describe the heaven I am met with.

Discussion #12

C. S. Lewis wrote often about Heaven, and though he believed strongly that his imagination could never come close, that didn’t stop him from writing whatever glimpses he could. Which of these stands out to you the most? Or is there a moment within his books that, though not obviously a reflection of Heaven, reminds you of Heaven anyways? What moments fill you with that same “inconsolable longing” for Heaven that Lewis describes as “joy?”