Episode 265: “Best of” Series – An Experiment in Criticism, Ch. 1-4

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast - Episode 265: “Best of” Series – An Experiment in Criticism, Ch. 1-4

Host: Angelina Stanford
Co-Host: Cindy Rollins
Release Date: February 25, 2025

---

Introduction

In Episode 265 of The Literary Life Podcast, hosts Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins revisit timeless discussions centered around C.S. Lewis's seminal work, An Experiment in Criticism. This episode delves into Chapters 1-4, offering listeners a comprehensive exploration of Lewis's insights into the art of reading and literary criticism. The conversation not only dissects Lewis's theories but also intertwines personal anecdotes and teaching philosophies, making it a rich resource for both avid readers and educators.

Background on C.S. Lewis's Literary Criticism

Angelina begins by highlighting the multifaceted persona of C.S. Lewis, often celebrated as a beloved children's author and Christian apologist, but equally revered as a profound literary scholar. Lewis, renowned for his exhaustive knowledge encompassing medieval and renaissance literature, was lauded as "the most well-read man in the world" at the time of his passing. His work, including a preface to Paradise Lost, showcases his ability to weave intricate literary connections, making him an indispensable guide for readers seeking deeper understanding.

Discussion of An Experiment in Criticism Chapters 1-4

Chapter 1: The Few and The Many

Lewis begins by distinguishing between "literary" and "unliterary" readers. He posits that the majority ("the many") seldom reread books, often dismissing them after a single read-through. Conversely, true literary aficionados ("the few") engage with great works multiple times—sometimes 10, 20, or even 30 times—allowing for a profound and evolving comprehension.

Notable Quote:
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” – Satan, Paradise Lost (05:00)

This quote underscores the importance of a reader's disposition in interpreting literature, aligning with Lewis's assertion that the same text can evoke vastly different experiences based on the reader's engagement.

Chapter 2: The Status Seeker

Lewis critiques readers who consume literature primarily for social status, aiming to appear cultured rather than out of genuine love for the works. He distinguishes between "professional" readers—those who read for external validation—and "amateur" readers who engage with books out of pure passion.

Notable Quote:
“A bad reader can make a good book bad and a good reader can make a bad book good.” (14:04)

This emphasizes that the quality of reading is deeply intertwined with the reader's approach and intent.

Characteristics of Unliterary Readers

Lewis identifies five key traits of unliterary readers:

1. Exclusive Focus on Narrative: They consume books solely for the story, neglecting deeper stylistic and thematic elements.
2. Reading by the Eye: They fail to appreciate the rhythm, melody, and stylistic nuances of the text, reducing reading to a visual activity.
3. Preference for Simplicity: They favor clichéd and simplistic writing, avoiding complex or beautifully crafted prose.
4. Status-Driven Reading: They select books to enhance their social standing rather than for personal enrichment.
5. Transactional Interaction: They use literature as a tool for self-improvement rather than engaging with it wholeheartedly.

Angelina and Cindy reflect on these characteristics, sharing personal experiences and discussing the pitfalls of teaching methods that prioritize memorization and superficial engagement over genuine appreciation.

Insights and Discussions by Hosts

Angelina's Perspective:
Angelina draws parallels between Lewis's ideas and her teaching practices. She emphasizes the importance of fostering a love for reading rather than treating it as a mere academic requirement. Angelina shares her experiences of shifting away from rote memorization towards encouraging students to immerse themselves in the text, allowing literature to shape their thoughts and character organically.

Cindy's Reflections:
Cindy echoes Angelina's sentiments, discussing her journey from methodological reading to appreciating literature's intrinsic value. She recounts moments when academic pressures distanced her from genuine literary enjoyment and underscores the significance of approaching books with an open heart rather than utilitarian motives.

Notable Quotes

1. Angelina on C.S. Lewis:
   “He is, wills out but in Literary criticism, it's just, it's just mind blowing.” (10:20)
   Highlighting Lewis's unparalleled ability to connect and critique literature.

2. Cindy on Family and Lewis's Influence:
   “I have a little chip on your shoulder, or you didn't get a college education...” (38:59)
   Discussing the impact of academic approaches on personal reading experiences.

3. Angelina on Teaching Literature:
   “The difference is, you know, the person who's like the Ten Commandments...” (42:15)
   Comparing religious learning to literary engagement and the importance of authentic understanding.

4. Cindy on Art and Music Appreciation:
   “It was like listening to a random 30 seconds of a Beethoven symphony...” (58:04)
   Illustrating the depth of engagement required to truly appreciate art.

Conclusion

Angelina and Cindy adeptly navigate through C.S. Lewis's critical examination of reading practices, offering listeners profound insights into becoming true literary enthusiasts. By contrasting the motivations and behaviors of literary versus unliterary readers, they advocate for a heartfelt and immersive approach to literature. The episode serves as a call to embrace reading as a transformative experience, encouraging both educators and readers to cultivate a genuine love for the written word.

Listeners are invited to continue the conversation on The Literary Life Podcast's Facebook page and join future episodes as Angelina and Cindy delve deeper into the remaining chapters of Lewis's work.

---

Join the Conversation:
Engage with Angelina and Cindy on Facebook and subscribe to The Literary Life Podcast on your favorite platform to stay updated with their literary explorations.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites. To honor that request, I present to you this episode of the Best of the Literary Life Podcast. This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome back to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm your host, Angelina Stanford, along with my co host, my co partner in crime, Cindy Rollins. Hey, Cindy, how you doing?

[B]

I'm doing well. Excited about this book.

[A]

Oh, I know, I know. This is a favorite for both of us. So this is the first episode of the season proper. This is the how to Read a Novel series. And we're going to be going through C.S. lewis's An Experiment in Criticism to orient ourselves on how to read a book. And then we're going to dive into Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. I know this is a favorite for both of us, but before we get into that, Cindy, do you have a commonplace quote to share with us this week?

[B]

Yes, I have a really short one. And then next week I'm going to share another quote from the same author. So this is Ann Patchett from her little book called the Getaway Card. It's a great little book. I don't even know if you can buy it except on Kindle. I'm not sure, but it's her theory of how she writes. But here's what she says in this quote. The history of world literature is weighted heavily on the side of writers who put their masterpieces together without the benefit of two years of graduate school. And I think that all the time I always try to imagine, although I think getting a degree in literature is wonderful, I'm not against it, but I try to imagine when moms are worried about teaching their children to write. You know, how many times I mean, who did anybody sit down with? Shakespeare and say, you need to dress that up with some adverbs. Or. I mean, he. I think there is a danger in misunderstanding what is going on when we're learning to write.

[A]

Oh, amen to that.

[B]

Yeah. So that's this little quote from a writer, a very good writer from Nashville. I just thought she captured that little.

[A]

No, that's great. And Lewis kind of says something like that in these chapters we're covering.

[B]

Yeah, I think in the fourth book. That's why I thought I'd go with this first. I had another one of her quotes, but I'm gonna do that next week.

[A]

Oh, no, that was very good. He makes the point about following arbitrary rules for writing, like never end dissonance with a preposition. He said, despite the fact that so many great writers end sentences prepositions.

[B]

Oh, that's a great quote. We'll get into that quote when we get there. Because he makes very, very good points at that juncture.

[A]

No, he really does. Alright, so I'll give you mine. I am rereading Paradise Lost. So I've got a short quote from that and I also chose one that I thought would be befitting today's episode. So this is it. The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. Now this is a quote from Satan and it's an ironic quote because he thinks he's saying even though we're in hell, we can make this heaven. But ends up happening is that when he goes to heaven in paradise, he makes a hell of it. So it ends up being truer than he thinks it is. But this idea that your mental disposition to something is often the difference between getting it, not getting it right, the heaven or hell. And I thought that that was really one of the things that Lewis is expressing in these four chapters we read. Right. That. That on the surface, literary people and unliterary people do a lot of the same things, but there's a different mental disposition happening which changes it entirely.

[B]

Yeah. And Lewis was a big fan of Paradise Lost?

[A]

Oh, absolutely. He wrote a preface to Paradise Lost, which is a masterpiece. And if anybody's reading Paradise Lost, don't you dare do it without Lewis as your guide. He is.

[B]

I read that last year finally.

[A]

Oh, it's so good. Yeah, I'm going through that again too. I'm going to briefly interrupt this best of episode because it was recorded many years ago and I want to let you know what's going on right now in 2025 at the house of Humane Letters. If we had a word of the year, it would be word. It turns out that so much of what we're struggling right now in the world of education and even in our culture at large, this experience we're having that some have called a crisis of meaning. Well, it turns out that the reason we can't figure out how things mean is because we don't understand language. Language and words is really at the heart of our entire struggle right now for meaning. And so we have put together a number of webinars, mini classes, and even a whole conference this year devoted to exploring this topic. How does language work? How is meaning made? And why does any of this matter? So right now, Jen Rogers is still in the middle of her mini class on the language and literary theory of the Inklings. This is a once a week class, so it's not too late to jump in, view the recordings and catch up. Even if you're listening to this much after the fact, you're going to want to get these videos. Honestly, this class is blowing our mind. And what seemed like it might be a very esoteric topic has turned out to be incredibly practical as again, we are learning how things mean and why does it even matter? Next month in March, we have another webinar on the same topic, but this time applied to the language of nature. So we have a WEBINAR Coming up March 19th called the Living Learning to Read the Language of Nature. And this will also be exploring how things mean and how do we know what they mean and why does it matter? And then finally in April, we'll be culminating with a conference on exactly this topic. The seventh annual Literary Life Online conference is going to be about living, why words matter. I'll be speaking, Jen Rogers will be speaking. Dr. Phillips will be speaking, Mr. Banks will be speaking. And I'm very, very excited to introduce to our audience a philologist of whom I am a great admirer, Dr. Michael Drought. And we will each be giving talks approaching this question, how does language mean? And why words matter? As I said, I am more and more convinced that at the heart of all of the things that we are struggling with right now, this crisis of meaning really comes down to a crisis of language. And we're not going to be able to find our way out of this crisis unless we get to the bottom of exactly where we went wrong and find out what words mean, how meaning is made, and why any of this matters. I hope to see you at some of these events and you can find out about ticket [e-mail] and now back to our show. So before we jump in, I thought we could talk a little bit about Lewis the academic because a lot of times American audiences are surprised to find out Lewis's pedigree because we think of him as C.S. lewis, beloved children's author, or C.S. lewis, Christian apologist. But that of course, wasn't what he was in his profession. He was a literature professor. And actually C.S. lewis was considered. You'll appreciate this, Cindy. At the time of his death, C.S. lewis was considered to be the most well read man in the world. So he's always pulling from a million different ideas. And so to talk about literature and how to understand it and what does it mean and what do books expect from us and what should we expect from a book was the work of a lifetime for him. He gave a lot of thought to this. Lewis the literary scholar is my favorite, hands down. Nothing else is close. Reading his literary criticism, it's just, it's just mind blowing. His insight into these books and again, all the things he can pull from because he's so well read, he can just make amazing connections. His, his field was in Medieval and Renaissance literature. He was one of the beginners in that. And, and he's written so many things about that. He was the world's foremost scholar on Edmund Spencer. And as I like to tell my students, Narnia is Edmund Spencer fan fiction, straight up, 100%. So if you love Narnia.

[B]

Yes, I noticed that. Yes. And I just put that in my review of the second book of the Fairy Queen.

[A]

Oh, there. That.

[B]

It's so George MacDonaldish and Lewis.

[A]

Oh yeah, Spencer. Huge, huge influence on Lewis. So anyway, as we go into this book and experiment in criticism, this is Lewis kind of just thinking through some of his ideas about what does it mean to read and what are different types of readers and what are different types of books and how do we orient ourselves to that? This has been a favorite of mine since I read it the first time. It's the kind of book I go back to regularly and I'm always challenged anew. We can talk about this as we move through the book, but I have radically changed the way that I assess in my classes as I've really tried to apply his ideas about literature. So he's been a huge, huge influence with me. How about you, Cindy? What's your history with this book?

[B]

Well, I read it for the first time a few years ago and I don't know the exact year, but I read it then and I really, really liked it, of course. And I have this goal of reading everything Lewis has written, working my way through some other. You know, I've read a few obscure things that nobody else has written. I read of Lewis. That always cracks me up because I'll say, have you read this? And not to be like a snob, but just to. And there's some very obscure stuff out there. And also, it's hard to put together Lewis's catalog because, I mean, a lot of overlap. This volume might have five of these stories. In this volume, two overlapping. So it's really hard to know what you have or haven't read, especially the essays.

[A]

And a lot of them have multiple titles.

[B]

Yes. But the other thing is that I was thinking about our podcast. I don't know that we've ever had a day when we didn't quote Lewis.

[A]

Oh, it's true. In my classes, I call him Saint Jack. He always has something applicable to say.

[B]

So in my email box right this minute, I have an email from the kilns, which I treasure, and I've got it flagged. And they're just telling me when I can come visit and what I could do, you know, what. What's available and what days. But I'm just like, I got an email from the kilns, which it was his house in Oxford, which you can still visit if you go on certain days of the week, as I now know from my email, you cannot just go any old day. You have to really let them know. And. And they charge, I think, £12 to get in. And I'm like, they could pretty much charge me whenever they wanted.

[A]

This is the pilgrimage for literary people, right?

[B]

Yeah, I would be there. So, yes, very much a of Lewis's. And a fan is probably the right word. I just definitely am a fan. And this book is excellent. All his books, I mean, really hit a tone that is so approachable and yet also so stretch. They stretch us towards something that maybe we missed along the way.

[A]

No, I think that's very true, that he is very approachable. This is not Professor Lewis in the ivory tower tossing down pearls of wisdom for us, you know?

[B]

No, no, not at all. And the interesting thing about this is he says instead of being a literary criticism, that critic that critiques books, in this book, he's actually going to critique the readers of books.

[A]

Yes, that is what. I'm so glad you brought that up. That's one of the very interesting twists, one of many that Lewis will give us in this book about how to think about things so he thinks less about what is a good book and what is a bad book and more about what is a good reader and one is a bad reader, which is much more the apropos question.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So go back to my Paradise Lost quote. A bad reader can make a good book bad and a good reader can make a bad book good. And that is one of the points that Lewis brings out. It's really about how to read much less than it is about what book in and of itself is goodness. Because, you know, we can make a hell of anything. To paraphrase.

[B]

Yes, yes. And I've noticed that, like if you get on Goodreads and you read the reviews of say, a beloved book and you find out, you know, there are a good many people that hate this book and are giving it one star reviews. Not this book, but any book. You know, it is, it is hard. It's hard to read that stuff. It's hard to say. You find yourself saying, well, what kind of person is this? It's like saying, you don't like dogs immediately. You're just like, you don't like the Chronicles of Narnia. What kind of. I suspect you of murder.

[A]

Okay. In my early days, I think I've calmed down a little bit about this as I've mellowed with age. But in my early days of teaching, if I had a student say something like, well, I don't like Shakespeare, I would say, okay, and thank you for confessing that sin. Are you going to repent? Like, you know, I always took that as not a criticism of Shakespeare as much. It was a confession of a deep moral flaw in this student.

[B]

That's right, Exactly. And that's why if you don't, it's okay. And I think we'll find this out as we go to just say, I don't like Shakespeare, but I realize it's something lacking in me, not something lacking in Shakespeare.

[A]

That's right. It is okay to have your opinion. You don't have to love everything. But we need to understand that that's not a value judgment on the thing. Yeah, we've all been there. We've all been the kid who thought a McDonald's hamburger was the height of taste. And then you, right, and you think, I don't know how I ever thought that was good. You know, we grow and we mature and we like things as adults that we thought were gross. When we were kids, this book stepped.

[B]

On my toes a couple times. And then he would, he would reel it back in a little bit and Say it's okay because we all do this. And I'd be like, yes, thank goodness. Because I just felt like I had been, you know.

[A]

And I'm so glad that you brought that up, because that's one of the things I will. I will confess I do. Some of the things that he says are unliterary. Right. We're all tempted, I think, to be like that. And so I think he's. This is not a book about judging bad readers as much as it is an examination of what does it mean to be a good reader. Right. So writing this to an audience of people who want to be good readers. And so he's, you know, it's not about parsing the wheat from the tares. It's about helping us to strive toward being good readers. And as some of our listeners have already jumped into the book, I've been getting really interesting messages and emails from people saying, you know, ouch, ouch. He's just described me. I think this has been part of my problem. Well, then, let's jump in. So chapter one of Experiment and Criticism is the few and the many. And you were right. He jumps out saying that this is not going to be a literary criticism book. This is a book about what it means to judge readers. What are your thoughts about section one here?

[B]

Well, in the first place, I think the very first point he makes, which is a very interesting point, is that the majority never read anything twice. But then he goes. And I like that. But then he goes on to say that those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work 10, 20, or 30 times during the course of their life. And I think to myself, yeah, if I was an Oxford don, I might be able to do that. But in my real life, I did read a lot of things over. I don't know that I've ever read any book. I may have read a book 10 times, like when we were. Now we are six, or when we were very young, or Winnie the Pooh, but I don't know. Or, you know, Dr. Seuss, I've certainly read 20 or 30 times. But an actual volume of. I don't know that I've ever read a book more than 10 times. I don't even know if I've read a book 10 times. Possibly I've read some books 10 times because I read aloud for my kids and I love to reread. I mean, right now I'm at a time in my life where rereading is really taking over because I really want to Go back and see some of these things. But I don't know that I've ever read a book that many times.

[A]

Well, and that's it, Right. He makes this point of the unliterary person never wants to read a book more than once. And we start to feel pretty good about ourselves.

[B]

Yes, yes. Right. Immediately, yes. I felt good on that.

[A]

He says 30 times, you think, well, I'm not anywhere close to that. But he's absolutely right. He says that the sum mark of an unliterary man is that he's considered. Considered, I've read it already, to be a conclusive argument against reading a work. And I have heard people have a very extensive home library. And I have heard people say, well, why do you have these books? You've already read them.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Or why do you have these books? You're never going to read all of these books. As if either one of those things has anything to do with building a library. This is not a magazine waiting room. You know, reading. This is. This is a library I'm building. But I have thought a lot about this whole. I've read it already, and I think that one of the things that can happen with teaching is you can end up doing that to your students. You can give them this experience that makes them feel like, well, I've already read this and they're never going to come back.

[B]

I think that is a key point. I think that is one of the mistakes that we make when we're teaching children. First of all, we give them a book they're not ready for. We think that this makes it better, that it's so hard. And we're going to give them this book in second grade or fifth grade or eighth grade, a book they should read when they're 30. And then we've stolen that book from them, essentially.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

Because of pride. Really. It's just pride. Oh, my.

[A]

Exactly what it is.

[B]

Yeah. And I saw myself do that with my kids. And later on I backed off of that completely because then I had. There's. And we've talked about this before, there's so many good books. Don't miss the books that you can get something out of because you're trying to read a book that you're not ready for. And I think we should be very careful with that with our kids.

[A]

Absolutely. And I think this is one of the dangers of giving selections instead of whole books, too. We hold this completely false idea that giving somebody a chapter. You know, the anthologies I'm talking about, we all had them in High school, they just had a chapter. I remember my high school English literature class had a chapter of a Charles Dickens novel. I mean, how utterly ridiculous.

[B]

Now, I will say this. I have the singer prose and poetry of England. They have a whole play in there. It's. It's. And they have a whole Dickens book in there.

[A]

Oh, as it should. As it should.

[B]

I. I just love that book so much. And they did not put, you know, they had essays in there and short stories, but they didn't pull things out.

[A]

That's it. Because, you know, all that happens when you give, you know, a little bit of exposure. And I call it the inoculation method. You've just made sure they're never going to catch that book. Right. No one ever has read a chapter of Charles Dickens and thought, well, I've got to have more. That's not how a Charles Dickens. It's like listening to a random 30 seconds of a Beethoven symphony. That is not going to give you any sense of the movement of it and where it's going to go. And what the real genius is. The real genius of Charles Dickens is that he can juggle 500 characters and not drop any of them.

[B]

Dickens is a perfect example of people who dismiss. Who feel like superior to Dickens because they think he's wordy. And that's a real modern way of looking at a book. Oh, it's so wordy. He needed an editor. No, he didn't. He did not need an editor. He needed the right reader is what he needed, and the right people reading his books are thrilled with. I mean, we talked about Bleak House before, but, I mean, I can jump right into. I've only read Bleak House once, but I could jump into that book at any time in my mind because I'm so thoroughly immersed in that world that, you know, it just. It just stuck with me. Mm.

[A]

I was just gonna say we could park on this one. We're in the first. We're gonna park on this the whole episode. We really could, because. Yeah. I mean, that's an admonition. Take really to heart, is making sure that I'm not doing anything in my class to give my students the sense of. Well, I can check that box off of my bucket list. Right. Sometimes, too, when we have this, my child has to get through this, you know, before they graduate. That attitude can be sort of inadvertently sending the message that you're not going to be reading this again after you graduate. You know, I always tell my students, this is just your way into this book. This is not the definitive discussion. This is the first reading and you're gonna come back to it again and again. So, yeah, we better not waver that point anymore. So the second point he makes is that the majority though they are. Sometimes this was. This was good. Sometimes they are. Frequent readers do not set much store by reading. They turn to it as a last resort.

[B]

And I think our. I mean, our listenership is probably. They are the kind of people that he says here are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read. I imagine that is our listenership. You are people who are constantly looking for a place in a time to read. And you're probably very well prepared to read given a moment, when the moment occurs.

[A]

Yeah, you know, sometimes I hear people talking about, well, you don't see people reading in public as much as you used to. And that's true, but I don't know if that means there are necessarily fewer readers. Right. I think the people who are readers in the sense that Lewis is talking about, are always going to find time for a book. The people who were reading just to fill the time can just as easily fill the time with Angry Birds.

[B]

Well, the thing is, this is where the phone. It makes it complicated. You don't always know if the person is reading a book or playing Angry Birds.

[A]

That's exactly right.

[B]

I'll pull up a book on my phone. That isn't to say I won't play a word game here and there, Sudoku or something like that, but. But you can. You know, it is hard to tell. I always say that about our Bibles. It's hard for our kids. When we read our Bibles on our devices, our children don't know if we're wasting our time or redoing something. You know, we're not really all being all that great of an example because nobody can tell what we're doing.

[A]

No, that's absolutely.

[B]

That's the danger of a technological age. We can't be good examples because we just have. We've gone down this weird whole.

[A]

Right, right. So the third point, the first reading of some literary work is often to the literary. An experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness has changed. They have become what they were not before. And again, I feel like our listeners can relate to this. And he says, but to the other kind of reader, they finished the book and nothing at all has happened to them.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So even if you can't remember a book per se, like you would like to. There is a sense where it changes you. I mean, if you've read it a certain way. I just finished Kristen Lavren's Daughter and oh my goodness, I was listening to it on the way to church and I couldn't even. I got to church and it's like every time the pastor said a word, I was just about to burst into tears. It's such change. It's a book that changes you. And there are some books that are just so well written, even if you don't relate to what they're saying, you are moved by the beauty of what the author is trying. You know, the way they use the words is unbelievable. And that book is one of those. I, of course, related very much to what Kristin went through.

[A]

Lewis talks about in other places that the kind of intense literary experience that a reader has is the kind of thing that a non reader just can't comprehend. They have no idea what we're talking about. They don't understand this intense loyalty we feel. I know for me, when I finish a book that I have deeply connected with, I can't leave the book. I can't leave the world of the book. I can't. It takes me a long time to start a new book because I'm still.

[B]

Want to pick up a new book.

[A]

Yeah. I'm still in that space. I'm still feeling that stuff, even if it's grief, you know, I'm just. And the feeling of it is part of it. And I don't understand readers who can just close one and start the next one. You know that.

[B]

Have you ever felt like, like when you finished the book, like you didn't know was coming to an end, like what happened? You just fell off a cliff. I mean, the books go on forever. You're living there and now you have to move out of that neighborhood. And it's terrible.

[A]

It's true. You feel homeless and I don't. I often have this weird restlessness, like I don't know what to do with myself.

[B]

Yeah. Now one of the ways I combat that is that I always have a couple books going so that I'm always in the middle of something. So when I get to the end of a book, usually it's something completely different, like a nonfiction, like if I just come out of Kristen Laubransutter, I don't jump into another fiction book at all. But I can read, you know, the, you know, an experiment in criticism or something like that. That's totally, you know, not taking me.

[A]

Right. Yeah. It does not Sucking you into a world in the same way that a novel is. No, I agree with that. The last point he makes here then, as he's outlining sort of the differences between readers and non readers. This really hit close to home that for the reader. They constantly have in their mind what they've been reading. Scenes and characters from books provide them with a sort of iconography by which they interpret or sum up their own experience. They talk to one another about books often and at length. The latter seldom think or talk of their reading. This is the life of me and Thomas Banks. This is us. We talk about books all the time. We reference them all the time. We don't go anywhere, do anything without making the literary reference of what this is like, or I feel like so and so, or just catch. We just talk books all the time. We breathe books all the time. It is absolutely the reference for how I make sense of my life. And as Lewis points out, the non literary don't have that. That is not anything they can relate to. It's a side entertainment just like nothing else. Right. But it's not. They're not breathing it and talking about it all the time.

[B]

I think that's one watching a show.

[A]

Yes. And I think that's one of the things and that makes. Makes books very participatory, I think, and not a passive act because we are synthesizing it and it becomes part of us. But I think that's one of the beautiful things we have seen happen on the Literary Life discussion page on Facebook, is that all of these people who want to talk books now have this place to do that. It's just beautiful watching these conversations.

[B]

Yes, yes, it is beautiful and it's been so much fun to know. It is so nice to know that when you, when you have a book like Kristen Lavin's Daughter and you go on there and you say something, you're gonna get, you know, somebody else is going to say, like Lewis says, what you too?

[A]

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I love it too. He says the non reader wonders why you are making such a fuss about books. I have absolutely been asked that. He says we treat as a main ingredient in our well being something which to them is marginal. And that, that is a difference between a reader and a non reader. And here he's. He' he's not even. He's. He's describing a type of reader that's essentially a non reader.

[B]

Yes, yeah, yes. They read. They read, right, exactly. They might read all the, you know, the, all the modern.

[A]

They might have a book with them all the time. But it doesn't. They don't. It doesn't become an essential part of who they are in their experience of being alive.

[B]

Now, when he gets into the second chapter, I think it's very interesting that he does remind us that even though. That we can't be kind of snobby, like, we're not trying to puff ourselves up and be like, where are the readers? And we're the literati.

[A]

Oh, absolutely. He has plenty to say about those people. Right?

[B]

Yes. He said, even the literary, there are no small percentage of ignorant caddish, the stunted, the warped and the truculent. So even amongst our own kind, may we never be that. We have. We have snobby people or now there are non readers who put on the cloak of being a reader so that they can relate, you know, so they can. So they can be over other people. But we also have. Well, like we saw in the omnibus, the celestial omnibus.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

We have a professor who. It uses reading as he wields it as a weapon against other people.

[A]

And that's one of the things I loved about this section, that Lewis is very quick to say. The distinction I'm making between the literary and the non literary has nothing to do with intelligence.

[B]

Yes. Yes. And that's. I think that's something too, that I think that's the kind of community we're developing in this podcast. We are not developing a community where we're lording ourselves over one another. We're just a community that we're all just jumping up and down going, I like that. I like reading. I want to talk about it. Not lording ourselves over one another. We're not throwing out big words to make each other feel stupid or like we know more about it than you do, that sort of thing.

[A]

And he's so quick to say, the line here is not between readers who are so smart, non readers who aren't smart, or even intellectuals versus non intellectuals. Because he said there's plenty of brilliant scholars out there who are really non readers at heart in the way that they interact.

[B]

Yeah. The bell rings and they go home. They don't take.

[A]

Yeah. So this is. This is the description he's making is going to cut across education, intelligence levels, class, all of that. This is not a distinction between high and low. This is. I really think it's about a disposition of the mind.

[B]

Yeah. He says here those kind of people are mere professionals.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

You know, and, and, you know, that word is so fraught, the word professional. I've Heard it always makes me cringe. I met. I remember at one point it was really popular to talk about mothers as professionals. They moms at home. Instead of, of course, they're being, you know, assaulted by the culture. And so then someone comes along and tries to build them up by saying, oh, no, you're a professional. Which to me was the height of condescension. I wanted to say, no, I'm not a professional. I'm not a professional mom. I'm a mom. I'm a mother. I don't need a title, I don't need a degree, and I don't need approval. This is just who I am. And you don't label me.

[A]

And the distinction. Oh, go ahead, go ahead.

[B]

And I just think that's exactly right. That's the distinction he's making here.

[A]

And the distinction he's making is between professional and amateur. And the thing that we can't forget is that amateur is from the Latin amo. I love. An amateur is someone who does it for love. A professional is that one who does it for money. And so we should all seek to be amateur readers.

[B]

And then some people, like you, Angelina, love it so much and have the opportunities of life come along that it becomes your profession, but it becomes your profession out of love. I think of my dad like that. He loved baseball. Yes, it became his profession. So he's in. My mom said it today. She said he every single day of his life, he loved what he did, and it was baseball. And that is a professional. But it's not only a professional.

[A]

Yes, but it's a challenge to keep that love alive when it's your profession. That's what Lewis is saying. He's saying, look, there are literature professors who have become non literary because they're not doing it for love anymore. It's the job. And there's so many things about the job that require them to treat the text not as this beautiful moment in itself, but as this, you know, the raw material to write an article or get a promotion or whatever, or to.

[B]

Say something new about it. And I think that does do a lot to damage not only the profession, but the student. You know, I'm gonna pull this out of the hat because I have to, because if I don't, you know, I'm gonna lose my tenure or something, you know.

[A]

Oh, it's true. And I mean, we could spend the whole time talking about this, because this is one of my hills to die on is when he says foreign universities here, he's talking about American universities. American Universities have the publish or perish mentality. So it's not about how good of a teacher you are. It's about how much new research you're doing. New articles, new. So. So it's not enough then to say, I'm gonna teach my students what Shakespeare means and I'm gonna do it well, and we're gonna love it together. That's not good enough. In America, you have to write the book, publish the article that says the new daring thing. Look, I'm absolutely convinced that it was not some leftist agenda for literature professors today to say crazy things about books. What it is, is they have to, in order to keep their job, say something new. Well, guess what? The easiest thing to do is say something weird and crazy that no one's ever said before. That's all that's left.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

So Lewis is talking about this, you know, in the 1940s and 50s. He's complaining that that drive to have something new to say, to be on the cutting edge, is gonna kill your love.

[B]

Yeah. And then he goes on a few pages after that to talk about people who. Name drop who. Who. You know, it's popular to talk about certain. And there. There will be books in the air. You know, all of a sudden we'll all be talking about TS Eliot for some reason, or all of a sudden everybody's discussing Wendell Berry or. And it's not to say these people aren't good and that we don't have those moments in time where we. We have that collective consciousness that moves us all together in a way. But there are people become very. People who want to fit into that world are then given the ammunition to do that because they can start just dropping words.

[A]

Oh, yeah. And Lewis talks a lot about that, about not getting swept up in literary fashion. So if you. If you study the history of literature, which I do, authors come in and out of fashion all the time. All the time. And so that you're. You're sort of laughed out if you love someone who's out of fashion at the moment. Shakespeare was out of fashion for 400 years, or 200 years, I should say.

[B]

And I'm sure he'll go out of fashion again.

[A]

Right. And so really, you just have to love what you love. Just read old books and just don't pay attention to the trends. They come and go, you know. So the person everybody loves right now, five minutes from now is going to be a misogynistic xenophobe that we have to all reject. You know, just. They rise and fall and this. It's always been like that. That's not new. That's not a new leftist thing. It's always been that way. Shakespeare was out of fashion for 200 years, long before there was any of this leftist agenda. And you know, they rise and fall. So, you know, that's what he's saying is that there's a certain type of sort of, you know, fraud reader who's just surfing the wave, right? Of who's in fashion. They always know the right authors for the time period and they're using. And then again, that's the theme he's going to bring out in the next section about using art. So the status is just.

[B]

I'll talk about that. That is very important.

[A]

He talks about this in section two, the status seeker. So there are people who will read books for status trying to seem smart, to give themselves an edge. And that's not somebody who's reading for love and not somebody who's truly reading. He also talks about. And this, I love this. The guy who's reading to quote, unquote, approve himself is also not a real reader because he's not really giving himself over to this book. He's trying to use it to improve himself in some way. Lewis says elsewhere, you know, the. One of his other essays, I'm gonna butcher this terribly. It's probably my commonplace book, but I will butcher my paraphrase here. He says something like, anybody who picks up a poem to improve himself is not going to improve himself because the muses will suffer. No marriage of convenience.

[B]

Yes. Now, what I want to ask you about that is. So say you're me. You know, you have a little chip on your shoulder, or you didn't get a college education and you love to read and you want to stretch yourself so you trust. You try to. You try to trust the people that you seek out the truth, the good and the beautiful. And you maybe you read Paradise Lost the first time and you're scratching your head going, I don't get it. I tried to read this, everybody liked it. But what you don't know is that if you read it to a three times, suddenly it's going to be a beautiful thing. There is a sense of faith that we come to and we are trying to improve ourselves in some way, but we. But really it's not trying to improve ourselves as just having the faith that there's something here, like we said about Shakespeare that I don't understand. So I'm going to read this and let's say I read it the first time I don't, I don't get it. And then I read it again and you know, suddenly I'm starting to get it a little more and I read it again and I'm starting to get it a little more. And the more I do that, the more I begin to love it and see that it's love. Lovely. But at the same time that looks a little bit like I'm trying to improve myself.

[A]

Okay, I'm really glad you brought that up because again, that has. This comes back to this idea of it's a disposition of the mind and the heart. Because we do think that reading these books will improve us in some ways. Part of it has to do with trying to control the outcome, right? So the reader who enters the work saying it's going to do what it's going to do, that's one thing. The reader who's trying to be in control. This will improve my vocabulary, right? I'm going to read vocabulary. Well, you know that you could get that by studying the dictionary or an SAT test book. You don't need Paradise Lost to improve your vocabulary. In fact, you're not going to improve your vocabulary trying to talk like that. You're just going to sound starting. So it has to do with that, I think a little bit. The difference is, you know, the person who's like the Ten Commandments seem like a good idea. If I follow that, I'll probably have a pretty good life. You know that that's not the same thing as I love these commandments. I love God and I'm. And I'm trusting that it's going to have some transformative effect on me trying to obey him. Right. So that it's about trying to put yourself in control of the outcome. One of the things that I have been thinking a lot about is when we talk about truth, beauty and goodness, I think a lot of times what we really say, what we really mean when we say goodness is we're not saying the book is good, we're saying the book is going to make me good. And that's of course not true. I get messages from people every day. My 13 year old is lying. What book can I read to them? That's not how. If you're reading the Bible and it's not going to make them stop lying, there's no fairy tale I can recommend that's going to tell because that's not how it works. So it depends what you mean by improving yourself. If you mean I would like to improve my vocabulary, I would like to get a better job. I would like to stop lying. That's not the way books work. But if you mean I would like to engage with truth, beauty and goodness and become more fully human. Yes, it'll do that.

[B]

Oh, that is a really nice distinction. I like that because it does. Because we do get to the point with our children where we're like, that isn't actually doing what I thought it was gonna do. Well, really?

[A]

And it backfires. All that passive. I was teasing my students the other day about, you know, passive aggressive prayers. Right. My dad, My dad was the king of that. Like, he'd be praying over a chicken dinner. But boy, in between praying for, you know, the dark meat and the light meat was. And help my children to love each other. Other and stop fighting and obey me more. And you know, it's just.

[B]

That's my dark children and my light. Exactly.

[A]

Those that are on in the shadow of Aslan and those who are walking to the light, that. That's not how the prayer works. You don't pray these things in front of your kids and then automatically they start acting. But that's not the process here. You're praying for the Holy Spirit to change, right? Not trying to, you know, guilt someone into good behavior. But, you know, that's a whole other issue. But I think what Lewis is talking about is just a temptation. We have to try to somehow control and force an outcome.

[B]

Now, it can work that way. I mean, I know that literature can change us in a way that does make us good, but it's not outwardly, it's not what we go. That happens accidentally sometimes. I know somebody who read the Lord of the Rings and they, they were thinking about doing something wrong and they said later that they realized that they. They could wear that eventually the ring would control them if they, if they, yeah, they could just get away with doing this wrong thing for a little while, but eventually it would control them. And that book, clearly. But that was the Holy Spirit. It wasn't just the book. It was the Holy Spirit taking the book and using it in their lives.

[A]

Right. And if the parent had tried to manipulate the child into certain behav. The book, it would have not. It would have not.

[B]

Yeah, no. If I, if I said to one of my sons, oh, I want you to read this so you know that you'll be manipulated. You will not to let sin have control over you. That would just not have worked at all.

[A]

And in this section, Lewis gives a long example of what he's talking about. It's exactly what you're talking about. The improvement might come, but only if that was not the goal. It's a side effect. So he talks about playing games, right? There's the guy who plays a game because he loves the game, and as a side effect, he might get in better shape. Right. But the guy who plays the game just to have better shape is not really playing the game. He could just as soon, you know, walk on a treadmill as he could walk a mountain. Right?

[B]

So for him, it's not about the game at all.

[A]

Right. So he says, you know, the tragedy here is when you. When you come to it with nothing but a desire for self improvement.

[B]

Mm. Right. You might hope that I love this game. I hope it helps me get in shape, but I'm gonna play it anyway. Or you might just be using the game. And we're gonna talk about that as we move on into art and music in the next chapter. But before we do that, is there anything else in this chapter? Well, yeah.

[A]

Oh, yeah. There's a few other things I want to go over.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

I see he talks about one sad result of making English literature a subject at schools.

[B]

Yes, yes.

[A]

Is that the reading of great authors is from early years stamped upon the minds of conscientious and submissive young people as something meritorious. Okay? Now that's, again, one of these things where we have to draw some fine distinctions, because isn't it meritorious? Isn't it good? Don't we want them to do these things because of good? Yes, but the goodness has to be from some intrinsic value. Right. Not as boxes to check. Not as, well, cultured people know who Homer is. Check that box. Cultured people know a little bit of Shakespeare. Check that box. And so he's going to talk about this later, how students want to please you. And so that's why you have to be very careful what your disposition is as the teacher, because you're telling them all the time in your attitude what the value is or is not of something. So we don't want. This is what he's saying. We don't want to put our children in a position where they think reading Shakespeare is like taking a tablespoon of cod liver oil. Well, it's good for me.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Because it's got to be beautiful and delicious, and that needs to be. It is good for us, but it's delicious, right? It's good for you in the way that a beautiful Sunday dinner is good for you. It's good for all of you. It's good for your soul and the fellowship. And it was delicious and it was nutritional, but let's hope nobody approaches Sunday dinner with, well, I'm gonna choke this down like cod liver oil.

[B]

Right, Right. You sound like Charlotte Mason. She does so much with food. So many analogies that come across with food and love.

[A]

Here. How he says the muses assume the role of amenities. Right. That's the Furies. That's beautiful. Right? The muses. The muses, not the fury. The furies come after you and you transgress.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's not what the muses are. And then, of course, he talks about the puritan consciousness. Right? Like. Like just, you know, this is. This is what it means to work hard. You read these hard books, Right?

[B]

Right.

[A]

It is hard work. And nobody's saying it's not. That's part of it. But it can't be just be hard work for the sake of being hard work. In fact, he goes on to say it's because of literary puritans that he doesn't like to apply the word serious to readers because he says being a serious reader is only good if it's a serious book. If it's a. If it's a comedy, if it's, you know, if it's a body fat blow from Chaucer, then being serious about it is exactly the wrong thing to be. Right.

[B]

Right.

[A]

What the book requires you to be. Sometimes that means it's PG Wodehouse and you're laughing hysterically, and sometimes it's a tragedy and you're crying.

[B]

Yes. And when you're reading Woodhouse talk about vocabulary, the humor is so spot on that you do increase your vocabulary just because to get the jokes, your brain has to stretch. And I just find him so.

[A]

But you're right. But it's the byproduct, Right. Nobody should be reading it to improve their SAT score.

[B]

Now, I know there are people on the Literary Life Podcast Facebook page that get upset when the puritans are considered dour and sad people who don't like to have fun. I think that's a misrepresentation. Of course. Lewis is just playing off of that. Just tell us this.

[A]

Yeah, I think he's using literary puritans, like, we might say, grammar Nazi.

[B]

Right, Right. And he does actually talk about grammar Nazis later, doesn't he?

[A]

He does. So for him, he makes out this. This really beautiful harmonizing. A paradox, right. That a serious reader can be as playful as Mercutio. I think that's me. I think I'm a playful serious reader. I liked that as a serious reader though, is somebody who just takes into his whole heart what he reads. That's what it means to be a serious reader. Not that I'm oh so serious and I'm treating this like hard work.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

So you read as he says, in the same spirit that the author writs. So if he's written a comedy, you read it looking for comedy. And if he's written a tragedy, you read it that way. I always think there's tons of parallels for me between the way you study literature and the way you study the Bible. I went to a, just this really kind of hard nosed academic school that treated Bible in that way. And I think that was really bad for me. I think it was very bad that we had a rigorous study of the Bible and did all these hours of homework and took tests on things. And I remember around my junior or senior year just thinking, I remember this very clearly, that these Bible facts were in my head just like history facts. But there had, surely there was something different. I kept thinking that I have been thinking about education theory since I was in kindergarten. That is the absolute truth.

[B]

Honestly. Me too.

[A]

I have always thought about why am I here? And I remember in the Bible class, this did not make me popular with the teacher, but I really meant it genuinely. And I asked how is this study of Bible different than the other things we're studying? I really wanted to know. I thought it should be different. It wasn't just going to be a mental exercise. Right. It's something that's supposed to touch my heart and change my life. That I presume being able to list the presidents of the United States in history class is not going to touch my life. It had to be different. And I, and I never got that in school. So I'm really sensitive to over making something overly academic. I think can destroy the nature of it.

[B]

Well, this came up last night in our Charlotte Mason meeting because we were. Because Charlotte Mason is very much about giving your children the kernel of the gospel without overburdening them with, with a lot of distinctives or a lot of, of your own sectarian ideas. She, that she said we should just give them the Bible as is and not. So the question came up, you know, is it helpful to catechize your child? And I honestly, as someone who has catechized my children and has, has done both. Has done it and has not done it, I honestly don't know that I'm not at the point at this time in my life where I'm gonna Say that was a really good thing that we did, or that was. I'm not ready to throw it out, but I'm not. I'm really not ready to unequivocally think it's a good idea either.

[A]

I'm not sure I'm in the exact same boat. I'm in the exact same boat. I'm just. I'm just not sure. And I'm unsure about it in my own life, too. We were. We were heavily catechized. We were given tests on Bible memory work. All. I mean, I'm just not sure that that was the appropriate disposition for me personally in the way that I interacted with that stuff.

[B]

Now, I'm a big fan of memorizing passages of scripture so that they're in your heart. So then when the Holy Spirit needs to use them, they're there. And I'm not saying that the Holy Spirit couldn't use that with the catechism either. But also, there's a beauty to this scripture that, that you pick up when you memorize it. And a lot of times people memorize the scripture. The main way we memorize scripture, the same way we memorize Shakespeare, is not by trying real hard to memorize, you know, Shakespeare, but, you know, those things get in our heart as we read it over and over and over again. That's the best way to memorize scripture. But I do. I have not changed my mind about memorizing scripture as long as it's not a weapon or a tool. And it's just this. Isn't this beautiful? Let's memorize it.

[A]

No, I agree. And my objection was not to having to memorize it, but having to be graded on it.

[B]

Yes. And having a worksheet on it.

[A]

Yep. So we had to write it a bunch of times, and then we had to write it, and then, you know, they take points off if you didn't get it quite right. And, you know, and I am a.

[B]

Big, firm believer that no memorization. The point of memorization is not perfection or word perfect. It's so that you have the flow of something in your heart.

[A]

I know. They would always get me on those.

[B]

Little, little, little prepositions.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, right, right. I forgot what else I was going to say, but.

[B]

Oh, sorry.

[A]

No, no, no, it's fine. It's just. I'm sure it was something else about all that. So, again, we're getting back to fine distinctions. I mean, look, there are plenty of people who made A's in Bible class who didn't even pretend to be a Christian. Right. Like, and not that Christians don't want to know the Bible, but knowing the Bible does not make you a Christian. Right. If I can make that distinction.

[B]

Yeah, we can't. There's no correlation between straight A Bible students and Christianity.

[A]

No, that's right. That's right. Right. So again, it has to do with the disposition of the mind. Oh, I remember what I was going to say. We had to write Bible verses for punish work.

[B]

Oh, that's awful.

[A]

Was so, you know, they would pick out an appropriate verse to go with whatever your transgression was and then you'd have to, you know, write it a hundred times.

[B]

Well, that probably solved a lot of problems. Yeah, you know, there's a lot of earnest zeal that is that, that I mean, I can't. I'm sure my kids think I did stuff like that at times when they were very young. And we did have a little book of the proverbs that like that you were supposed to. We finally got to the point where I said, you know what, I don't think reading Bible verses before, you know, I punish a child is a very good idea because I really got to the point where I thought that was a bad idea. But there was this whole thing like, you know, you sit the child down, you have a long lesson and then you, you know, deliver the punishment. But that's a whole other topic.

[A]

But I do think it's related. No, but it's really. I think we're all talking about matters of the heart and disposition and I don't think you can use scripture to get an automatic one to one correlation or read this psalm and your kid will act this way.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

And so it's the same thing with this.

[B]

And the more you do that, the more they. Yeah, the Bible might actually work like that if you let it work like that. But if you making it work like that, you're picking it up and you're on the child's head, then you're actually, like you said, inoculating them against that verse, not helping them to embrace the verse.

[A]

So he spends a lot of time talking about, you know, a serious reader is not a solemn reader. It's one who understands the nature of the book that he's reading and reads according, according to that. He has this sentence, I just love, love this, where he's talking about different types of reading. So like something that would be a laugh riot versus a tragedy. And he says he will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison. That's. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Okay, so I think we can move on to section three. So this is how the few and the many use pictures and music. So Lewis is going to take what he introduces here and really develop it in the next section in the book. Between the way that someone can use art. And he starts off by talking about the way that different people look at art and the way that different people look at music. Because he's going somewhere with this to try to describe the different ways that people read. What jumped up. Did you hear Cindy?

[B]

Well, I'll tell you what. I got nervous. And I've read it now three times, and it continues to make me nervous because I'm so bad at appreciation. Art appreciation and music appreciation. I don't understand beauty. It's always made me, like, get hives. Like, you know, I mean, let me. Let's just put it this way. It took me a long time to understand why Thomas Kincaid was not good art. I just thought, well, it's really pretty. What's wrong with it? You don't like pretty. Now I understand and I get that. But. But I was that person who. I didn't know how to look at a picture and. And I didn't know why. I didn't know why Bach was better than sticks are. I just didn't understand that I. Because I couldn't hear it and I didn't know. Eventually I had that faith to stick with it. And I understand that now. But I did this. This. I guess I break out a little bit reading this because I'm thinking, oh, man, I did so many of these bad things.

[A]

Well. And essentially the line he's drawing here is between those who use pictures and those who do not.

[B]

And that I understand, especially now, the idea of if we use something we don't, it's not a loving act.

[A]

Yes. And so he goes through different ways that someone might interact with art and shows that essentially they're all using the pictures. In other words, treating the picture as a jumping off place for something else. A mini. An emotion you have.

[B]

It's like looking at a Norman Rockwell painting and feeling, you know, like, oh, that I feel all the emotions that would happen if my son returned, you know, soldier returned home. You know, it's not like, oh, that's bad that I feel those emotions, but that's not making me an art, an artist or. Right.

[A]

So a painting is not a good painting or a bad painting because it made you feel warm and fuzzy. And reminded you of your grandma. That's not relevant to the question of whether or not it's a good painting.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

He says, in other words, the person who's looking at paintings the wrong way, he says, in other words, you do things with it. You don't lay yourself open to what it. By being in its totality. Precisely the thing can do to you.

[B]

Yeah, Right.

[A]

So if you go to look at the Sistine Chapel, right, You're in the presence of this amazing art and these things that can really affect you deeply if you're. You know, if you're. If you're. If you're looking at all. The hand of Jesus in this. In this painting really reminds me of my dad's hands. And I'm now thinking about my childhood. And, you know, that's not the point of the picture. That's not saying that. That's not a valid response to what you're feeling. It's just not a comment on the painting. Because Michelangelo was not trying to make you think about your dad.

[B]

Right, Right. And, yeah, and I guess that's where I get lost a little bit, because so much of there is that romanticism of the thing. I have a picture on my wall right now by an Edward Jensen. I really, really love the ocean. And I always am looking for pictures of waves that really, really capture it. Well. I have a painting now on my wall that I just lay in bed. I have one painting on one wall that's a very beautiful painting that was of the beach and the other of just this picture of the. Like. It's actually like you're in the deep sea. And I can just lay there and look at that at night, and I can almost get seasick. It's almost like that painting of the Dawn Treader where the water is splashing out and hitting me. And I'm thinking, is that the right way to look at that painting, or am I doing something? Is that the wrong way to look at it? I don't know whether it's great art, but it is extremely evocative of the sea.

[A]

Right. So he talks about this in this chapter with regard to painting. Like I said, he's going to really apply this to literature. But I have a couple of things underlined here that I think we definitely not miss. First, he says real appreciation demands the opposite process. We must not let loose our own subjectivity upon the pictures and make them its vehicles. We must begin by laying aside, as completely as we can, all our own preconceptions, interests and associations. Right there's a lot of application here to the study of literature, which he'll bring out later. Right. So it's not about. You can't judge the work because it is or is not an accurate reflection of the way you felt about your own childhood.

[B]

Right. And he. I do like this. We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with this. And I think that is really the heart of much of what he's saying throughout these books.

[A]

Absolutely. And I underline that, too. And then the next line, the first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender, look, listen, receive, get yourself out of the way. That is one of the biggest challenges I throw before my students is I teach them all these different ways to get yourself out of the way. And of course, we're in the way way more than we realize it. Our modern assumptions are in the way a lot and standing in between us and art. And I think the number one task of the teacher is to help students learn how to get themselves out of the way so that they can enter the work of art.

[B]

Now, Charlotte Mason, that would be very much in line with what she's saying, that the teacher should get out of the way. She is saying, but really, she's saying nothing should stand between a student and the thing. The thing.

[A]

Even the student himself.

[B]

Yes. And you're adding on to that. Not just. Not just the thing is the thing. Knowledge is the thing, is what Charlotte Mason is saying. And don't confuse, you know, anything for that. And so that the picture is the thing, not the teacher's idea or the student's idea.

[A]

Yes, yes. And so we have to teach students that. I mean, yeah, I completely agree. Nothing should stand between the child and the work of art or the work of literature. But there is a lot of invisible things that are standing there in between them. And then you have to help as a teacher get them out of the way.

[B]

And so he said, this is the main distinction. Many. The many. We've been talking about the many and the few. The many. You saw the few receive it. Yep.

[A]

The many behave in this like a man who talks when he should listen or gives when he should take a hundred times. Yes. I teach my students constantly. The number one rule of being a reader, the number one goal you have is to hear what the author is saying. And you cannot do that if you are talking. And one of the things that that means is I strongly object to this idea that we're talking back to the book and we're supposed to be writing all these notes in the margin and having conversation with the author. How can you have a conversation with him until you've heard the whole thing?

[B]

Well, that's what I found in my book the Dubliners, that I had. That I had the young girl or boy's notes. And she was having this conversation with the author along the way. And it was so absurd. I mean, the thing.

[A]

She hadn't heard anything James Joyce had said.

[B]

No. And it was like it had something to do with her and not. You know, it was. It was all her. Where she was and not where the book was at all. And she was missing so much because of that.

[A]

And unfortunately, I think we think that's what we're supposed to be teaching our students to do. We're supposed to be teaching them to talk back to the author. But there you have to think of the time and the place. You cannot. I always say it's the difference between somebody who really hears what you're saying and then responds versus the person who's only pausing while you talk and they're formulating their response.

[B]

Well, I think this all gets back to that whole idea of utility. Lewis is basically saying that a reader, a real true reader, is not concerned about the utility of it all, what he's gonna get out of it. And it's very hard for us as moderns when it comes to reading. I get it. But when it comes to these other things, I get kind of muddled because I'm a modern person, and I am used to thinking, what can I get out of this? How can I use this?

[A]

Mm.

[B]

But when I see other people do it, do it where I'm better at it, it's easier for me to say, oh, ouch, that's bad.

[A]

Well, he says this at the bottom of page 21. We're skipping a few pages here. But this is. This is the point he's getting at. Okay. The real objection to that way of enjoying pictures is that you never get beyond yourself. And that's my big objection to this whole idea that I supposed to talk back to this book. You're never going to hear what the author said. You're only going to hear your own voice for a thousand pages. You're only going to be hearing your own voice. And our own voice is this is the reason why we read other books, to be quiet, to hear other people. And I'm not saying there's never a chance to respond, but you don't respond until you've heard the whole thing. And that's what Lewis says. Right. He says there's no way to know if you should surrender a book until you've done it.

[B]

Right, right, exactly. And. And yeah, I agree with that 100%. I agree with Louis.

[A]

It says when you are. Just when you don't. When you don't get yourself out of the way, the picture so used can call out of you only what is already there.

[B]

Yes. And what. And why would you even bother then?

[A]

Why would you. I say that over and over. If. If all I'm doing is reading a book to have my own opinion affirmed, I don't need the book.

[B]

No, no.

[A]

Because I already know everything. You know, I don't want to be challenged. I want to argue. But again, we're arguing before we've even heard the other guy. That's not fair. That's not loving. That is using. That is using art. To what? To sharpen your sword? To do whatever, but to make yourself feel good, to puff yourself up and affirm yourself in your own belief. But he's gonna make this.

[B]

Yourself a professional.

[A]

Yes, but he's gonna make this point again and again. When you're doing that, you only ever meet yourself. And that's. That is not the point. One of the metaphors I use in explaining this to my students is art is a mirror. But what kind of mirror is it? Is it the evil stepmother of Snow White's mirror? Do you just want to look in there and have the mirror tell you how beautiful you are? Is that what you want? Or is you want to look through the looking glass to the reality behind you, want to have new eyes to see? And that's what Lewis says here. If you don't get yourself out of the way, you do not cross the frontier into the. That new region which the pictorial art as such has added to the world.

[B]

Now, that reminds me of the book Fantastic. Yes, by George MacDonald, which I think the whole point of the book, maybe, maybe not, is how, you know, discovering beauty by getting rid of yourself. How do you do that? We can't discover beauty when we're wallowing in our own self.

[A]

Yeah. So then he goes on to talk about some other ways that we use rather than receive art. I have to say that's been one of just a really good distinction for me as I think about all of my teaching methods and what do I do in the class, and am I helping them receive it or am I teaching them to use it? So all of the examples he gave of self improvement, that would be an example of using it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I want to get a better job. I want to sound smarter at a cocktail party. I want to impress my boss. I want to have better vocabulary. I want to seem knowledgeable and cultured. All of that is using it. And this is how he defines that. It's the rush hastily forward to do things with the work of art instead of waiting for it to do something to them. And I think we really have to be careful in our classrooms with assessment because of this. Right. If literature and art is a transformative experience, that's going to do something to us. We all know, in our own lives, that takes a long time. Right. You read something and then a long time later you begin to see that it has changed you. So you have to be careful in your assessment that you're not demanding the students do something with this.

[B]

And this is why homeschooling and being a mom is so very difficult. You're not preparing your children for the next 20 minutes or. And you're not going to see that from. And it's going to be discouraging to you all the time. But you are planting seeds that will bring forth fruit. Maybe you won't even be around to see it, or maybe you will. But the thing is that if you plant the seed, it's going to grow and. But you just can't. You can't look around, like you said, and say, well, I gave him that Bible verse about not lying, and I don't know why he's lying. What. You know, what do I do now? That isn't how any of this works.

[A]

Mm, no, no, completely. And we'll come back to this idea, because this is really important to me, this idea of receiving art and not. Not using it again. I think that has to do with a. With a disposition. It's submitting to the work, which means literally to put yourself under it.

[B]

And he ends the chapter with saying that, you know, and this made me feel better because I think I can commit some of these errors. But he said. I said this error is transient. I meant transient and real lovers of music or painting, but in status seekers and devotees of culture. Devotees of culture. It may sometimes become a fixation.

[A]

Yes, Right. And we're all going to be tempted to have these moments.

[B]

Right, Right.

[A]

But we also get beyond it.

[B]

And if you see someone who's fixated on these. On these nuggets of use, it should be a red flag that that person doesn't know what they're talking because they don't love what they're talking about.

[A]

No, that that is exactly true. And, oh, my gosh, there's so many things I'm thinking all the same time right now. But I mean, I have been involved in teaching and academia in that world for a long time, and I certainly have seen that was actually. And I think I've told this story before, but that was one of the things that made me so disillusioned that I left academia, is that I perceived these people were not readers. They could quote the critics, they could talk the talk, but they were not readers. The reading was not what they did in their alone time. They didn't love this stuff. They didn't breathe it like I did. And I was so discouraged to think that the teachers of literature were not readers themselves. Certainly not the readers like Lewis is describing.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So in the last chapter. Well, we're just dragging along here.

[B]

I know. We really are. It's just.

[A]

It's just too much good stuff. So we'll definitely continue the conversation on the Facebook page as we unpack this stuff. But he talks about five characteristics of the unliterary reader. So this is somebody who reads. Again, this isn't about reader versus non reader. He's talking about people who read, but read in an unliterary way. Yes, characteristics. And maybe we should start off by saying. He says that the literary reader does this at times, too.

[B]

Yes. So he says that we all do this, but these people only do this.

[A]

Only do that. They never look beyond this. Because this very first one.

[B]

I know this very first one was confusing to me. So maybe you can help me understand that they never uncompelled, read anything that is not narrative. I don't know what that means. I mean, because I think of narrative in the terms of Charlotte Mason, where if I'm reading science, I want to read it in a narrative way so my mind can hold on to it. If I'm reading history, I'm going to read a narrative. What does he mean by narrative?

[A]

I think he means they're reading it for the story, for the plot, so they can get away with the CliffsNotes version.

[B]

Yeah, maybe they're reading it for the. Just the outline.

[A]

Yeah, because he's describing it. Because he says he doesn't mean by that that they read fiction.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

That even when they. Well, he's talking about the unliterary person. The most unliterary reader just reads the news. But for that, he's still trying to find out the. The who did this to who.

[B]

He's trying to find out truth, what happened, rather Than be a part of it. Maybe he's just trying to find out what happened. He's trying to find the facts. Just the facts. Okay, okay. I think that makes sense.

[A]

So when you're reading a book and you're like, oh, can we get past this dreadful description and get back to the story?

[B]

Yes. I hear people say that, oh, I've.

[A]

Been guilty of that. I've totally been guilty of that. I got a master's degree in Victorian literature. You better believe I've been just like. Enough with the garden. Can we just get back to the story now? Number two, they have no ears. They read exclusively by the eye. So what he's saying is they don't appreciate the rhythm of the words and the beautiful melody. But I think that our listenership, with all the out loud reading that they do, I'm guessing how definitely reads with the ear and definitely picks up the sense.

[B]

I think reading aloud is the training for that. I mean, you suddenly become. I remember I was reading the Idols of the King out loud to my children and I didn't know it was in a meter. And I was just reading it and I think I may have said this before, but it was not going in my head. The words were not. I'm like, what in the world? This thing is terrible. And then somehow by reading it aloud, I hit the meter and I just immediately fell in love. And I was like, oh, my goodness, this is so much fun. This book is wonderful. And all the words made sense. It was like it had been Greek before now they just fell into place in this beautiful, beautiful wave. And I thought, this is a beautiful book. But when I first started reading it, it was just nonsense to me because I didn't have the medium.

[A]

That is fascinating. That's a great story. And you know, reading silently to yourself is a pretty fairly modern phenomenon. Everything was read out loud for a really long time. I could tell you about that, but.

[B]

We'Re running out of time. Yeah. He was meant to be. He thought of people sitting around reading out loud.

[A]

Oh, yeah. And then they. And they did. So, yeah. I mean, my favorite sentences just. I like the way they sound. I like the way they feel in my mouth. Just, you know, the rhythm of it. I always. My favorite writers, to me it's like music, what they're doing. I just, I feel that. I feel that musical rhythm and I love it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Number three, not only as regards the ear, but also in every other way. They are either quite unconscious of style or even prefer bad books, which we should think badly written. So I think this goes back to the first point when you're just trying to get the nugget of the story. A really well written sentence actually can get in the way of that. So that they saying they actually prefer when it's badly written. So he gives the example of cliches and things because that's easy. The cliche is easy. They just, they just roll right through that and they can get to the nugget.

[B]

And if you get on Goodreads and start reading some reviews of some really beautiful books, you'll see that this is the problem right here. This is where it gets them. They, they want the book to be bad because they can't take the good parts of it. And I'm not talking about any of my friends, but you can read all the reviews of different books.

[A]

Yeah, he says they just want basically a hieroglyphic. Right. Just the words just need to imprint the idea in the image in their head. And so yeah, he talks about how they prefer the cliche because he says in two directions they'll run into problems. One, a really well written, beautiful sentence. Well, they don't like that. That just got in the way. Right. But the other thing is that a minimalist sentence he says. So he gives an example.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah, just like the moon, you know, the moon was bright. He said to a good reader there, I thought this was really interesting. Our imagination fills it in.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

But the bad reader doesn't have enough imagination to fill that in. So they have not enough imagination to be able to appreciate a very minimalist style. And, and they lack the ability to connect with a very ornate sentence. So they just want the cliche.

[B]

Yes. And I think this comes down to the question, should we give our children bad books just so they're reading? And I think Lewis would say absolutely not. I think that we. That doesn't mean we have to be hoity toity. We might, we can find things on their level, but we don't have. We don't. The point isn't just to read under. You know, you're right.

[A]

Because we could be making non literary readers.

[B]

Right. I think we do that a lot. But we could also make non literary readers by forcing our children, by not accepting where they are. Like maybe they're reading the Bobsy Twins. There are some very literary bad books that are actually helpful to kids, I believe.

[A]

No, I agree with that. I mean, I'm a great lover of Nancy Drew. I don't think it's beautiful prose, but.

[B]

No, but it's not void completely of, you know, genius here and there.

[A]

Right. Well, at least the old ones. Right. As we.

[B]

Oh, right, right. I mean, I like the Sugar Creek Gang for boys. For little boys like seven, eight, nine. And I mean, I feel like they're so well written now. They've updated them and made them more modern. But if they're very quaintly written, and I just think I find it pleasurable to read them out loud. And that, to me, is a good sign.

[A]

Oh, yeah, I think so too. Not everything can hold up under that. The read aloud.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

So he goes on to say that. Okay, so on the one hand, there are those who detest style, and then on the other hand, he calls the style mongers.

[B]

Yes, the style mongers.

[A]

What did you think about that?

[B]

Well, I mean, I think that's just appealing to our snobbery, our wanting to, you know, fit in to a certain group of people so that, I mean, it's going back to that whole thing where we were talking about before. What do you think?

[A]

Oh, this was. I thought this was fantastic. Again, this was my experience in academia. He says they just pick an arbitrary role. Right. And it doesn't even matter what the rule is, whatever the in fashion thing is at the moment. And that's how they judge books. So they're judging books only according to the passing fashion of style. Well, this. This is a cutting edge, postmodern film. This is a cutting edge postmodern book. This writer really pushed the limits on narrative, blah, blah, blah. You know? Well, pushed the limits on narrative. That's actually a neutral statement, Right? Did he do it right? Did it poorly? Did it help the story? Did it hinder the story? Those are not the questions the style monger asks. Right? Just because it's new and cool and it's the fashion of the moment, it becomes praiseworthy. He says they judge the instrument by anything rather than its power to do the work it was made for. Right? So I don't care if it's a cutting edge style. I want to know if what he did with that, did the cutting edge style open up this story in a way, in a new. In a new way, in a delightful way, in an inventive way, or did he have a cutting edge style and fail?

[B]

Right?

[A]

Because sometimes cutting edge style can be a real distraction from a story, can hinder the story. You know, it's so deliberately trying to be avant garde that you're just like, stop already.

[B]

Yes, the style monger is just after the style. He doesn't care about anything else that's going on. It's just. And I know there's some modern books right now, I haven't been able to read them where the book is really about the style of how it was written, not about actual the story.

[A]

Yep. Yep. And he now did. This is Lewis's most hated group of people. He says they're not just unliterary, they're anti literary.

[B]

Yes. Yes.

[A]

Because he says he creates in the minds of the unliterary who have often suffered under him at school, which means that a lot of teachers are anti literary. This has 100%. This was my experience. I had teachers who made me hate books.

[B]

And my kids. I've said this before, but at least two of my children came back from college English class and said, they're making me hate reading.

[A]

No, it's true. So he's absolutely right. There is a certain type of teacher that is anti literary. He says he creates in the minds of the unliterary a hatred of the very word style and a profound distrust of every book that is said to be well written. And this is true. Right. They have turned style into this meaningless idol so that when they hear style, they roll their eyes. I would say that an interesting parallel because I've seen this on the Facebook group quite a few times as several people have said that their professors were so ridiculous about symbol that anytime they start hearing somebody talk about a symbol, they just. They want to. They want to.

[B]

You know, that was me. That was me. I've heard that so much, too. It's just like, these are people who don't read books. They don't enjoy books, and all they care about is what this symbol means.

[A]

Right. And so several of those people said that our Celestial omnibus episode showed them that symbols are not so arbitrary. And I think a lot of the teaching I do on this in my classes and webinars and things, I try to show the symbols are not arbitrary. And you can't make them say anything. There's actually. There's rules to symbol and metaphor.

[B]

Well, I think that happened to you and I where I think we. When we were in Colorado a couple years ago. Yeah, I was like, yeah, I don't, you know, I'm not listening to this. This because I don't want to hear people tear apart books. And you said, oh, I would never tear apart a book. And I was like, you wouldn't. And it was a nice reunion for us over ideas.

[A]

It was. And that's another one of those buzzwords where I Think the anti literary hub destroyed. So like you, literary analysis. So people hear that and think this means, like you said, tear apart a book. I have no interest in tearing apart a book. I think I teach my students how to, to look at the parts in a way that helps to synthesize the whole. But that's another one of those things. Like even to teach literature, the pendulum's kind of swung back the other way, I think, because we're so afraid we're going to destroy the book. But this is exactly what Lewis is talking about. All of these would be example of somebody who is anti literary. So they've ruined it. The word style turns people's stomach. The word symbol, the word literary analysis, all of that, I think for a lot of our listeners, just as automatic, nauseated feeling. So many of the people who listen to this podcast went to school for English degrees and say, you know, that killed me. That made me hate books. The way they talked about books made me never want to talk about books. So part of what I'd like to think I'm doing is reclaiming that we can talk about books. Literature means something, and it has components which we should understand. But those things all have to be in proportion or, you know, we can, we can do what Lewis says here.

[B]

And become anti literate and it can increase our enjoyment. So I'm finding it's really fun to read a story that I, you know, like when I read A Good man, it's hard to find I'd read that many times. But when I read it with you and we talked about, did it increased my enjoyment of the story? It didn't make me hate the story or it didn't make me think, oh, I should never have read this story because I didn't understand all the parts to it. I just, oh, now I already like this story. Now I like it even more.

[A]

Right. And where an analysis can slice and dice and make something smaller, I think, you know, a good, a good reading of a book, a literary reading of a book will actually show you that it's much bigger. Right. Has so much more levels of meaning than you thought. Right. Analysis, again, it's just like what Lewis says here, with style. It's one of those words that can just turn our stomachs. I say that what really is going on in literary analysis is you're learning to name the things that you saw.

[B]

Yes. You recognize them. Yes, I think that's true. And I think, and you can read a story a few times before you're even ready to do that. Maybe you're not. Maybe that's something. You get to know the story, then you're ready to see more of it that you. You love it. You. Now I want to know more about it. Or it can work the other way, too, where, oh, there's more there than I thought, you know, so. Exactly. Araby was like, that bad. You know, that didn't seem like the best story on earth, but the more we talked about it, the better and better it got.

[A]

We did that episode. It has continued to open up to me. I've continued to see new things. And one of the exciting things for me, this was about all of the short stories we did, is that reading the comments of our listeners continually opened up this. There are plenty of times that I pull out my iPad and show Mr. Banks, like, look up what this person said. I hadn't thought of that. And he was like, oh, I hadn't thought of that either. And we'll. We'll have this moment. So just because we're not replying doesn't mean we didn't see and enjoy. We were out to dinner one night. That's why we didn't reply. We were just having. We're having our wine and hors d'oeuvres and reading the Facebook comments and just delighting in that our listeners were helping us to see these.

[B]

I have learned not to get ahold of you during dinner time.

[A]

That is, dinner time is the prerogative of the newlywed, Cindy.

[B]

Yes, that's true.

[A]

But then he goes on to say, because we're gonna wind it up here. But he goes on to say that the unliterary is trying to focus on the event. What happened?

[B]

Yes, yes.

[A]

But so many great books. Nothing happens right, and everything happens right.

[B]

You become, like we said before, you enter another world. You're just living there. And you know what? What happens is? It's not even half of the deal.

[A]

So then let's just quickly go through this. He talks about some of the ways that the unliterary read. One, they get that pleasure from this, you know, vicarious anxiety. So this suspense novel, the sensation of fear. Right. Secondly, he says they like to have inquisitiveness, aroused, prolonged, exasperated, and finally satisfied.

[B]

Yes. And then that's when he kind of steps them up.

[A]

Stories. I was like, wait a minute, Louis. But he redeems himself. Thirdly, they like the stories which enable them vicariously, through the characters, to participate in pleasure or happiness. But then he goes on to say that, let us be quite clear that the unliterary or unliterary. Not because they enjoy the stories in these ways. He goes on to say, everyone likes these things, but because they enjoy them in no other way.

[B]

That's right. That's right.

[A]

All of us are rooting for Darcy and Elizabeth to get together. We all want the vicarious happiness there. We all feel the anxiety and suspense in books or. Right. That's all part of the experience for us, but it's not the whole of it. Right.

[B]

And that's why. That's why that's a standalone book, Pride and Prejudice. Because nobody. Because modern people try to give us the ending without actually having the talent to write, to write it the way it should have been written.

[A]

That's right. That's right. So he finishes by saying it's not what they had, but what they lack. Cuts them off from the fullness of literary experience. These things ought they to have done and not left others undone.

[B]

I like that. Yeah.

[A]

All these enjoyments are shared by good readers reading good books. So, yeah, he. He took with one hand and gave with the others. Cindy. Because at first he made me feel bad, too, about the mystery stories, but then he said, no, no, we all love those things, but we don't just love those things. And of course that's true. One of the things you and I talked about a lot on the Detective Store episode was how much we love the whodunit. But it's also not just about that for us. We love the characters and the cultural commentary and all of the other things.

[B]

There's so many terrible mystery stories out there.

[A]

Yes, there are.

[B]

I mean, there are more terrible ones than good ones. So that's why we get excited when we get a good one.

[A]

Now he ends it with this. This will be the cliffhanger we end it on. Because there's a lot to say about this and we can pick that up next time. He ends the section, the saying this. Those who seek only vicarious happiness in their reading are unliterary, but those who pretend that it can never be an ingredient in good reading are wrong. So he's affirmed us. We can want vicarious happiness. It's just that that's not all we want. That's a part of good reading, but it is not the end in itself.

[B]

Oh, absolutely. Yes. So much to say. We'll leave it. We will hang it there. And you guys can think about this until we come back next week.

[A]

That's right. So next week we'll cover chapters five through eight. So please jump in on the literary life page. Also head over to our website the Literary Life. We have extensive show notes that our podcast manager, Kiel does a great job. Any book that we mentioned, she writes it down and she links it for you. So if you're trying to track down what were those authors, she's got it all there for you right there on the website. She's also got each poem that's read each week is there and she's got all kind of good links and stuff. So head on over to the website even if you're listening to it on itunes because she's got all the info there. And of course, if you're enjoying the podcast, please rate, review and subscribe. We would really appreciate that. And a special thanks to our Patreon friends and fellows who continue to provide support for this podcast so that we can keep doing this and keep helping each of us to craft a literary life. We've got lots of new bonus stuff coming out, continually coming out for the fellows. I'm about to make an announcement announcement pretty soon about what's going to be happening this month there. So thank you so much for your support and thanks for listening with us. And until next time, have fun crafting your literary life and we will leave you with a poem read by a poet. Thanks so much. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member Only Patreon forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks, the man he killed by Thomas Hardy. Had he and I but met by some old ancient inn, we should have sat us down to whet right many a niperkin but ranged as infantry and staring face to face, I shot at him and he at me and killed him in his place. I shot him dead because because he was my foe just so my foe of course he was, that's clear enough. Although he thought he'd list perhaps off hand, like just as I was out of work, had sold his traps. No other reason why. Yes, quaint and curious. War is you shoot a fellow down, you'd treat of met where any bar is or help to half a crown.