Episode 266: “Best of” Series – An Experiment in Criticism, Ch. 5-7

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast: Episode 266 – “Best of” Series – An Experiment in Criticism, Ch. 5-7

Release Date: March 4, 2025

Introduction

In Episode 266 of The Literary Life Podcast, host Angelina Stanford, alongside lifelong reader Cindy Rollins, revisits key discussions from C.S. Lewis's influential work, An Experiment in Criticism, specifically focusing on Chapters 5 through 7. This “Best of” episode delves deep into Lewis's exploration of literary criticism, the nature of myth, fantasy, realism, and the essential disposition required for meaningful reading.

Main Discussions

---

1. Understanding Myth in Literature

Angelina and Cindy begin by unpacking Lewis's definition of myth and its distinction from mere storytelling. They explore how myths serve as permanent objects of contemplation, transcending their narrative forms to offer profound insights into human existence.

• Notable Quote:

  "We can't criticize it because it is criticizing us. But I must give you one word of warning... you are merely sitting in judgment on yourself."
  – Cindy Rollins [06:27]

2. Fantasy: Literary vs. Psychological

The conversation shifts to the concept of fantasy, differentiating between literary fantasy—a tool for transcendence and moral exploration—and psychological fantasy, which can become egoistic and disconnected from reality. They discuss Lewis's ideas on "castle building," illustrating healthy versus morbid fantasies.

• Notable Quotes:

  "Every storytelling starts as an imagined reality."
  – Angelina Stanford [42:17]

  "A taste for the comics is excusable only by extreme youth because it involves an acquiescence in hideous draftsmanship and a scarcely human coarseness..."
  – Cindy Rollins [80:43]

3. Realism in Literature

Angelina and Cindy delve into Lewis's critique of literary realism, distinguishing between realism of presentation (the depiction of realistic details) and realism of content (stories mirroring real life). They argue that true realism is a narrative construct and not inherently more truthful than other forms of storytelling.

• Notable Quote:

  "Realistic fiction is much more likely to deceive you than a fantasy."
  – Angelina Stanford [65:28]

4. Escapism vs. Transcendence

Challenging the common perception of literature as escapism, the hosts align with Lewis's view that literature, especially fantasy and fairy tales, serves to reorient readers toward deeper truths and transcendent realities, rather than merely offering a temporary reprieve from life's hardships.

• Notable Quotes:

  "Fairy tales are truer than true and realer than real."
  – Angelina Stanford [72:08]

  "If life is a prison, then escape means somebody let us out. How is that a bad thing?"
  – Cindy Rollins [69:44]

5. The Disposition of the Reader

A recurring theme is the importance of the reader's disposition. Lewis categorizes readers as literary, unliterary, anti-literary, and extra-literary, emphasizing that the depth of engagement with a text depends more on the reader's mindset than the inherent qualities of the book itself.

• Notable Quotes:

  "The literary person is going to read this myth and it's going to become a permanent object of contemplation that he will go over and over again as long as he lives."
  – Angelina Stanford [25:49]

  "You can't assume that because someone loves a book for one reason, they are missing out on another."
  – Angelina Stanford [86:06]

6. Implications for Teaching and Reading Practices

The hosts discuss practical applications of Lewis's theories in educational settings, advocating for cultivating good reading habits over rigid reading lists. They argue that teaching students how to read critically and contemplatively prepares them better for engaging with complex literary works in higher education.

• Notable Quote:

  "It's about learning how to read and become a better reader."
  – Angelina Stanford [34:16]

Insights and Conclusions

Throughout the episode, Angelina and Cindy emphasize that meaningful literature requires an active, contemplative engagement from the reader. They advocate for embracing a diverse range of narratives, encouraging readers to transcend their personal experiences and connect with universal truths. The discussion highlights the enduring relevance of C.S. Lewis's insights into literary criticism and the transformative power of storytelling.

Final Thoughts

Episode 266 serves as a profound reflection on the nature of reading and the profound impact literature can have when approached with the right mindset. By dissecting Lewis's arguments, Angelina and Cindy provide listeners with valuable tools to enhance their literary experiences, fostering a deeper appreciation for the art of reading.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

1. "Forgiveness... is the key to all art."
   – Cindy Rollins [07:34]

2. "A myth can be summarized and still be as powerful as if it was told in this full scale beautiful way."
   – Angelina Stanford [20:05]

3. "Admitted fantasy is precisely the kind of literature which never deceives at all."
   – Cindy Rollins [71:18]

4. "Fairy tales are truer than true and realer than real."
   – Angelina Stanford [72:08]

5. "No novel will deceive the best type of reader."
   – Angelina Stanford [75:00]

Conclusion

This episode not only revisits essential discussions from An Experiment in Criticism but also enriches them with contemporary perspectives on reading and literature. Whether you're a seasoned literary enthusiast or new to the world of critical reading, Episode 266 offers valuable insights into the timeless dialogue between author, reader, and text.

Transcript

[Angelina Stanford]

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. This is episode 22, and I am Angelina Stanford, and with me is the one and only Cindy Baseball Girl Rollins. That was my lame attempt to be a color commentary on the baseball.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, yeah, I like that. Yeah, I can put some of my Yogi Bear quotes in here.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, since I've gotten married, it has struck me how many baseball metaphors I use in my. In my life. Like, I realized that one of my constant expressions is, that's in my wheelhouse. And. And my husband had never heard that before. And so I looked it up and to confirm that it was in fact a baseball metaphor, because that's where I had. That's the only place I ever heard it was the. The guys on the Atlanta Braves used to.

[Cindy Rollins]

The.

[Angelina Stanford]

The commentators. You remember those guys. Oh, Chip, yeah, exactly. That always talk about Dale Murphy and, oh, they're gonna give him a pitch in his wheelhouse. And that. That is one of my constant expressions.

[Cindy Rollins]

So, guys. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yeah. I have so many. Baseball is this defining thing from my childhood, and I'm living with a poet. I'm. Now I catch myself, and I've been realizing how many baseball metaphors and expressions are just a constant part of the way I interpret reality.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, definitely. For me, I mean, I'm pretty sure I've gone to more baseball games than 99.9% of the people in America, because I was. You know, I went to baseball my entire childhood at my dad's work was baseball, and we went to all his games. So then when I got married and had kids and they started playing baseball. So I was be. I'd be going to three or four or five baseball games in a single day, keeping up with all the kids. And so I'm pretty sure I get some kind of award for that.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think there's a special level of heaven that says the baseball field. You know, Field.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's where you're going to be.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. I love baseball. I still love baseball. I just never get tired of watching a baseball game.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's America's pastime, Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

America's an intellectual pursuit.

[Angelina Stanford]

I wonder if C.S. lewis was a fan of baseball, he'd have been more of a Cricket.

[Cindy Rollins]

Cricket. Cricket, yes. I don't even know if he. I never hear him talk about cricket, but then I wouldn't know because the term. I don't understand the terms.

[Angelina Stanford]

I have also not realized if he's talking about cricket. I don't know. He doesn't really seem like the sporting kind of guy. He likes walks.

[Cindy Rollins]

You know, in my talk last year, and I was talking about. I asked that question, I said, how many of you can imagine C.S. lewis at the gym?

[Angelina Stanford]

No, I remember when you said that. That was such a good point. That he was an outdoorsman in the sense that he would go on these long walks.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. Sometimes called pub crawls, like the character.

[Angelina Stanford]

Ransom in the Space trilogy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah. And I love that about them. I, to me, is the ideal life where, you know, you. You read and then you take a long walk with your friend and you talk about books. And so this is our long walk today with.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, ever since you said that, I've always. I've thought about my husband, Mr. Banks, because that is how he is. I cannot imagine him at the gym. And yet he. Since the time that he was 11 years old, walks about four miles a day, every day. Just, wow. He does not take the car. He walks to downtown to go to the coffee shop with his book in hand. He's just a. He's a walk.

[Cindy Rollins]

Wow. That's a. That's a wonderful. A lost art, really, to walk somewhere. And especially in America, in England, it's a normal thing to walk places. Here, it's a little. Because. Because you can pick up a trans. Public transportation pretty much anywhere there. Like, you can either hop on a train or a bus or something like that along the way. You're not. If you. If you get to. You can walk to one town and then take the. You know, the bus back to the other town.

[Angelina Stanford]

Mm. Ye. What he. What he considers walking distance Is anything within four or five miles. He walks to church every Sunday morning. It's about five miles away.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think that is the ultimate, to walk to church. I think that I would love to walk to church. I would. I would absolutely adore walking to church.

[Angelina Stanford]

I do not walk the five miles with him, if anyone. That's not a shared activity. It's hot. It's the South. I'm not showing up.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And that is in my heels.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, that's not. Have it in.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's true. That is true. You would wear different clothes if you were walking to church.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. That's right. So, yeah, no, that's him. All right. Well, we are here back with the next set of chapters five through seven of C.S. lewis's An Experiment and Criticism. And before we jump in with that, we're going to do our usual sharing of commonplace quotes. What do you have for us this week, Cindy? What's been striking at you?

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, this is the second quote I have from Ann Patchett.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right.

[Cindy Rollins]

So I promised the second quote, and I love this quote so much. She says, forgiveness, the ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this, because it is the key to making art and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. And I've just. That quote just sticks with me because I think about forgiveness as being the key to making art. And I just tumble that around in my head a lot because it is very hard to forgive oneself. And to be in that state, really would of unforgiveness towards yourself would definitely affect the way you. The. What you produce in your art. You know, whether it's writing. She's talking about writing in this book. But she says forgiveness is the key to all art. And I know it is the key to happiness in life, whether. Whether we forgive other people or we forgive ourselves.

[Angelina Stanford]

Gosh, that's really got me thinking, Cindy. I mean, I'm thinking about some of the stuff that Lewis talks about in this section, and I'm wondering if that's applicable where he talks about the. The certain type of daydream. You can have one. One, you're the hero of the dream, where you're the spectator. And I wonder if the connection between making art and forgiveness is that you can be. You can have that little bit of space between you and your experiences. You can step back and kind of watch it as a spectator. You know, I don't know if this is true for everyone, but a lot of times I think it's easier to forgive other people than ourselves.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely. I definitely think that is true. We make such. I actually heard a really good quote yesterday about forgiveness and maybe I should just save it for another. Another podcast. Maybe I will. But it was basically this out beyond our wrongdoing and our right doing is a field. I will meet you there. And that is for people we have wronged or people we are self righteous about. Either way, there's something beyond our failing of each other or our high expectations of one another. And we're gonna go and we can meet each other in that place. Oh, that's so good.

[Angelina Stanford]

I guess I'm thinking too as you speak about that, about how I think forgiveness and mercy. I think I think about those things a lot more as I get older. And I'm reminded of what Chesterton said about fairy tales and about the fact that at the end of a fairy tale, the wicked, it's not just that the hero is saved, it's that the wicked person is judged. And he talks about how adults struggle with that because children want justice. It's people who want mercy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. That is so true, isn't it? When we're young, we really do want justice and when we're old, we fear justice.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. I'm all about mercy for everyone.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And I think that's part of, you know, life getting older is that either you're gonna get more merciful or you're gonna be one of those horrible old people.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, yeah, you're right because I think as you, we got a whole other show here. But this is fascinating to me. As you get older, I wonder if that drive for justice doesn't cross the line into a desire for vengeance. Maybe you just become that big old man who wants all of his enemies trampled under his feet.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. You're bitter that life is not giving you the justice you expected because you don't have that long view of eventual justice. Yeah. And sadly, all this stuff I'm thinking of, I've been really emotional this week and it's all been because I'm going to be talking about laughter. And so I've come up with, for some reason, this has sent me down this rabbit hole of really depressing things. Well, by the time this comes out, most people who have signed up for that conference will know whether they just sat there and sobbed on laughter.

[Angelina Stanford]

It'll be a good catharsis. We'll get it all.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes. And I'm not going to go off on that because I have that talk in my head. But what about you? Do you have a commonplace?

[Angelina Stanford]

I do. So I have at the last min, had switched off what I was going to say because the Literary Life podcast discussion group, as always, so thought provoking.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm just gonna shamelessly steal a quote that our dear listener Angie Burke posted, which I read.

[Cindy Rollins]

I love this quote.

[Angelina Stanford]

I put it on Facebook. I put it in my commonplace book. It's just too good. And I thought so. Apropos to what Lewis was talking about in last week's episode and what he will again say in next week's episode about putting yourself under a work and not over a work. So this is A quote from A.A. milne, who was a huge fan of the Wind in the Willows and in fact wrote a play version of it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, that's right. That's right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And you can. Whenever I teach the Wind in the Willows to my students, they always immediately start talking about Winnie the Pooh and the forest there, and they can hear the echoes between those two. But here's what A. Milne said about Wind in the Willows. And I thought this was so fantastic because in so many ways it's emblematic of what I think a great story always does. He says one does not argue about the Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man tries it on his nephew and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character. We can't criticize it because it is criticizing us. But I must give you one word of warning. When you sit down to it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste or on the art of Kenneth Graham. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worthy, I don't know, but it is you who are on trial. Oh, that's so good.

[Cindy Rollins]

That is so good. I think we kind of talked about this last week when we talked about, you know, reading people's reviews of books and realizing that they just totally missed it or they. They didn't love it. But that doesn't change the book at all, does it? If someone doesn't like it.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, no. And you're liking it doesn't change it either.

[Cindy Rollins]

And it doesn't make it good literature, bad literature, because, you know, everybody modern, so many modern reviews say things like, he could have used an editor. I feel like that's the modern critique.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Cindy Rollins]

They could have used an Editor, like Dickens could have used it. We talked about that. But it's just like, yeah, Kenneth Graham could have used an editor. He could have. And it would have been so sad for the world not to say that. Editors, I love it. My editor. Give a shout out to her, Katie Krebs. She's a wonderful copy editor and I love her to death. She knows I need an editor. But I just think that's a beautiful quote.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, it's so good. It's so good. And I think Lewis, Oakwood Lewis was a huge fan of the Wind and the Willows, as was Tolkien. Both of them very, very influenced by that book. And I thought about that actually, in the section that we read when Lewis talks about the numinous, because that's what I think Kenneth Graham is going for too. So let's go ahead and segue then into the reading because it's actually, it's an easy segue because they're all speaking about stories in the same sort of way. So Lewis in the first section has talked about the actions of the unliterary versus the literary. And then he even went so far as to talk about the anti literary, which I have been chewing on since last week when we talked about this. The idea that this is not about intellectual versus non intellectual. It's not about educated versus non educated. It's not even about who's trained in literature and who's not. Because he gives some examples of English teachers who are anti literary in the way that they approach things. So he's getting at something that transcends all those categories. And so now he kind of pauses for a minute in chapter five to say, okay, so what is. Let's talk about myths.

[Cindy Rollins]

Because he says we have to define some of this stuff. We've been talking about it and nobody knows what I mean. Maybe.

[Angelina Stanford]

So he defines quite a few things in this section, myth and fantasy and realism. Because he wants to pause here and getting our terms right and how someone reads those things and how that fits into his overall argument of the literary reader versus the unliterary reader. And then he's going to jump in this last section, which we'll look at next week, he's going to jump headfirst really into that with the nitty gritty about what he thinks about reading. And I really appreciate him defining these terms.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. And I thought the first part was so helpful, like for even for me to say, oh yeah, that's so true. A myth is something that even if I'm just having a conversation with You, I can tell you, and you'll be listening to it, and it won't matter that it's not my writing style that matters.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, that's right. And that's why myths are not terribly literary written. Right. They're very short, and you can really approach them on almost any kind of incarnation and still get the power of the myth, because the power of the myth exists beyond the storytelling. You know, no one's ever gonna say, oh, well, you know, I'd like this myth. But it's not told very poetically. He said it doesn't. If Virgil told it poetically or didn't tell it poetically, that's not the point. That's irrelevant. That the power of the myth is in something else. And I really appreciated that. And one of the points he makes again, and we talked about this last week, is on the surface, it looks like the literary person and the unliterary person are doing the same thing. But again, there's a different disposition of the mind and the heart, and that's what he's getting out here. So, yes, he has a lot to say about myths, and he's using it in a very specific way. Points out that myth, in terms of what that means in literature is actually not so much what he's talking about because he says that not all old stories are myths and then some new stories are myths. And he gives the example of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Tolkien's world as being very mythic in itself.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. He throws a lot Tolkien's way in this.

[Angelina Stanford]

And Tolkien is very deliberately writing a myth. There's no question about that. The Merillion is his mythological background.

[Cindy Rollins]

He's absorbed in the myth.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So he talks about what he means here. And so one of the things I love here is that while he set forth these terms of the unliterary and the literary, and then the last section added the term anti literary, which was the, you know, the literature person who reads in a way to kill it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

In this section, he gives us a fourth term, which I really is excited about. This is my favorite, and that's the extra literary. So those things that have myths that have this weight in its own, that's really separate from whether or not it's told in a good style or, you know, nice description or good pacing of the dialogue, that the myth itself, the kernel, even the summary. So he gives the example of different kinds of stories you can summarize and says, you know, it'd be pointless to summarize a Charles Dickens novel.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because that just ruins it. Just read the novel. But a myth can be summarized and still be as powerful as if it was told in this full scale beautiful way.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, that is why, like, like, if you take the Fairy Queen, I hate to like take a book and summarize it before I read it or find out the plot before I read it. I feel like that is absolutely a horrible way to read a book. But when I'm reading the Fairy Queen, I have to go. I want to read a synopsis first so that I can fully engage with the language of the book and the story. And it doesn't matter that I read the synopsis of the myth because I want to relax and be put into it totally.

[Angelina Stanford]

And all of those stories. So Spencer, Homer, Virgil, Milton, Dante, all of them give you a summary before.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, at the beginning. Exactly. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

But I always tell my students. Because suspense is not the virtue here.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, but you don't want to read David Copperfield start to finish and know the finish.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, exactly. That's not a myth. That's an entirely different story. And now you've gutted it. Right, right.

[Cindy Rollins]

You've gutted the story. Right. So that's a good distinction. That helps me. Right, yes. Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So we get a lot of questions about, you know, what books are appropriate to read adaptations of and which ones are not. And so maybe this introducing here is books of a mythic quality. You can read an adaptation. So the children's Homer, for example, or version of the Fairy Queen or something like that. Those do find you're not taking anything away from giving them the nugget of the myth. And there's still going to be so many worlds to explore when you're ready to read the whole thing. That's not true of books that don't have a mythic quality. Like, I mean, my go to example is always, don't read an adaptation of the Count of My Monte Cristo. You've ruined it. You've ruined it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

The ending that you know, this suspenseful twist at the end, that is the whole story hinges on that. If you know that, you've ruined it now.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because that's.

[Cindy Rollins]

So many novels are like that. We don't even, even the Wind and the Willows, which we just said is mythic, would not be well played by reading it ahead of time and then reading it. I mean, the words themselves are also very beautiful.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I think also another principle about adaptations is whether or not the author expected this was the reader's first entry into this world or not. And Homer did not expect that this was anybody's first entry into the world of Achilles and Agamemnon and Odysseus. Right. They knew these people. And so nothing is lost but the wind and the willows that Kenneth Graham does expect. This is your first entry into those woods, the first time you've met.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

And you don't want to, you know.

[Cindy Rollins]

Just like Lucy through the Wardrobe oral tradition. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

So you don't want to destroy the wonder of that first experience with that adaptation. So the second thing he talks about with this idea that it's extra literary is that the pleasure of myth is that it becomes a permanent object of content contemplation. Oh, that speaks so deeply to me. Right. So the, in the myth is a. Becomes a permanent object of contemplation and which is going to be very different than that plot driven story, which is not a permanent thing of contemplation.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

It might have some mythic qualities that you can permanently contemplate, but, but that, you know that that's. You're going after the event, as you would say, which I absolutely love that. So he says the value of myth is not a specifically literary value, nor the appreciation of myth, a specifically literary experience. So in other words, you don't approach a myth asking literary questions of it like what's the point of view and what's the style and what's the description and you know, the kinds of things you might ask about another work of literature. You don't ask of a myth because they're. That's not the point of the myth. The same thing, like if somebody's like, well, these fairy tale characters are just, you know, they're not very complexly drawn. And I'm just like, do you know what a fairy tale is? Yeah, of course they're not complexly drawn. This isn't a novel. So then he starts to talk about what does it mean then to read a myth as a literary person versus an unliterary person. Because he basically says, you can't read a myth in this literary way that I'm talking about. You are reading it for the nugget to contemplate. So he says that the literary person is gonna read this myth and it's going to become a permanent object of contemplation that he will go over and over again as long as he lives. Right. He will be moved by the myth as long as he lives. But the unliterary person, when the momentary excitement is over. And the momentary curiosity peas will forget the event forever. So that's, that's one of the. Again, it's a disposition of the mind, so their, their eyes are going over it in the same way. But one person is gonna, is gonna be struck. And I think we've all had that moment, right, where you, you read something of a myth nature, and you're so struck by something deeply profound and you just think about it forever. And we also know the experience of the student who reads it, takes the quiz and it's done forever. That's it. They've moved on.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think that with Achilles, I think of the idea of remembrance and how desperately his only hope was in being remembered.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

That haunts me constantly. To think of what it was like to think that either I'm going to be forgotten or remembered.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. And then pair that with the Achilles we see in the Odyssey, which is why those two. I'm gonna get on my soapbox. But they have to be read together. They're part one and part two of the same story. Kills me. The Odyssey is read first because you are reading part two first.

[Cindy Rollins]

I hate that. I hate that.

[Angelina Stanford]

I hate it too. Like, they do it because the Odyssey is easier to read. But you are reading stories.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

You're reading the sec. It's part two. It's part two of the same book. I spent a lot of time in my ancients class showing that all the questions Homer raises in the Iliad, he does not answer them until the Odyssey. If you don't read them together, you're not getting the whole story. So there I'm getting on my soapbox for that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, well, I'm there with you and I don't know anything. That's just so we don't get the.

[Angelina Stanford]

Full answer to the question about Achilles, glory and being remembered until we meet him in Hades in the Odyssey and talk about haunting moments. When he says, I was wrong, I was wrong. I would rather be alive and be the lowliest person than be the king in Hades and have all the glory of the dead boy. And so we'll talk about haunting is like wondering, am I gonna ever have that moment where I'm dead and it's too late? And I think, okay, I was wrong. I put all my eggs in the wrong basket.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, that's haunting. Very haunting.

[Angelina Stanford]

Very haunting. So his point is the literary reader encounters these things and like you said, I love that. Haunt haunts them forever. Forever. And the, the non literary person is going to have the event and move on. And it won't have struck any. Any deeper than that. And I love this. Again, he says it's not literary versus unliterary as much as it's extra literary and unliterary. And I think means by extra literary is that the literary reader is adding a new component, then applying it to our lives, contemplating, thinking about it way beyond the story. I love this.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

He gets out of myths what myths have to give. But the unliterary do not get out of reading 1/10 or 1/50 of what reading has to give. Oh, that's so good. That's so good. And. And I've seen discussions on the Literary Life podcast discussion group of people talking about how deeply they connected with myths or that their children connect with myths. I was like that. I discovered a book in my school's library when I was in the seventh grade. There was a set of Greek and Roman mythology, Norse mythology, and Oriental mythology. And I just gobbled those up and just. I still don't know that I could articulate what happened when I read those books, except that I fell in love and I have never forgotten them. And that would. Lewis would say, that's the extra literary experience. I didn't read them in the way that I read a novel. Not at all. Not at all. In fact, sometimes I hear people saying things like, what's the best version? And what they're really asking is, what's the best literary version? And honestly, it doesn't matter. They're not written in that way.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

In that sense, they have. If I can tiptoe around this without sounding blasphemous, they have that in common with, say, Genesis. Right. The creation story in Genesis is not written in this highly literary style with all this character development and suspense. You know, it is presented to us in those same sort of mythic terms where it's a nugget of a story and we're supposed to contemplate it forever.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes. Where it is supposed to affect us in a way that a myth would.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And then you're not supposed to just encounter the event and then move on. So you don't read Genesis and like, oh, well, you know, Adam and Eve fell. Okay, now. And I'm. And I'm moving on. Right. That's something we can never move on from. Not on this side.

[Cindy Rollins]

There's a pathos there and the human emotion of it all. I mean, that's how it is in the Iliad. To me, it captures it because it's less story there's more pathos to me in the Iliad. Genesis is like that too. That the absolute.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's so good. And I think Lewis would agree. I think that's what Lewis is saying here, that some of these stories, the nugget carries it in a way that these overblown renditions couldn't because it's a different type of story. Now, don't conclude that, you know, he's against that kind of storytelling, but it's all about honoring the nature of the story.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, mythic stories.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. Then he ends this section and also. Okay, this was my favorite part of this chapter, and I bet yours too, where he says that that mythic quality means that you can't assume that you know what is happening when someone else reads a book, because somebody might read a book and for them it's just, you know, a thriller. It was just. It was just a fun beach read and nothing more. And then somebody else, though, has launched on to the mythic quality and it becomes this life changing thing that deeply. I relate to that so deeply. That's one of my favorite sections of the book because I'm the reader who can find the myth in anything. As much as I hated the Twilight books, I saw the myth in it. I did see the archetypes. I saw what she was doing and I was interested in it that way. Not that I'm saying Twilight's great literature, but one of the points that Lewis makes, and he makes it again later in the book, is that because the experience is happening inside the reader and not objectively in the book, you can't just say, oh, you like that book, and automatically desist. That person is not knowing how to read because they might be getting something out of it that you're not.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So he talks about.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I have that writer Haggard. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Not put in the great books category. Right. King Solomon's Mines and that kind of stuff. Isn't that who wrote King Solomon's Mind?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. And the whole she who Must Be Obeyed and the. Yeah, she. He wrote a book called she? Yes, that's what he wrote. Yeah. A lot of adventures, Indiana Jones type adventures.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's what I thought. Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

He is the archetype, I guess, for Indiana Jones.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

So his hero.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. So Lewis says, you know, somebody like that, somebody might read that and just get nothing but the thriller, the page turner. Right. And then put it down and move on. But he said, but a literary myth loving boy is going to connect to the mythic elements and have a totally different experience with that book. And I think that's completely true. I see that in my classes all the time. As I teach them how to. How to read mythically and archetypically and metaphorically, they start making those mythic connections. And I get so many exciting emails from parents saying, you know, their child watched X, whatever it is. Right. A play, Broadway musical. I've gotten emails about that. I've gotten, you know, movies, whatever. And they are suddenly seeing the mythic components of these stories, and then everything is opening up to them in this new way. And that's why Louis has his extra literary. Maybe the thing itself really isn't that great, but the reader has a certain disposition and mindset that they're getting all this great stuff out of it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. Yeah. I was looking at him. His comparison to Buchan and Haggard, and they both are. Both of those authors are things my boys really liked. John Buchan had 39 steps, tons of other books. Haggard also had tons of books, and they're all. Buchan is the better writer by far. But Haggard also captures something else in this mythic quality.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And again, Lewis's point is that it's not about the books as much as it's about the reader and the experience that the reader is having. And that has to do with a certain disposition.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, all right, we got that.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I love. That's important, because I think that we're all. Well, it comes down to when we all are desperately looking for the perfect reading list.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right, right. Yes. It is true. We have. It's true that it's hard to. We have so much available to us. It's overwhelming to know where we want to come down. But I guess we have to give ourselves. Maybe that's why reading widely is so important. So we don't mistake some of this stuff. We don't think, oh, this is a good book and only going to read books like this, or, this is a good book. I'm only going to read books like this.

[Angelina Stanford]

Mm. And, you know, and again, to Lewis's point, the unliterary reader can read the great books of Western civilization in a way where they get nothing out of it. It's just a box to check, and they might as well have just read an encyclopedia entry.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

So something. Something else is going on, and I just. I don't think we can stress that enough. And Lewis stresses it many, many times. It's really. It's not about crafting the perfect reading list. It's about learning how to read and be becoming a Better reader. That's what it's about. That's part of the reason. If I can get on another soapbox. And I think we're in agreement here. It's part of the reason why I'm so adamantly opposed to many of the middle school reading lists in classical school. They are just jumping these kids headfirst into works that are too difficult for them, and they're doing it because they have this reading list that they want to check off. And I have taken the exact opposite approach with my middle school classes, where it's not about the books we read, it's about learning how to read, that I am teaching them how to be readers, learning how to have the proper disposition. And we use, admittedly easier books. We do myths, we do fairy tales, we go through Narnia. And that's all very, very deliberate because I'm trying to teach them how to have that experience. And they.

[Cindy Rollins]

And you're creating real readers, not people who check things out.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think that I am, because I have to tell you, I've been doing this enough years now that when those middle school students go into my high school classes and jump into things like the Iliad or Paradise Lost, I am blown away. I have never before had students more prepared to encounter these books than the ones who have been through my middle school. Again, where the emphasis has not been on, you know, a sixth grader having to read the Aeneid. It's about a sixth grade learning how to read, and they get several years of learning how to read, and then they jump into those books, and I'm just blown away with what I'm seeing. And I think that all speaks to Lewis's point. It's about cultivating the mental disposition of how to be a reader. It's not about what books you read.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, absolutely. I agree with that, too. And I remember once hearing that there was a catalog and it had a school that went with it, and it was suggesting these really hard books for seventh grade. But someone pointed out that went to the actual school. So they aren't able to use these books in their school. They're just promoting them for other people to use.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, right. And that's why I think it's really important to stress this, because I know so many of the people listening to this podcast are trying to craft reading lists and are comparing themselves to schools websites, which may or may not actually be an accurate reflection of what's really going on, as you say. And, you know, I think we. I just want to give everybody permission not just permission, but to say this is the right thing to do is to hold off on those books. Because again, it's not about what books you read. It's about learning how to read and even having this idea of, well, you know, my kids about to graduate and there's some books I got to make sure they get. No, those are books for a lifetime.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And this is why you can give yourself permission to cover fewer books if you cover. I get this question all the time from people like, I don't have time to pre read all these books. I don't have time to research all these books and teach to my kids. And that's true. I know that. I know that people don't. I barely have time. And I do this professionally. So I get that. My answer is always this. If you only have time to do one book, then just do one book. Read it out loud as a family. Go slow, stop, look things up together. I said, when you get to the end of that, you will have done more by doing less, because you would have. You will have taught. This is how you read a book. This is how you go through it. This is the questions you ask is how you stop and you look things up and you learn more. So far. Better to do what you can well than to feel like there's some magic number of books. There isn't. And that's Lewis's whole point. It's never going to be about, well, we read these hundred books in high school, therefore my child is educated. Nope.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And there becomes a kind of snobbery where we. Oh, I read that. I've read that. I mean, I feel kind of. I read more than most people, so I feel like I probably sound like that sometimes, that I'm like, But. But I also have this, like, desperation about it, too. Like, oh, my goodness, you know, And I realize now I'm never going to read all the great books. And by great books, I mean in quotation marks. I'm not going to get to them all. I mean, I don't know if there's a thousand or a hundred or however many they are, but I'm going to miss a few of those.

[Angelina Stanford]

I feel the same way, and especially because I think you're doing the same thing. I keep wanting to reread things now that I'm a better reader.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah, go back. What? Oh, yeah, I want to read that now as this person I know when I read, I reread Fantasties by George MacDonald, and I was a different person than when the first time I read it. And that mattered in that book because. Not because of who I was, but who I related to in the story.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yes, we should do that on the podcast because that's a book that I was not in. I was not in a good place the first time I read that. I would like to read that again. But I've read Pride and prejudice, I think 12 times and the first time when I was 17. And I just think it's funny that I started off relating to the young girls and now I'm Mrs. Bennet, you know.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh yes, that's a terrible moment when you realize I am Mrs.

[Angelina Stanford]

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 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 Page, 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 language 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 song 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 Lewis finishes this chapter of Myth. So then in chapter six, Lewis is going to define his terms again, and he's going to define fantasy. And one of the things he does in here is distinguish between literary fantasy and psychological fantasy, which I really appreciate it because don't you find that people conflate those two terms?

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I didn't know that until I read this, but once I was reading it, I thought, yeah, that's what happens.

[Angelina Stanford]

People say all the time, oh, that's not healthy to have a fantasy. Right?

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, exactly, yes. And he goes. He talks about that, and you are really uncomfortable when he's talking about people who live this fantastical life. Their head. That's not like they're writing a good story or anything.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And even within psychological fantasy, he makes some distinctions between what he thinks is potentially good that could lead to storytelling. Because all stories.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because every storytelling starts as an imagined reality.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right, right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And then the stuff that he thinks is damaging. So this is gonna be good to get into this. I know that sometimes people struggle not just with fantasy and fairy tales and that kind of thing, but with any fiction thinking, you know, this is escapist, this is unhealthy, that we're supposed to be preparing children to face the real world.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And fantasy is the opposite of that. So I think he. He makes some pretty good distinctions here with that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And there's a lot that goes on with fantasy. I often wonder, like, when there's a string of utopian novels that come out, which in turn become movies. You know, you think, is this our culture working out, like, what's gonna happen to us? You know, are we, are we trying to say, well, what if this happened? Or what if this happened?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, absolutely. And that's his whole point, that fantasy is a what if kind of scenario. And I think anytime a story, be it, you know, a printed book or a movie, is dealing with the other world, okay? So whether it's sci fi or Narnia or Middle Earth or whatever it is, if it's a. If it's bringing you to the quote, unquote, other world, then it's doing that to examine our world always. It gives you that bit of distance that you can then make comments on your own.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

It gives you new eyes to see your own world by kind of removing you from it from a little bit. That's, that's the idea behind the other world.

[Cindy Rollins]

And in our politically correct age. I heard, I have heard people make the argument that fantasy is the genre left where people can explore themes that they're not allowed to explore.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that is such a good point. Such a good point. I mean, one of the things Lewis talks about all over the place in this book is that a good story helps you transcend yourself and that a bad reading is reading where you only encounter yourself and you never get past yourself. And I think we are struggling with that so much as a culture. I mean, every time we're hearing about a call for a book being banned, the reasoning is always that I didn't see myself in this book whatever. Myself has not been properly represented in book X and therefore book X must go. What is disturbing to me there is the constant demand that we see ourselves reflected and no desire to transcend by experiencing the other in any way.

[Cindy Rollins]

So we are. Yes, all right. So the other then becomes the most important thing here because it's helps, it is a mirror, but it's not, it's not supposed to. We're not going to it to say the value of this book is do I see myself here?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yes. And that. So that's when you end up with really almost like a spreadsheet of, you know, I've got to see this many disabilities, I've got to see this many races, I've got to see, you know, this many genders, you know, these many ages, these many social classes, just on and on and on the demand to see a particular experience reflected back. And that isn't to say that we don't want to hear all kinds of diverse stories. We do, and we need them because we need to experience the other. But what we can't is demand that the stories reflect back the world that we have already decided we want to see?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. Yeah. I always talk about generalization. That's where we communicate on generalizations. Yes. Then we have to make distinction. So we have to kind of start in a general place and then go to a distinctive place. But if we demand of our stories that they're so distinct down to the nth degree, then they're not going to be able to communicate at all to anybody, but just a few people that happen to fall into that story or can find it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Mm. You know, and I've always had a love for kind of the other and the foreign other. You know, I grew up. I said this so many times. I've grew up with Persian fairy tales, you know.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

And it's very exotic and different and couldn't have been more different from my own life in a small Southern town. And I loved that. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason why I have never really fallen in love with American literature is it's just too similar. It's just too, you know, Southern literature. It's just too. What I see down the street.

[Cindy Rollins]

Do you recognize it too much? Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. And it's not a criticism of it. It's just I'm drawn to the other in the same way. From what I understand, so many British people are so drawn to American Southern literature because it's so different. Right. So I think it's good to be drawn to the other and to have experiences which pull ourselves out of our small little worlds. That's the whole point.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. So he's not against this. He says this activity called castle building. He said there's normal castle building, which is what gives us normal stories, and then there's morbid castle building.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And I like these distinctions.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, they were really good because he says the guy who dreams about women like he's Don Juan will make no effort whatsoever to be agreeable to a real woman when he meets her. And that's.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

I thought that was a pretty good way of looking at that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. And that's the kind of. That the morbid castle building is where we as parents are worried. Read.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's the dark imagination. So Lewis talked about how he talks about this. I think it's surprised by Joy how encountering George MacDonald sort of redeemed his imagination, that he felt that he was drawn to the darker things of the imagination, but that he had it redeemed through or baptized through reading the stuff he read. And so we all know there's the tendency toward morbid castle building. And one of the things Lewis points out is that tendency doesn't go away necessarily when you're reading anything, even if you're reading it realistically. Realistic. He's going to define that in the next chapter. But, you know, if you're just determined on making yourself the hero of the story, yeah, you can do that in the Bible. You can. You can. You can put yourself morbidly as the focus of any story. So.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, my son says this all the time, and I think it's a good point. He said, don't make yourself the protagonist of your own story. Let, you know, let's let God be the protagonist. Then we can find happiness in the story. As long as we're making ourselves the hero, where happiness is gonna be hard, you know, to come by. Joy. Joy will escape us.

[Angelina Stanford]

Mm.

[Cindy Rollins]

He didn't get that from himself. He listens to a lot of people. I probably got it from Tim Keller or somebody like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, and I think one of the points that Lewis is making here about morbid castle building is, again, this is not going to be an activity where you transcend yourself, right? So you're just. You're just finding your own idealized version of yourself. And by idealized, I don't necessarily mean virtuous, because really, to virtue, you would be pulled out of yourself. But, you know, to be the wealthy, powerful person that everybody falls at your feet or whatever your particular fantasy is to be focused on that, he says, not only has that no connection between those imaginings and actually going out and accomplishing anything, that it actually works in reverse, that you're spending all your time so disconnected from reality, imagining yourself as, you know, the world's most famous talented person, that you're less likely to go out and do anything. And he makes the distinction then, between that kind of fantasy, which actually prohibits any kind of real growth, with other kinds of fantasy, where you actually do see the makers of this kind of fantasy as actors, they commit actions, they do things. They don't just imagine, they actually go out and do things. So that would be a healthy. I mean, because, you know, it is true that you have to imagine a life different than your own to be able to make a goal for it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right There is the imagination is. I mean, ideas have consequences, and that's how God has made it. So we think, therefore, we. Things come out of our head and ideas come out and they give birth to actually actions. Nobody has an action until they've had an idea, so. And I like this where he brings out that, you know, if you have a reverie about, you know, for me, visiting Ambleside, I'm going to Ambleside. So I'm going to think about it. I'm going to try, because my brain has to work out all these logistics. How am I going to train and how am I going to get to here and how I'm going. And it is a pleasant reverie in its own way. But he talks about Switzerland and. But at the same time, it would be morbid if, you know, now you know, now you know, all of England is applauding me.

[Angelina Stanford]

Charlotte Mesa has risen from the grave to tell you, well done, good and faithful.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes. So anyway. Yes, yes. And I. We won't go there.

[Angelina Stanford]

I love it, though, because I think that, again, he makes the distinction that it really comes down to a certain disposition because, you know, the little boy who dreams about being a great baseball player and never does anything more but indulge fantasies of, you know, home runs and accolades, but actually doesn't go out and practice, that's the bad kind, Right? That's a certain disposition of the mind. But a little boy who dreams about being a really great baseball player and then that motivates him to go out and work hard. That's a totally different experience. But it can look on the surface like the same thing.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. And I think that in terms of little girls, that used to worry me, like, how are my boys were really boys? How were girls who didn't know that, who dreamed of the prince, gonna understand what a real boy was really like? You know, it was worrisome because, you know that real boys weren't always princely. They, you know, they. They tried to be sometimes, but, you know, they. They were real boys, not. Not fantasy boys.

[Angelina Stanford]

Hmm. What's the answer to that?

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I think part of the answer is that the girls have to come. I think part of the answer is not sheltering them and keeping them away from real boys. I think it's allowing them to actually be around real boys and interact with them and, heaven forbid, date them, because then they begin to see that, oh, this is what a real boy is like. Instead of, I, you know, I get married straight out of the fairy tale, and now I'm confronted with a man who doesn't have a romantic view of life that I've been living under. I think it can be difficult. I don't know, Angelina. You're closer to that than I am. You just got married.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I found my prince. So I don't know.

[Cindy Rollins]

I know he has a lot to live up to. Is he living up to it?

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, my gosh, he really is. He's amazing. He is absolutely living up to it. You know, I guess I see all kinds of connections here. Like the difference between giving your daughter chores and letting her play house.

[Cindy Rollins]

You know, like giving them real tools and not fake tools, that sort of thing.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I mean, I think that there's a lot of value in playing house and playing with dolls and there's value in real chores. I think we need both of those. I think we'd have to be careful not to say, oh, she's just sitting around pretending to wash dishes. Make her really wash dishes. I mean, I had no interest in doing actual chores in my home, but I love to play house. I loved, I loved to create a domestic world in my mind. It was very real to me. And I think that falls under Lewis's, you know, healthy castle building that I was thinking a lot as a child about what was a good home, like, what was a happy life, like, what? You know.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, this brings up the question also. And I think a lot of parents get concerned and you hear these warnings. So is it, it's one thing to read fantasy. Like you go read Tolkien or you read Lewis, the space trilogy, and you. And you're really getting into fantasy and you go out there to look for more and there's, there's a lot of garbage out.

[Angelina Stanford]

Bad stuff. Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

So then you have this problem. My child has developed a taste for this bad stuff. And I don't know, you know, there's not a huge amount of really good stuff in that genre. There are some good things and some very good things in that genre.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I've heard such funny quotes about Tolkien is to blame for all the bad fantasy. Right. He wrote such a good one. Everyone wants to imitate it, but it's all awful.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah. And yes, I don't want to go there. I always complaining about being sucked into reading some book and then hating it. But yeah, so that's so true. As a matter of fact, it was funny because yesterday we were watching a television show and that the couple was playing Dungeons and Dragons. And I said to my husband, I said, remember how everybody told us how bad that was? I said, do you think it really was bad or do you think it was just one of those Christian things that people freaked out about? And he said, I don't know. He said, role playing. It's a role play game. And he said that can make it very problematic. And I thought that's true. There is ultimate. And I think that's what this chapter is actually talking about, that the idea of role playing in our minds can, Can. Can lead us astray.

[Angelina Stanford]

It can because. And I think that's because storytelling is so powerful. And I think Lewis's point is, again, it goes back to that disposition of the mind. Right. He says if all this imagining is keeping you from actually living life, then it's a problem.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

But if it's something that has motivated you or. Because his point is that no novel, whatever, was written without the author spending a lot of time in his imagination making a world. Right, right, right. In fact, Mr. Banks and I were just talking about that this morning because we were talking about how our students like to bring up video games in class. And one of the things that is really interesting to me when my students talk about it is that the trend is that video games are now narratives. They are intricate stories. And you enter the story when you play this video game. Like one of them is kind of a. Almost like a film noir hardboiled detective. I can't think of the name, but. Right. It's like LA Confidential. And you go, and you're the guy and there's like the voiceover and you're interviewing. You know, you're getting the clues and interviewing people and involved in shootouts and chases and. And all this kind of stuff. And it strikes me again to the power of story and that people want to be part of a story. And I think when you are a good reader, you do enter that story. And my just off the cuff theory here, based on nothing, is that what's happening is, as we are not able as a generation to be such good readers, we still have that longing. And these narrative video games are sort of providing that. That we're literally entering the story. We are character.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

That does happen in a book, but it takes a little more effort. I just think that's fascinating. So what Lewis says is that. Is it an egoistic imagining or is it a disinterested one? So if it's. If it's an. If you're James Bond in all of your fantasies, then that's. That's the egoistic one. That's not gonna result in you actually going into the world and doing something that. That. That's pure. Just feeding your ego. And I'm the world's most daring, charming man. Everyone wants me. You know, the classic male fantasy or female version of that. But the Disinterested. And he gives himself as an example. When he and his brother were kids, they remember he talks about in Surprise by Joy, animal Land, that they would.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, the boxing is it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah. My kids were like that, too. And they had created this elaborate fantasy world of their imagination, which later became Norman. And he was not a hero of that. He was just an explorer in this.

[Cindy Rollins]

He was like a big face watching it, huh?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Yeah. And then that. That became Narnia. And so his point is that some of that is. It just depends if it's healthy or not. Depends on, again, that that disposition is this. Is this just, you know, really human beings can make anything bad. That's why we have to be so careful.

[Cindy Rollins]

Make a hard, fast rule for our listeners.

[Angelina Stanford]

I was just thinking that you can't make a hard and fast rule about almost anything because we can twist anything up. And I always think about that scene. I don't know if you've ever read the book A Clockwork Orange, but there's a scene there. It's a dystopian novel.

[Cindy Rollins]

I have not read that well.

[Angelina Stanford]

So the main character is a juvenile delinquent and he goes through various government programs to reform him. Okay. And so. And Anthony Burgess, the author, is showing how these different things, you know, can't actually reform a person. And one of the scenes that always sticks out in my mind is he's in prison and he's being forced to read the Bible. But he loves it because he identifies with all the villains. So he reads those stories and it fuels his villainous imagination. And I just think that's such a great scene to remind us that, you know, our minds and hearts can twist up anything.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. And I used to feel really worried with my kids that I was going to introduce them to something that they shouldn't be introduced to. And I wouldn't know what that was like. You know what I'm saying?

[Angelina Stanford]

You might accidentally corrupt them.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. Yeah, I worried about that. Which, you know, that's not a good way to live either because, you know, then you're always afraid of stuff. But I just. I think that my. I've seen that happen in people before where maybe you're going along, you don't know something exists. And then someone gives you an idea. Now suddenly you're struggling with something that you wouldn't have struggled with before. And that's the nature of humanity, I think. Fallen. And we. We corrupt things. And unfortunately, but fortunately we don't. That's not the end of the story.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And I think that is totally fitting what Lewis is saying here. Right. So it's not about having the perfect environment for your children so that they grow up to be virtuous. Right. It's not about the perfect reading list which will make us be readers. It's all about what's going on in our hearts and minds. And that takes effort. And he. And one of the things I love about this book is how much we see that there's just a mix of all of that and all of us at any given moment.

[Cindy Rollins]

Moment, yes. We see ourselves in the wrong places in this book. Oh, ouch. You know I did that.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. Like I would like to believe that my imagination is mostly of the kind Lewis is talking about as, as being, you know, a healthy, disinterested castle building. But I'm sure that I have slid into the other. Never willing to be James Bond. But I'm sure I've had my version of that. But these categories he's giving us are really helpful to figure out, you know, where. So then he, okay, so if that's psychological fantasy, this castle building, then how does that relate to reading? He says, and he says again that you can take that egoistic castle building mentality and you can bring that into reading so that you're only wanting to read success stories or certain love stories or certain stories of high life. And he says these are the favorite reading of readers in the lowest class. Lowest, because reading takes them least out of themselves. I love that. Confirms them in an indulgence which they already use too much and turns them away from most of what is most worthy having both in books and life. I love that. So the bad kind of castle building turns into a bad kind of reading because all you want is your fantasy affirmed. Right? You want to relate to the guy who's deceased self made man or who all the women are falling for. I keep using that example because the James Bond. Yeah, well, that's the easiest thing.

[Cindy Rollins]

It is, it is. And that's certainly a character everybody understands.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And so, and Lewis's point is then we read that because we really don't want an honest look at ourselves. We just want to indulge in something that we really should not be indulging.

[Cindy Rollins]

And yeah, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And then so that again becomes really kind of an anti literary thing because it just, it doesn't take you out of yourself. Now let's see. Then he goes on to say, he also says that, well, he's gonna get more to fantasy in the next chapter. But yeah, he, that, you know, this kind of reader really doesn't want genuine fantasy in terms of an other world. He really just wants his own world, the one in his imagination.

[Cindy Rollins]

It's not truly fantasy at all. It's just a re. Clothing his own story.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And I love this line. He wishes to be deceived, that is the reader, at least momentarily. And nothing can deceive him unless it bears a plausible resemblance to reality. So, you know, we can't have.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And then the next chapter, he really delves into this idea that if it's real or what, what we can believe, what's believable and what isn't believable and how. How the uncritical reader, what is he called unliterary reader, is demanding that things make sense and just.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I love this chapter because this is something we encounter all the time in conversations about literature, is that if you're going to read something, it should be quote, unquote real. And one of the things that Lewis points out here is that there's really no such thing as realism. That is, this is one of my hills to die on. Realism is a narrative construct. It is not real. Literary realism is not real. And I always point out to myself the way that you actually talk. People don't talk like that in a novel. You know why? Because no one read that. It's full of and half finished sentences that go nowhere and we circle back around and we don't make any sense. And most of what happened in our lives is long periods of nothingness. All of that out when we're telling a story. Realism is just a fiction. It's a narrative construct. It's not any more true to life than fantasy is. And so again, Lewis makes very careful distinctions here which are super helpful for us. One is realism of presentation, I.e. the details are realistic, people are acting in a manner that's consistent with life. And the other is realistic content. And so he says those are two different things. In fact, I think this is Lewis in an essay somewhere talked about how if a writer is writing a fantasy that is creating, crafting an other world, that the demands on realism of presentation are actually more intense so that the more fantastical the setting, the more realistic everyone has to act. So if you're, if you're sci fi and it's on Marvel, the people better behave like real people that you know or you're not gonna buy that this is Mars.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So that's a really fine distinction. What do we mean by realism? Because a fantasy can actually Be very realistic in terms of the way people respond to threats, joy, whatever. So he points out that really, when we say realism, we're talking about realism of content. And then he talks about why that's actually not true. The first thing he says, I talk about this all the time in my class, is that realism of content is a new idea and the history of mankind and storytelling has had no use for that. And there's a reason for that. I tell my students, you don't like realism of content. That if.

[Cindy Rollins]

If.

[Angelina Stanford]

So if I were to say to you, what did you do today? You're probably going to say, nothing.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I probably would.

[Angelina Stanford]

Which meant not that nothing happened, but that you had a normal regular day. None of which makes a story. So you say nothing. When we tell a story, it's always about, well, let me tell you the weird thing that happened today, or you will never believe what just happened to me. Right. Storytelling is about the weird thing. And so historically, especially medieval storytelling, storytelling was about the weird thing that happened, in fact, to a medieval audience telling, as he says, a realistic Victorian novel, they would say, why is this a story? This is a story in which nothing happened. It's just ordinary life.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. So King Arthur's story. Well, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, he. A guy walks up and he's holding his head, so.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yep. And so he says, this is just the dominant taste at present, but there's nothing to suggest it's going to continue to be the dominant taste. It has not been historically the dominant taste. And I actually think our storytelling is moving beyond that. I think that we tiring of that. And that's why we're seeing so much science fiction and superhero movies and, you know, the. The opposite of realism, of content, because I think we've kind of exhausted that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I think we have. I think it's gotten to be where we don't know what we're doing with it. Are we trying to expose people? Well, we've already exposed everyone and nothing. Nobody has anything left to hide. So what are we going to say now?

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. So for him, it's the question is not could this happen? But if this did happen, what would it be like? That's the question for him. That's what are people behaving in a realistic way given the circumstances? You know, the Green Knight shows up and challenges Gowan, and Gawain spends the rest of the bug being afraid he's gonna die. That's pretty realistic. Even though nothing about the story is realistic. Of course.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Realistic response to be afraid that you're gonna die. And so I just, I really appreciate all of this. And he gives lots of examples of the difference between war and peace and the difference between, you know, something like Sir Gawain of the Green Knight in terms of storytelling. And then he deals with the age old argument against literature as being escapist. Oh, yes, we've all heard this. Right. And he actually references Tolkien's essay, essay on Fairy Stories, where Tolkien deals with this in depth. That's in a footnote where he says, you know, Professor Tolkien has handled this. You know, he's mic drop about this issue. Right. But it really comes down to the question of what is it that you're trying to escape. And so, you know, he talks about, well, and Tolkien talks about this too, you know, that if life is a prison, then escape means somebody let us out. How, how is that a bad thing? Now when people talk about literature as escapism, they say it in such a way as if you're having a momentary reprieve from the harsh reality of life and it's going to make you less able to cope with life. That's usually what they mean. Like you're not facing facts, you're not facing hard truth, you're trying to run from it. I think that has much more to do with the disposition of the mind than it does with, with the reading of fantasy. Because again, any kind of scenario which presents an other world is. It is an attempt to give you new eyes to see your own world.

[Cindy Rollins]

And it's closely overlaps the idea that. Which is more truthful history stories or the facts of history? And I mean, I debate this with my kids all the time. You know, is, is the story perhaps more true than the actual facts? Because the facts obs the truth behind the emotions and everything that was going on in history. And some people very adamantly believe that you can't learn history through stories. You have to only have the facts. And other people believe that you actually get more at the truth through stories. And it's not even a true truth. It's like if we hear the story of Achilles and think of it as a true historical fact, which I know it isn't, but I'm saying there are other stories about other historical figures that very much have that mythic feel.

[Angelina Stanford]

Mm.

[Cindy Rollins]

And we, and we learn a lot from that, even if we don't learn exactly what they really were doing at that moment.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, and again, we're getting caught up in a lot of modern categories about what is true. And one of the real troublesome categories we have is that we think fiction equals false and nonfiction equals true. That's not correct. Fiction simply is a work of the imagination. Nonfiction is not a work of the imagination. And this is nothing to do with true or false.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, and he's. This quote he has here is what made me think of it, where he says, admitted fantasy is precisely the kind of literature which never deceives at all.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

Children are not deceived by fairy tales. They are often and gravely deceived by school stories.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yes, yes, yes. And that goes to the next sub point about escapism. So when you believe that fiction is false, you say something along the lines of, we should be teaching our children true things, not false things. But we have to take a step back about what do we mean by true and false? I mean, by those definitions, many of the things Jesus said is false because he told fictional stories. I always tell my students, if you're reading the story of the prodigal son and you are obsessed with who is the historic prodigal son? Let's find him in history. What guy is this? You are missing the point. Jesus made him up. Made him up. It never happened. Does it make the story not true? No, it's true. Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think it's hard for some people to accept that fact, right?

[Angelina Stanford]

That. That the parable is a story of the deepest truth and that Jesus told it in a story as opposed to a sermon, because that truth could only have been told in that form. And so fiction is really imaginative truth. It's not false. It's imaginative truth. So Jesus made up a lot of things. There knows no servant that, you know, didn't forgive the dead. There was no guy that buried his talent in the ground. Jesus just made it all up to tell you a deep truth.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. Very good.

[Angelina Stanford]

So Lewis is bringing out this point that if you're worried about fantasy and stories being false and lies that deceive, he says, look, no one's deceived by a fairy tale. No one's deceived by science fiction. What people are deceived by is, as you were saying, history books with an agenda. Right. Realistic. Realistic fiction is much more likely to deceive you than a fantasy. Here's a great.

[Cindy Rollins]

And there's a whole genre of fiction now that is based on this unreliable narrator.

[Angelina Stanford]

Like.

[Cindy Rollins]

Like, it's almost acknowledging the fact that fiction can be a lie also because it brings in this, the unreliable narrator. And you're constantly. You never know who is.

[Angelina Stanford]

And A morally confused universe where you cannot determine right from wrong, good from evil, you don't know who to trust, all of that kind of stuff. And also there's this idea that a realistic novel usually does not portray the spiritual realm at all. So think about the great lie that is being told there, that what's real is what we can experience through the senses, that there is no supernatural realm and that all that is real is what we see. Well, that's a terrible lie. The terrible lie. Fantasy is telling you that there's more than meets the eye, that there is things beyond the veil that we can't understand, that life is mysterious and unknowable. That's what's true. Right, so here's, here's a quote from Lewis. The real danger lurks in sober faced novels where all appears to be very probable, but all it is in fact contrived to put across some social or ethical or religious or anti religious comment on life. Yeah, so he's talking about, yeah, these realistic novels that have these agendas. That's what you've really got to be on the watch for to be sure. He says no novel will deceive the best type of reader. So again, it has to do with a disposition of how, of how you read. So one book that's dangerous and deceives one type of reader would not deceive and be dangerous to another type of reader. He can enter while he reads into each author's point of view without either accepting or rejecting it, suspending when necessary, his disbelief and what is harder, his belief.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's so good, so good.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because again, if stories are trying to get us to transcend ourselves, we have to at least temporarily be able to set aside our preconceived notions. Otherwise we're not going to ever grow.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And that doesn't mean that, and he says this later, that doesn't mean you don't come to the end of the book and say, no, actually I think he's wrong. But you don't, you don't do that till you get to the end, you know, until you've heard the whole, you got to hear the whole argument before you know if it's wrong.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And then you can enter in the conversation about it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, but, but like he says earlier, listen, wait, attend. You have to, you have to wait.

[Cindy Rollins]

He makes the point that most of the great fantasies and fairy tales were not addressed to children at all, but to everyone. And this really comes across when you're reading Spenser because you see, these were not childish stories. But we basically don't read the Fairy Queen anymore because those stories are considered childish stories. But since they aren't really appropriate for really small children. I mean, I know my friend Katie, but she actually read the Fairy Queen to her three year old and he loved it. And I could see that happening. But it also was written for adults.

[Angelina Stanford]

It is, but it has that fairy tale kind of mythic quality that I always recommend. If somebody reads it to young kids, they read it strictly on the fairy tale level because it's got multiple levels and you don't need to get into all of the higher levels. I mean, it's a rip roaring tale just if you read it at the basic level. But right now, one of the points Lewis makes here too is that, you know, this deception, this can happen when you read history or science, no less than when you read fiction. That is one of the points I really want to drive home is if you're worried about fiction being deceiving or not real, you can be deceived by history books and science books. And just the study, the study of the history of ideas will show you that people have believed wrong things in nonfiction books and will continue to do so. So that's part of the process.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So that's not unique to fiction. So then he goes on to deal with, like you said, that not all of this stuff is for children, that this is a very modern idea, that these are works of children. And it's because really, it's fallen out of fashion for adults. He says that's why it has become something.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. And you could see that, you can see that when I read that, it seems like I'm doing a childish thing, but it's a very, very adult read.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yes, he talks about. Where's that line about. Oh, yes, yes. About how, you know, why are we condemning the good things of childhood? Like you have energy and vitality, imagination, wonder, a full head of hair. I like that one. You know, he said we all want to talk about, you know, the weaknesses of childishness, but none of us talk about the weaknesses of, of, you know, growing old. And there are some we like the loss of wonder and imagination. And so, you know, he says it's a matter of wisdom to say which parts of being young we need to reject and which ones we should try to still cultivate. Like, you know, being excited about things and having energy. No one, no one would say having energy is a bad thing. No, you just have less of it as you get older. And we all do what we can. Right. We're all coffee on the IV drip. Because we want.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, but. But we do we. When we want to say somebody's immature, we say they're infantile or childish. And he's saying that we should not. If a book is childish, that doesn't mean. It might mean. What we might really mean is it's childlike and not childish.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yeah. This is so good. The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose. Not to acquire a taste for the realistic is childish in the bad sense. To have lost the taste for marvels and adventures is no more a matter for congratulations than losing our teeth, our hair, our palette, and finally, our hopes, sans teeth. Why do we hear so much about the defects of immaturity and so little about those of senility? Yeah, that's so good. And so then. And then. So his final point about escapism is that you must ask the question, what are we escaping to? And I absolutely think that that is crucial. You know, I always say that fairy tales are truer than true and realer than real. Right. That it's not an escape, because I believe fairy tales are pointing us to the numinous, to the transcendent, to the reality behind, beyond what we can experience with the senses. And if you're a Christian, that's what's real. Right. All of this, this material universe is passing away. These are the temporal things. The eternal things are the real things. And so if literature helps us for a moment to have eyes, to see beyond the veil, to be reminded of those things which are eternal and transcendent and numinous, then we are escaping away from this false reality we're in. And for a moment, we're seeing the true reality. So for me, literature has never been escapism. For me, it has always been a reorientation to what is real and true. And it has helped me to be able to then to come back to my daily life with new eyes for what's important and what's true.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

I've also been.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's the best way to put it. Yes. It brings. It come. You come back to your life with new eyes.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. And you see that in the best stories, right? That's why the kids from Narnia come back to England, and they always come back. And they've learned something in that journey from being in that other world.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. Now, there is one more point hanging here in the air that I thought I'd throw out there because he says, and I'm imagining this is going to be very controversial.

[Angelina Stanford]

Here we go.

[Cindy Rollins]

He says, a taste for the comics is excusable only by the. By extreme youth because it involves an acquiescence in hideous draftsmanship and a scarcely human coarseness and a flatness of narration. Now, graphic novels are extremely popular at this point, and even people I know who are good readers, I've noticed, have indulged in graphic novels. I have not indulged in graphic novels, so I'm curious about that. I really kind of wish we could talk to Lewis about that, because I know I did. We've talked about this before. We both read comic books when we were growing up. But he seems to equate that with something very negative.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, I don't know enough about graphic novels to really have a comment. I mean, again, I think I know people who are good readers who are reading it and getting something good out of it, but I don't. I don't really know enough about it. And I don't know which comics Lewis is talking about. I mean, he's talking about Punchin Judy. What is he.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, he actually seems to be making more. Being more offended by the bad pictures than anything else. And I don't guess they're all bad pictures. But anyway, I just thought that was so interesting in light of the fact that we have so many graphic novels at this point in time, which are kind of like a bridge between maybe movies and.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, there's no question that the form is changing. Right. And it'll be interesting to see where it all. Where it all goes. I mean, for a very long start. You know, again, what we consider to be, quote unquote, the novel being the kind of realistic, chronologically told story with an omniscient narrator that. That did not get created until the late 19th century. And it was the standard for a long while. Now we've kind of moved beyond. That was like you were saying, the unreliable narrator instead of the omniscient narrator. Things moving back and forth in the narration, circular narratives, you know, I don't know where we're gonna end up, but the novel is gonna continue to grow and expand. And I also think that as we have become a less literate culture, I think that movies have become like the novels of past. And what I mean by that is that if you look, look, in the 19th, I had to actually do this as a graduate project. And what I'd. You know, what has come to us from the 19th century is Dickens and Eliot and Thackeray and Trollope and, like, really good writers. But there were also a lot of garbage. A lot of the kind of stuff that people would roll their eyes and say, oh, these novel readers are just, you know, women scribbling, women wasting their time. There was a reason for that criticism, and it was valid. There was a lot of garbage being produced. And so I think that part of what we're seeing in our culture as we move away from the novels, we're just seeing, you know, novels, just not, I'm sorry, movies. Just movie after movie after movie after movie. And every once in a while, there's a really great one, but most of it's just complete garbage. Right. Like, I can't get those two hours back. You know, I don't know where storytelling is going. I have some theories, but it's really interesting to see the development of it. So I don't know where the graphic novel fits in this. There's a. Gosh, I mean, you get me on all kind of rabbit trails here. There's a lot of similarities culturally between what's happening now, what happened at the fall of Rome, and the shift there, one of which was that they moved toward much more of a picture culture instead of a word culture. And as a result. So Thomas Cahill in How the Irish Saved Civilization, talks about this. That long gone was the days when Augustine could make, like, a rhetorical argument for Christianity or use logic or anything like that, but they were way, way, way beyond that. They were a picture culture. And so instead, the missionaries used, you know, stories. Stories and allegories and pictures, you know, word pictures with stories, things like that. So they were kind of post rhetoric, post logic. I think we're absolutely there as a culture. I don't think anyone's gonna come up with the perfect rhetorical argument that will get our culture to change. I think stories is how we're influencing. But the idea of pictures and the graphic novels and what's all happening with that, that's way over my pay grade. But it's interesting to observe.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, it is interesting. We'll have to keep our eye on that and see where it heads.

[Angelina Stanford]

And if any of our listeners want to give a defense of the graphic novel, I'm more than happy to hear. I wouldn't say I'm for it or against it. I'm just in the dark. I notice it as a thing, but I really don't know anything about it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I would like that, too. I would like to hear what people have to say about it, because I.

[Angelina Stanford]

Guess it's probably similar to video games in that you could be sort of quick to dismiss it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, it would be easy.

[Angelina Stanford]

I have to know why. I've had students make impassioned pleas for what they're getting out of video games. And it shames me. I mean, I can't make these sweeping statements of all video games are a waste of time. It might not be true. And if Lewis is right, then there may be a certain mindset of a certain child who enters into one of these, you know, story type video games where they're a character in the story, where maybe they're getting something out of it that I don't, I don't understand.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's what Lewis says right here. That you can't assume that you know what someone gets out of a book. He's gonna bring this up later again because he says he does think you can find out, but you can't assume it. That was something that was very convicting to me. So what that means is if somebody says they love a book you hate, that doesn't mean they loved it for the reasons you hated it. You don't. You have to follow up and say, what did you love about it? What was spoke to you? What did you connect with? And then you might realize they read an entirely different book than you did. But yeah, and one of the things we didn't bring up on the show that you and I talked about before the show show was Lewis was talking about how an unliterary way to read in the terms of only wanting to have yourself reflected back, is that you're only look. You read things that reflect specifically your experience and you don't look into anything beyond that. Right. So it kind of reminds me of kind of book club situations where somebody would say, well, what's your favorite character? And you say, well, my favorite character is Joan because she's a mom at home with kids and I'm a mom at home with kids. Right, like that. Lewis's point. That's not how you read a book.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, that's really fascinating to hear you say that because on the one thing we're saying, the person enters the story, but on the other hand, it's not about, oh, what's my favorite part? I like this part, I like that part. I like this person. I like that character. What would you say about that? Can you unravel that a little bit? I know we're actually really over time.

[Angelina Stanford]

So you throw some really hard question at me and tell me I have 30 seconds to answer.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, you have 30 seconds.

[Angelina Stanford]

Again, I think it comes down to a certain disposition. Are we only looking to have ourselves reflected or are we being stretched beyond it? I think the question of who's your favorite character is not only not important, but irrelevant and perhaps will keep you from being able to read the book.

[Cindy Rollins]

Because it says more about you than it does about the book.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's exactly.

[Cindy Rollins]

Who's telling you about their favorite character is really trying to tell you about themselves and not about the book.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. That's right. And that's. And that might not be the story that the author is telling you.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's the story of your life. That's not necessary. So I should be able to read David Copperfield even though none of those people have an experience like me.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And the fact, and that's part of the glory of it, is that I don't know what it's like to be a street urchin and an orphan and, you know, have all these problems. I don't know what it's like to be a knight or, you know, Russian princess that, you know, that we're trying to transcend ourselves, we're trying to have new eyes to see the world. So, I mean, I know it's a struggle because obviously we do identify to some people. And I made the comment earlier, I used to identify with Elizabeth and now I identify with Mrs. Bennet. But that's really. That's an aside. That's. I kind of poke fun of myself as I read and think, oh, well, I never thought I'd have that in common with her. But that's not my. I love the book. That's not why we keep reading the book. You know, she has something really grand to say.

[Cindy Rollins]

I often wondered, would it be fun to write a home, a novel, a murder mystery in which a homeschooling mom is like the Miss Marple of the novel? And to me, it's. I'm like, no, that'd be so boring.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, right. So, I mean, I. And Lewis is going to get into this more and then in the next section. But yeah, it's. It's not about seeing yourself back in it. You know, I've been in a situation where, you know, it's kind of a book club situation where I was reading a book with some people and, you know, all they could talk about was, well, you know, I'm in the same stage of life as this woman or, you know, or I'm trying to get a promotion at work, too. So I really related to this that's just, you know, if that was the point of the book, then, you know, 5% of the population could read the book. And anybody else who couldn't relate, well, this is. Sorry, this book's not for you. You're not trying to get a promotion at work. You can't relate. There has to be something deeper and greater and more profoundly human going on than just.

[Cindy Rollins]

And if there's not, then maybe it's just a terrible book.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's true. Right. So if I don't have any children, I should be able to read a book about a mother and get something out of it. Right. I don't have to be walking literally the same life as the character to be able to get out of it.

[Cindy Rollins]

I find books about people that have absolutely nothing in common with me but that to be highly fascinating, like memoirs and stuff, of people that live totally different lives, but not just because they're different, but actually because of how similar they end up being and, you know, in a totally different set of circumstances. So there's just all kinds of things.

[Angelina Stanford]

Agreed, agreed. I like the way you said they end up being similar even though they're in a different set of circumstances. I think that's what I'm trying to say when I'm saying that they're presenting something human there. Like, I. I deeply loved Anna Karenina, although I have nothing in common with any of the circumstances of the characters, but there was something about the way Tolstoy portrayed a woman's pain. A lot of women are in pain in the book that deeply. I thought, this is a man who can name the pain that women feel in all these different circumstances, because, you know, he's got. Dolly's in pain, Anna's in pain. Everybody's in pain for these different reasons. And he portrayed it, you know, in a way that felt true and realist realism of presentation, to use Lewis's term. And I could deeply connect with that human experience, even though I'm, you know, I'm not a Russian woman with a guy on the side. That's not. That's not my story. That was never my story.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So. Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

I just had a similar experience, but I was much more like the hair. The hair of the story. I just, you know, everybody knows I was reading Kristin Laverne's Daughter this summer, but I have eight sons. She has eight sons in the book. And it really did rip me up in that. But. But also, other characters in the story ripped me up, too. It was just the depth of humanity, not just the fact that, oh, I'm very similar to Kristen. Of course, I didn't live in the 13th century, but, you know, we both had this thing where, you know, her. Her children were going off and doing different things than my children. But I related very well to the fact that she was at her heartstrings. You know, the children she's carrying in her heart, they never go away. But they do go away. They do go away because they have to go away. That's what they're. They're called to do. But anyway, that's. That's.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think that brings up a good point. That's not to say that there will not be stories you encounter where you don't deeply identify. It's just that that's not the only reason the book has value.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's not what the book is about me. The book isn't, oh, let's try to understand Cindy better.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. A lot of times in books, I am most profoundly moved, like, move to tears when something is being described that I have not experienced. And I feel like my world just got bigger because I lived this moment of grief or something like that. With a kid character.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. It's almost as if you've learned something that you didn't have to actually pay the price to learn.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. Exactly. Right. Which. Which isn't to say that there's anything wrong with saying, well, Kristen has eight children and eight boys, and so do I. I mean, you know, obviously that's. That's plain on the face that you should make that connection. But, you know, you. You wouldn't say to all the mothers of eight sons, this is a book you should read every. Too bad this isn't for you.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, and I think we talked about that. Tyler Upchurch said the same thing. He's liking that book. Well, he's not a mother of eight sons. He's a man. And I've often wondered, does that book transcend the womanly experience? And. Yes, it does. It transcends it very well.

[Angelina Stanford]

That brings up a really good point. Right. That doesn't matter the gender of the reader. We should be able to read books about either gender characters. Right. So women can read about men, men can read about women. We don't. We don't have to always see again. And this goes back to what we were saying earlier.

[Cindy Rollins]

It's not about. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Not about having that mirror.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's supposed to stretch you and grow you. Right. I mean, it would be. It's. You know, I don't want to overstate the case making the comparison to the Bible. But it would be like being angry that every sermon was preached, wasn't about you and your specific. Well, he didn't talk about me today, so, you know, this is a waste of time.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, you know, it's more like, oh, he better. I hope he doesn't talk about me.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. You have to be able to find the human connection, but between all of these. These things.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. The sermon. Oh, yeah, that's so true. That's a really great analogy. So thank you. It just shows the foolishness of it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, right. That, you know, you have to be able to. I, you know, I'm never going to be King David or have anything even remotely close to him, but I should be able to hear his story and come away having learned something new about myself.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

But. But again, like Lewis is going to say later, you learn about yourself when you transcend yourself, in other words. So. So hearing the story about somebody that I'm never going to be gave me new eyes to see my own life.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

If you're constantly seeing the reflection. I mean, look. Yeah. It's like how you see yourself in a mirror every day and then you see yourself in a photo and you don't recognize yourself. It's that. That experience. Right. The picture is not giving you the image of yourself you're used to seeing. It's giving you a new image. And that's when you're like, I can't not believe my friends. Let me get this haircut.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's what reading. Nobody told me that's what I look like from behind. Exactly.

[Angelina Stanford]

Why did y'all let me. Why did you let me leave the house in this outfit? I thought I looked cute. I guess. I guess we can end on that note, Cindy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, let's end on that note.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, we're all feeling so cute. Yes. So we want photos, not mirrors. So once again, we just want to thank our Patreon friends and fellows for sponsoring this podcast. If you like what you've heard, please rate, review, and subscribe. You can head over to our website, TheLiterary Life, where our wonderful podcast manager Kiel's got all the show notes and links and the poem. Everything you could want is right there for you. And of course, check out the Literary Life discussion group, which is always extremely interesting and a great place for my commonplace book, that's for sure. So until next time, we will leave you with a poet reading poetry and have fun cultivating your literary life. 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, A Moment by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge the clouds had made a crimson crown above the mountains high the stormy sun was going down in a stormy sky. Why did you let your eyes so rest on me, and hold your breath between? In all the ages this can never be as if it had not been.