Alastair's Adversaria - Life on the Silent Planet (with Susannah Roberts, Rhys Laverty, & Jake Meador)

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

Rhys Laverty (Senior Editor at Ad Fontes and Senior Managing Editor of the Davenant Press), Jake Meador (Editor-in-Chief of Mere Orthodoxy), and Susannah Black Roberts (Senior Editor of Plough and my wife!) join me to discuss 'Life on the Silent Planet: Essays on Christian Living from C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy': https://amzn.to/3VouL44. If you have not already done so, you should read Lewis's Ransom Trilogy: https://amzn.to/3VrP8NQ. Follow my Substack, the Anchored Argosy at https://argosy.substack.com/. See my latest podcasts at https://adversariapodcast.com/. If you have enjoyed my videos and podcasts, please tell your friends. If you are interested in supporting my videos and podcasts and my research more generally, please consider supporting my work on Patreon (www.patreon.com/zugzwanged), using my PayPal account (bit.ly/2RLaUcB), or by buying books for my research on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/3…3O?ref_=wl_share). You can also listen to the audio of these episodes on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/alastairs-adversaria/id1416351035.

Hello and welcome. I'm joined today by two really good friends and also by my wife. So we've got Reese Laverty. That could only have been worse if you said. I'm joined by my first wife. Reese Laverty, Jake Meador and of course Susanna. And we're here to talk about a new book by Davenant. It's on Life on the Silent Plains. planet and it's about the, whatever we are going to call it, the sci-fi trilogy, the Ransom Trilogy, the space trilogy, the three books that C.S. Lewis wrote in the series, Out of the

Silent Planet, Perilandra, and that hideous strength. So to set things up, just to begin, many people have not heard about this trilogy at all. They're familiar with the rest of Lewis's work. They're certainly familiar with Narnia. They're familiar with all of the books like the screw tape letters and break divorce, all these sorts of texts. They maybe not heard about the sci-fi trilogy. What is it? And why should people be reading it?

Jake. Yes. So the series of books, and I'm going from memory here, but I feel confident about it, a series of books began out of, conversations that Lewis and Tolkien were having and kind of this realization they had together that basically no one alive was writing the kind of books that they liked to read. And so if those books were going to exist, they were going to have to write them themselves. And so they resolved,

Lewis was going to write a space travel story and Tolkien was going to write a time travel story. And very typically Lewis came through and Tolkien did not because Tolkien could never get it exactly how he wanted it and he was doing too many other things and very typical of both of them. And so the first book, well, that kind of beginning also explains. There's lots of odd kind of Tolkien elements, especially in the first two books. The main character is a philologist, a student of languages, who has some overlaps with Tolkien personally. There's references to Numenor in that hideous strength. So these books were written at a time when Lewis and Tolkien were very close and talking regularly. And in Lewis's mind, like they were meant to be together along

with this project that Tolkien never wrote. So the first book, out of the silent planet, is the story of how this philologist who's on holiday gets abducted by a couple of scientists and taken to Mars, which is this far older planet than Earth. And it has several species that have rationality, unlike Earth, and those species kind of relate to the planetary spirit or divine being in different ways. It's one of those books where if you, and Tolkien's the same way, if you read Lewis and Tolkien expecting certain kind of political views, they will surprise you. And that out of the silent plan is one of the places where Lewis will really surprise you, because one of the kind of jokes at the end is these two scientists who think they're so advanced talking to these primitives,

and it's a scientist that don't know anything and are monstrous. And so that's kind of the first story is what happens when this very, very old world encounters people from Earth who are bent in some way. Their rationality has been damaged in a way that the species of Mars has not been. Then Peralondra is the second book. And in Peralandra, it's the second book. And in Peralondra, Ransom, the philologist, goes to Venus, which is a far younger planet, has never had a fall. And so it's basically kind of a reenactment of the temptation of Eve with Ransom and one of the two scientists from the first book, kind of being the good and bad shoulder angels for the Eve character in different ways.

And then the third book, and the third book gets much stranger. And one of the things that's good to know with that is the first two books, Lewis's very tight with Tolkien. By the time he's writing that hideous strength, he's become much closer to Charles Williams, who has very different sensibilities, very different aesthetic than Tolkien. And that shows up in the third book. So Tolkien loved the first two books and he hated that hideous strength. But that hideous strength is basically what happens when these kind of planetary intelligences and the struggle that's been going on and kind of converge all on Earth. And so the villain of the story is this kind of technocratic, scientific bureaucracy that is reimagining British society and really human existence from the bottom up.

And the heroes are this kind of small resistance cell of sorts that live at a rural manor house in England, kind of waiting for directions from God, really. and Ransom has become the leader of this group living out in the English countryside. So that's kind of a very quick overview of the stories. I do think they can be read individually. Like, I've read that hideous strength more than I've read the other two personally. I read that hideous strength before reading any of the others. Yeah. So I think they can be read separately, but it will be a richer experience if you do.

start with Silent Planet and then just read through the trilogy. It seems to me that looking back through the trilogy, that it has been one of the most powerful influences on just the imagination of people in Davenant. I can think of the way that you've used the image of St. Anne's, Jake, or we can think about Susanna's old blog, Radio Breithilkandra, or the way that we talk about the politics of NICE. All of these references are ones that have quite a long pedigree within Davenant circles. What is it about this trilogy that has particularly captured the imagination and that serves as such a powerful reservoir of images for the larger project that we're involved in?

Any thoughts on that, Susanna perhaps? I mean, I think we're temperamentally all what has been called tweeds. And the wonderful thing about the third book in particular is that it shows tweeds being tweeds being victorious over much more practical or much more, you know, utilitarian or much more direct forms of power. And so I think that flatters us. I also think that the vision of the type of inhumanity that the NICE represents and the type of humanity or humanness that St. Anne's represents to the Bellberry versus St. Anne's dichotomy is just really it's so the more technology advances, the more I feel like we're just living in that more and more. like the, you know, the Twitter hashtag that we all have used is that hideous strength is nonfiction. And it increasingly is feeling like that. And it's comforting and helpful.

And also, I think, in some ways profoundly true to realize that this was addressed before, that the truths that we value and love are not, you know, confronted by these nests. new technologies out of the blue as though, you know, the new technologies or the new ways of living are going to be, are going to just knock them over like dominoes. They're solid. And we see them being solid in especially the third book. Rees, you were the one that really put together this project and you're the editor of this volume, which I should say has an amazing cast of contributors. It has Michael Ward, Holly Ordway, and a large number of other people whose essays you'd love to read. What was the origin of the project?

And what were you hoping to achieve with such an essay collection? Yeah, well, it was very much me coming into the orbit, if people will pardon the Louisiana cosmic pun, of the Dowden Institute that introduced me to the trilogy. So I had never read, one of those who had thought I knew Lewis very well, but had never got round to reading the science fiction trilogy. And then as I came to get to know people in the network of the Davenant Institute, these people know Lewis, I noticed, but their references are not coming from Narnia principally or from his other works, but are coming from the abolition of man and from that idea of strength in particular and from the wider ransom trilogy and so I thought well hey I've finally got to read this thing and it just blew my mind I think

it's totally for me one of those I wish I could have the experience of reading that for the first time again experiences and I'm thrilled one of the greatest things about doing this project is encouraging more people to read this trilogy or often I find more people encouraging more people to finish this trilogy who maybe started at some point and then tailed off because every page is either dripping with something of timeless significance and relevance to the Christian life, it felt like, or with a very incisive, prescient, prophetic insight to the contemporary kind of ills that we're dealing with now that Susanna has just touched on. And so it occurred to me that what I'm encountering here is as worthy of kind of application to the Christian life as

anything people are going to draw out of Narnia, anything people are going to draw out of Lewis's other works. And the more relevant the trilogy seem to be, the more obvious it seemed to me, we need to put something out there that is going to push people and encourage people to think about drawing this bit of Lewis's work in and making ransom great again, basically. I mean, it was never overly great at the time. It didn't bomb, and that hideous strength has had a fairly steady life. I don't think it's ever been out of print. But certainly, it's, you know, my shame-faced.

attempt is to make it as prominent in the general Christian understanding of Lewis as Naira is. I'll probably fail at that, but I will die trying. So you say for the understanding of Lewis, and one of the things that you observe is that there are these different Lewises. There's the Lewis of the apologetic works or the Lewis of the children's literature of Narnia. And it seems, you argue, that this is a fourth Lewis. a Lewis that most people haven't really encountered. How does this fourth Lewis, first of all, how would you describe this fourth Lewis? And how does this fourth Lewis change the way that we view the other Lewises

that we might be more familiar with? Yes, my introduction to the book, I say I was familiar with these three Lewises, the children's author, the apologists, the literary scholar, but then there's Lewis the Prophet. And principally, this is what you get in the Abilition of Man and throughout the Ransom Trilogy. And it's Lewis really engaging with modernity and what it means to live in the modern world, what its particular ills are, or certainly what it's how it particularly manifest certain ills

that human beings have always suffered with, and how we live as faithful Christians within that. And partly it's his attempt to reconcile a more ancient and medieval rich view of reality that Christians have right down to that they're now disproven view of the cosmos with Earth at the centre and surrounded by these spheres and whatnot. We know that's not literally true in terms of physics, but there's so much in it that Lewis wants to try and carry the weight and the sense of that over into the modern world and reconcile the ancient and the modern.

So I think that's Lewis the Prophet, looking at the ills of modernity and working out how we kind of faithfully recalibrate the Christian tradition to fit with that and to see us through it. And Lewis the Prophet turns up elsewhere and you could take bits of the Chronicles of Dania, you know, Voyage of the Dawn Treader in your world. Even in your world, that's not what a star is. It's just what it's made of, you know,

this reductionistic view of the heavens and whatnot. So it turns up elsewhere, but it's more kind of to the forefront in abolition and in the trilogy. Yeah. You mentioned the connection with abolition of man, and that's very clearly paralleled in many respects in that hideous strength and maybe aspects of the discarded image and other parts of his work

that he treats in a more theoretical way in those texts appear in this more literary form. And in what's called in the case of that hideous strength, I think it's a modern fairy tale for grown-up. or something like that at the beginning. He's presenting similar material, but in a different mode. Can you, some of you, speak a bit to the way that this fits with some of those other texts? What are some of the ways in which the text of the trilogy can maybe go past the Sleeping Dragons in a way that a text such as that hideous or the abolition of man or the discarded image.

which is more theoretical, might not. I mean, just I'll let, I've spoken for a while, so I'll let one of the others jump in, but just to say, yeah, that link with abolition of man is very explicit, it's there in the forward. Lewis makes that to the point that verbatim words appear in the mouth of characters in that hideous strength, which appear in abolition of man, principally,

man's mastery of a nature always turns out to be actually man's mastery over other men by means of technology. So there's very explicit that link for Lewis. But I'll kick over to Susanna or Jake for any other kind of cross-textual links to his non-fictional writing. I think, I mean, so that, the question of technology is a major one. But then the other major thing, I think, is his idea of men without chests in abolition of man, the idea of like people who have been basically piffed the way that the frogs in

that on Paralandra were pithed, their reason and their, and their emotion essentially are broken apart and they don't have real selves to make decisions from their empty selves. And the two heroes, or the hero and the hero and the heroine of that hideous strength, Mark and Jane, both have to basically learn how to have chests. Like they have to learn how to be full human beings. and to be able to act with their full selves and to take their full selves into every act that they do in a very literal way in some senses.

And so that critique that in abolition of man can be quite abstract, in the novel is very, you can see what it's like to be a man without a chest and it's pathetic. You don't want to be. that. I was waiting on you to say that Mark and Jane need to just take their whole self to work, and that's their problem. I don't think it's working. Jake, any thoughts on cross-textual links to other bits of Lewis? You kind of alluded to it already, but perhaps especially with Michael Ward being a contributor, the role of kind of planetary intelligences or angelic beings associated with

planets is actually one of the really core ideas to Lewis's work. And I don't think a lot of people, I certainly did not appreciate that until Planet Narnia Ward's marvelous book about the way that the seven Narnia books correspond to the seven medieval planets. But you also see it coming up in the sci-fi trilogy, particularly in that hideous strength, I think, where the various angelic beings kind of descend on St. Anne's at the end. And you see kind of the way that these qualities in creation manifested through these beings kind of show up and infuse the atmosphere of St. Anne's. It's quite strange. It's a very, it's, it will sound weird. if you have not read the trilogy.

But if you read it, and particularly if you have some of Ward scholarship in mind as you're doing it, it's a really striking account. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm trying to kind of sum up ideas in my head and there's just so much there. But that's maybe one of the advantages of such a text, that it can bring such a range of different

ideas into a very fruitful correspondence. And there's a sense of the, I mean, ideas that are just abstract, need chests. And in some ways, having a story as the vehicle gives it that concrete, more earthy character. And it seems to me that there is a sort of theology within the trilogy that has, some comparisons with the implicit theology of the Narnia series, but is different in various ways. Maleldil is not quite the same as Aslan. How might we compare and contrast those two different broader theologies within the fictional worlds? Yeah, I sort of note that in the intro.

One reason maybe why the trilogy has not had the traction that Narnia has had is, yeah, Maleldal is not Aslan, and of course, Aslan. is the best thing about Narnia, which is good. If you can put God in your story and make him the best thing in it, then that's actually quite a feat. And a lot of the kind of,

if you've rounded up, counted up the most common Narnia sermon illustrations, there will probably be things to do with Aslan. And so I guess to that extent, Ransom is a less devotional kind of text, we could say. Malalil is largely withdrawn. He works by means of his agents.

There's a lot of more sort of intermediary work going on with the intelligences and his kind of team at St. Anne's. And so I think although it's less devotional, maybe we could say that that doesn't mean it's any less concerned with the Christian life, which I think is my, perhaps one of the things that really animated me is that the things about the Christian life that I felt like a lot of the trilogy was speaking to, There's plenty that is intensely devotional there. The, um, a parallel laundry in particular, this wonderful picture of goodness.

Lewis takes you for a walk in paradise. Like it's the closest you're going to get in literature. It's a walking in the garden at the call of the day. And the spiritual, um, spiritual warfare going on in the temptation narrative is just, one of the, one of the things we can link it to is screw tape. Um, it's just screw tape kind of redone. Um, but it's less devotional, but that doesn't mean it's less practical and less useful for the Christian life.

And so its theological concerns are elsewhere than kind of personal sense of devotion. Though it gets at kind of the intimate nerve of conversion and one's personal relationship, especially probably with Jane and her conversion. Yeah. And with Mark. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Is this question of whether Mark is, I think Jane is definitely converted by the end. I'm not sure if Mark is. but he's on his way. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Yeah. There's definitely a broader spiritual vision that you find within the trilogy than you find in the Narnia books. The Narnia books maybe have something of the drama of salvation going on,

particularly in the Lai and the Witch and the Wardrobe. But when you're reading the trilogy, there's more of a sense, I think, of the spirit. conflict that takes place within the world more generally. The sort of conflict that you see with the NIC is not straightforwardly that of the redemptive story. It's a broader spiritual conflict. And I think that's one of the reasons it's more resonant with our own experience. We're not living in a moment in redemptive history that is necessarily working out some key eschatological landmark.

But we are nonetheless experiencing battles with spiritual forces, operating through technological means through institutions and other things, and the darkness of the work of Satan and deception is very much in evidence. And so it gives us, I think, imaginative tools to wrestle with something

beyond the very narrow imaginative constraints that a more pietistic vision can speak into, which is something that I remember you noting within your introduction, I think, to his Reese. How is it that Lewis relates these themes to the broader activity of being Christians within the world or seeing the world as a place of spiritual conflict? Yeah, I think he's, as Jake sort of touched at the beginning,

what political opinions do you expect to find reflected or rattling around anywhere. For a long time, the only thing I ever heard about Lewis and politics is a quote. I'm not sure what the source of this is, but Lewis, Sersley said, oh, the only thing that sermons about politics ever teach you is which newspapers are taken at the rectory. Which makes Lewis, which, funny, that appears in sort of British evangelical sermons because it reflects the sort of apolitical disposition of contemporary British evangelicals. But Lewis is politically concerned early on in the abolition of man. And he says that politics is one of the things at stake with what he's fighting against in the abolition of man.

And I think Lewis is quite willing, he's supposedly, I think conflicting sources on this, but supposedly he sort of couldn't advance further in Oxford because of the satirical depiction of college life that made its way into that hideous strength. Lewis is quite willing to basically going to point his finger at the combination room and say, yeah, that's demonic in there, which is pretty fire and brimstone stuff when you think about it. And it really reminded me of I was blessed for two years to be, I've mentioned this to Susanna, I think, a lodger with a guy called Professor John Wyatt, who's a Christian medical ethicist over here, neonatal surgeon pioneered some revolutionary neonatal treatment for newborns. And it does lots with AI and medical ethics.

He's in his 70s now, I think. I live with him for two years. and we'd often chat over breakfast about this, that and the other. And then suddenly he'd be talking about AI or medical ethics or whatnot. And then he'd turn around and go, and of course, that's exactly what the evil one wants. And had this sense of Satan sort of stalking the corridors of the hospital, not just, you know, bringing death and in obvious ways, but in the kind of malign influence he has at the institutional level.

I think Jake's chapter, I think Jake's is one of the only ones where I had a topic and an author in mind. I went to the author and said, I want you to write me the chapter on this. And Jake's one is about bureaucratic speech. And I think really, I'll kick it over to Jake here, the spiritual warfare that goes on

when language becomes evacuated of meaning. So I'd love to hear Jake kind of expand on that. Well, I think part of the reason that it's harder to kind of latch on to that hideous strength, maybe for some folks, is also that the problem, it is, it's kind of the fictionalized version of the abolition of man. So the thing that we're dealing with is not like, how does man stand before God righteous, or how can man be justified, or how can we be saved?

It's what is a person? And his claim is that that's the thing we're losing. And Lewis has just such a gift for depicting that in images. I think of the horrible scene at the end of the last battle when Ginger, the cat, goes into the barn and sees Tash. I don't even think Ginger sees Aslan, sees Tash, and flies out of the barn in fear and loses the ability to speak and ceases to be a talking beast because of what he, scene. And the way Lewis renders it in that scene is so chilling. And yet I think the just inevitable

conclusion of the abolition of ban and that hideous strength is that that's what the thing Lewis is critiquing does to people. And so the thing Lewis is trying to show us through the essays, through the trilogy is he's trying to show us what it is to be human. So it's not even, I was thinking about this because yesterday I read this story, author in the New York Times

talking about the catastrophic birth rate in South Korea. It's a woman author. And she wrote at the end of the essay, at a woman's rights protest, I once heard a young woman say, the deepest form of love I can show to my non-existent children is not giving birth to them. And so when I hear something like that, I messaged it to Susanna because I was thinking about our tagline with Plow, which is that another life is possible. And the thought I had when I read that phrases, I'm like, I almost think saying another life is possible is too advanced. It's too far along. You actually have to establish that life is good and desirable first. And so there's this kind of unmaking of humanity that Lewis is diagnosing.

And yes, one of the first places it shows up is in the use of language. And it's one of the things that comes up sometimes with people when they get deeper into Lewis is that Lewis is hilarious. And a lot of people don't realize it because they know the children's books and maybe mere or problem of pain or miracles. but Lewis had an ear for language that was just on another level. And particularly for kind of modern bureaucratic speech, he's just savage. And the only places in his work where you really get to see that are screw tape and that hideous strength. But particularly the scenes with Wither in that hideous strength, you can go straight from Wither's character to something like,

Orwell's politics in the English language, or I think the other thing I think I referenced it in the essay is a national press club speech that George Carlin gave in D.C. a number of years ago before he passed away. Just highlighting the way that we use language, not out of a sense to try and communicate truth to another person, but we use it in purely utilitarian. in ways that are really indifferent to truth. And so Lewis draws that out in Wither, who just kind of bloviates forever and never actually says anything. But then you also get it in someone like Ferry Hardcastle, who is extremely corrupt and brutal

and pretty clear about what she's doing and just doesn't care about what's true or right or good, and will use language in her own deceptive and misleading ways to serve her purpose. And so I think one of the warnings of that hideous strength is that even the way that we try to speak, the way we understand the purpose of language, is subject to the curse of sin,

is a way in which we can demean ourselves, dehumanize others. And so it creates a certain kind of urgency to minimally, I think, be very serious about language as a gift of God that he gives us. It's a way in which we are actually like God. God speaks and we speak. It's something that elevates us above the rest of creation. And yet it becomes so ordinary, like so many of the things that have been lost, it's so kind of. part of the fabric of life that it doesn't even necessarily to occur to us in the moment,

wow, this thing is being lost and you kind of need something like a great story or a really jarring example like Wither to see exactly how far certain very basic human qualities can be degraded over time and what it does to us over time as those things are lost. there's also Mark's use of or Mark's propaganda so one of those we finally like get someone

to give him doing that with Harry yeah yeah he what he does at Bellberry is he writes propaganda he like writes up little op-eds for different newspapers and he writes you know one for the guardian and one for the daily mail and like different

you know in different registers like using different you know kinds of vocabulary and it's totally disingen, you know, it's totally, it is doing a job. It is not an attempt to communicate truth. It's not a human-to-human thing. It's like working on people using language as a tool to change people to get them to believe and do what the NIC wants.

And it's essentially it and Withers kind of strange use of language it's like language without logos. And it is like it's the kind of pre, it's the kind of slop that AI now can generate very easily because, you know, AI doesn't have logos. And so it can kind of sound like it means something and you can like get it to spit out stuff that does a job, but there's no meaning behind it.

And that, that degeneration of language, I think, is central to what Mark finally says know about. And of course, a very important event in the climax of the story, which everyone should read. I won't spoil the story here. It seems another theme that is very important within, especially the final book, is human society and the contrast between different communities,

the dynamics of Bracton College, the dynamics of the NIC and the dynamics also of St. Hans. It seems that each one of those exhibits some set of human dynamics might think about his essay on the inner ring and the way that that plays out in the affairs of the college and also of the NIC. Could you speak a bit to the way that those themes are present within the story,

maybe even present within the earlier books as well and how they help us to get maybe a greater purchase upon what Lewis is trying to communicate. You're right to say the inner ring is there. It's one of the other texts that is given sort of fictional form by that heavier strength. I think he actually says it in his chapter, Joe Minnick, friend and colleague of Larsen, fellow contributor points out that the NICE builds itself as progressive and by contrast, St. Anne's looks fairly backwards, yet the more inclusive and diverse community is clearly the Atlton Anne, which is a whole host of people from different walks of life, whereas the NICE is a Cambridge Combination Room to take Lewis's phrase, this very male-dominated space and hate,

all in favour of male-dominated spaces in the right place. And he's actually far less, not quite what it claims to be. And it's also quite gay. At points as well, there's a sort of weird kiss that happens and the someroticism and stuff going on there, which probably also makes it quite like a Cambridge combination room was in the 1930s. this is one of the things I wonder if if if that Hidia Strength were rewritten now what would it what would it be like and um one theory I do have is whether the the machismo of the Hidious Strength would still be as of NYCT sorry would still be as it is that its logo is a man holding a lightning bolt and Prometheus like um because often that sort of environment now the equivalent we would we would imagine is actually more like whatever that creepy woman's podcast that Kamala Harris was on was and it was like this is her version of going on Joe Rogan which is like a bar st or conservative sorry daddy yeah that yeah it looks like a HR

thingy thingy and a bob kind of you know environment um once I'm not I'm not I mentioned this on the Suzanne's making a face so I want to hear what she says um but I mentioned this on them the theology podcast with C.R. Wiley sort of threw that out there and they said yeah but we've still got the tech bros who uh you know Elon Musk and the Silicon Valley guys that's still a very male dominated space. So is that desire to kind of create that sort of, you know, uh, boundary busting scientific community? Is that always actually going to be a sort of male Promethean thing? Is it always going to be left to people like mother dimble, uh, in a more feminine space. And Anne is a feminine names and Anne is the mother of Mary, the mother of mothers.

So is there sort of necessarily a kind of gender divide between, you know, those two communities? I don't know. That's that's, that's, that's, I'm very open on that. So I want to hear. Maybe imagine, you could imagine an umbrae, type character. Yeah. And you can easily flip the, I mean, it's certainly not the case. Obviously, we can talk about this later. Lewis is not saying that the masculine sort of,

or dominating drive or like the drive to explore is bad. And the feminine sort of, um, drive to make a home to make a sort of a place for people and animals to thrive is good. Like that is not the point you can. So the good, the good masculine version of that is Reaper Cheap. He wants to go.

to the very end of the world just to see what's there. And then Caspian is a twisted version of it in the same story. But yeah, don't carry it. So it's not that at all. But it is like he is showing there are obviously with each of those archetypes. And we should be talking about archetypes at some point because this is how Lewis might not be using those terms. But it's very much the he's thinking. There's a good and bad version of the masculine and the feminine archetype, obviously.

and generally St. Hans is the good version of the feminine, and the NIC or Bellberry is the bad version of the masculine, but that could easily be switched. Yeah, and I wonder why does he choose that, you know, logically, it doesn't necessitate that he is very pro one and very anti the other, but he just, it's a choice. He gives us the bad version of the male and the good version of the female, but not the other way around.

So is that, do you think he's, he saw his moment, and maybe we're still in that same moment, as one particularly marked by the vices of, or the only phrase I can think of is toxic masculinity, but, you know, by the bad version of the male archetype, fallen Mars, let's say. And that was what he saw as the pressing issue. Would we now potentially be in more of a fallen Venus time?

He also has the headmistress in the silver. the chair. He has quite a dismissive comment about. So maybe he has a vicious female archetype in view there. I mean, it's also, sorry, go ahead. You can go ahead, Susanna. Well, I'm just thinking about St. Dan's, like, obviously, it is a, it's a female face, but Ransom is very much the king of it. Like, there is pulled by a king. And to a certain degree, I think there is a kind of like the space itself is female and then the ruler is male and that is a kind of because I what Michael Ward's wonderful piece makes the point of what makes the point to talk about is that this book is not is neither male nor female in the way that you know out of the silent planet was

masculine it was he went to Mars perilandre was feminine he was on Venus this is a book about marriage and so St. Anne's is maybe not so much a feminine space as or a feminine narrative but it's a feminine space occupied properly by a masculine principle by ransom as it's a home it's a home and it's a home occupied properly by the king by jove and um and that i think is probably closer to the truth it's it's not that say janz is feminine and belbury is masculine and that's a exploration of themes i think really is brought out within um war essay he has at one point the paragraph, if the ransom books comprise a sort of triptych that depicts masculinity on

malacandra, femininity on perilandra, and then matrimony on thulcandra, the opening chapter of that hideous strength repeats that threefold picture. Except here the first two portraits are reversed. The story unfolds from femininity to masculinity to matrimony. The initial section of chapter one introduces us to Jane, the second section to Mark, And the third section to Bragdon Wood. And Bragdon Wood is a private, delicately balanced world, a world of wood and water, which is deliberately suggestive of harmonious and fruitful marriage.

This whole exploration of gender themes is at the very heart of the trilogy. You find it in each one of the books in different forms. And then the final book really brings those themes to their fullest expression. It begins with the term matrimony, the whole book. And it seems that that is one of the ways to hold this trilogy together, even though the different stories have a very different flavor to them. There's maybe a jarring sense reading the first two and then reading the third. It doesn't quite have the same character.

But that is a unifying theme. How can we maybe bring them together within a larger sense of what? Lewis is trying to argue about man, woman, and the bringing of the two together in matrimony. Well, I think even more generally, something that Lewis is very good at, and Tolkien is as well, though I think Lewis is better, is depicting goodness in ways that are exciting and kind of like uplift, like make you want it to be true, make you want that thing to be real. And so I'm always drawn to these stories of that are able to depict like a community bound by love in a way that is genuine to human experience and is attractive. And so St. Anne's does that so beautifully.

And I mean, I even think like I reference the character of McPhee all the time in mere orthodoxy circles. Because McPhee is this skeptic doesn't believe any of the supernobre. natural stuff. He's plainly kind of Lewis's tribute to Kirkpatrick, his adolescent teacher. And McPhee is held in a place of honor in the community, even though he doesn't necessarily fit or belong. But there's these bounds of love that make it work somehow. You know, you mentioned to Umbridge. I actually think Hogwarts is a really beautiful picture of this as well. The kind of imperfections that Dumbledore allows to exist. so that some higher good of life lived in love together can be preserved. And so that's one of the things that I most love about St. Anne's.

And it's certainly there in how Lewis depicts marriage, I think. You see it in that hideous strength. I also think of the line, Korson's boy, about Kora, gosh, Kora Korn, which one is Shasta? Corrin and Aravus They were such good friends and enjoyed bickering amongst each other so much that they went ahead and got married or something like that He just has this very wonderful, very human and attractive account of what loving community looks like That's believable because it's not utopian

But it's also still very obviously rooted in the good rooted in a shared commitment to the good, which is what, in a sense, makes McPhee work, even though he's not where they want him to be. In a way, I'm rereading Severe Mercy right now, and there's a line that Sheldon has in there, Vonikin, the author, about how he felt a certain kinship with Lewis, because the first thing he read of Lewis's,

before he was even a Christian, was the space trilogy, and he recognized that Lewis hated the things that he also hated. there's a kind of McPhee dynamic there with Shelton that becomes his entry into the church eventually. And so the way that St. Anne's is able to kind of preserve like genuine space for difference, disagreement, people maturing and growing over time is really profound. I think particularly in a moment where we don't really know how. to forgive or reconcile in a lot of places right now. That's kind of the essence of what cancel culture is about, is this inability to reckon with failure or transgression in a way that leads to reconciliation and forgiveness. And so to be able to depict a community that is genuinely healthy

in order to the good and has this space for ambiguity and growth is really significant. And I don't know that a lot of people do it nearly so well as Lewis does. And so, I mean, the marriage theme is there, but it's larger even than just marriage, I think, at St. Anne's. I do wonder, I mean, this is 10 years before his marriage to joy. And it is true. Yeah. And his parents, I mean, his mother had died early and his father had not been particularly warm. Like, you do just wonder, like, where is he seeing these marriages? Like, how did he know? And I certainly feel as though, like reading that hideous strength

was a great preparation for marriage for me. Like, but how did he get? Where do you find that? Yeah, one is it? Sorry, Tom. Well, as first to say, I have said numerous times since first reading it that their hideous strengths should be assigned as marriage prep to people.

And, yeah, one, and his, Ward mentions in his chapter, which is about contraception. And basically, he reads, I think correctly, the hideous strength as a sort of sustained critique of contraception, which Lewis declined to speak of directly in public for a long time, largely because for most of his life he was unmarried and felt it not his place. But so he just wrote a novel about it instead, you know. Guys will write a whole novel. Against contraception. That's contraception. That's contraception. I can't remember what I was going to say.

Where did Lewis Kiddott? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe from the kind of people who brought him into faith, the people he knew, who met across the course of his life. And he, yeah, absorbs it from somewhere. I never thought of that. And St. Anne certainly seems to be,

for me, it's the fullest picture of the church within Lewis's fiction. And maybe he's getting this just from his experience of fellow parishioners. Well, fellow parishioners are other kinds of like community that, you know, he did have sort of chosen family type community. And I mean, probably everyone who reads that book just wants to live at St. towns. I mean, there's no one who reads that book and is like, and doesn't want to just sort of grow

winter vegetables as a way of fighting. evil. Like, yeah. It's his Rivendale, isn't it? But better than Rivenham in some ways. Maybe on, I read, I actually read, I mean, The Hobbit with my six-year-old and we actually got to the bit where they arrive at Rivendale today. And I mean, Rivendale and the Hobbit is like two pages. Um, very nothing, nothing happens. That chapter was called a short rest and they go to Rivendale and spend like two weeks there and midsummer and watch the elves dance and they leave. but there's that sort of sentence in there where it says it was the perfect place for reading and thinking and eating and such, such, etc. And all of these, or just sitting quietly and thinking if that's what you wanted to do. And St. Anne gives me a similar feeling. It's probably fewer kind of, you know, semi-angelic beings wandering round with lofty thoughts at St Anne. So they descend every now and then. It would have been. Susanna, your chapter is about Jane as a character within that hideous strength.

She's at the heart of the story and very much ties in with this theme of matrimony. Can you speak a bit to the importance of her character and why you thought that she was worthy of chapter within the book? I was going to credit Susanna with possibly the best chapter title in the book as well, the problem of Jane, which is a double Lewis pun on the problem of pain and the problem of Susan. Oh, I didn't even notice that. Oh, man. Wow, everyone else noticed it. Edit that out.

Edit that out, Alas. No, he's staying in. Definitely staying in. So it's basically, I wanted to be able to talk about Jane, but also to be able to talk about Lewis and women and the so-called problem of Susan, which is the other kind of thing. that people bring up when they talk about Lewis and women. So there are two complaints. And my point in one of my points in the pieces that they can't both be true,

they're mutually sort of, they cancel each other out. So the problem of Susan is Susan Pavenzi in the last battle is called No Longer Friend of Narnia because she's gotten into nylons and dates and lipstick and stuff. And this is read by. Philip Pullman, among other people, as basically Lewis saying that because Susan has discovered sex, she is going to hell. And that, like, Lewis is profoundly threatened by women's sexuality. And this is all very, you know, this is all very regressive. And then he writes an entire, I mean, men will write an entire trilogy of novels rather than convert if those men are Philip Pullman.

And the problem that people have with Jane is that Lewis seems to have a problem with her academic career. So, you know, she's, they've been married for six months. She is working on theoretically. She's working on her doctorate. Mark has already finished his doctorate. Her doctor is meant to be undone. On John Dunn. It is not done.

And she, and because she wants to be doing this doctor, and they want they you know she wants to have this sort of life that is not just being a wife and mother they're contracepting and so the you know the problem with jane that the problem apparently that louis has with jane is essentially the opposite to the problem that he has with susan apparently which is that so jane is apparently not sexual enough so it can't be both so the thing that it turns out, at least that I argue, is that Jane's problem and Susan's, and it turns out marks, are a secret third thing, which is it's not, it doesn't actually directly have to do with sex at all. It has to do with fake adulthood. So Jane feels that to just be a faculty wife is

beneath her, that she wants to be one of the academics, one of the intellectuals. And that kind of desire to be one of the intellectuals is a kind of desire for a fake adulthood. She's not, you know, Lewis makes this point in several letters. He is not saying that women can't be academics. He's saying that Jane is not a particularly gifted academic. She's going to be a wonderful wife and mother and she is not, she would not be a good English professor. So that is kind of like that desire to postpone or like put aside your actual life and your

actual grown-up life for the sake of a fake version of your grown-up self that you want people to see you as. Susan is basically doing the same thing. She's being, you know, she's whatever, 15 or something, and she's taking up the trappings of adulthood in this kind of like make-believey way and basically leaving aside her responsibilities to her siblings. There's a sense that like she's just not hanging out with them anymore. And that's also, that's another kind of fake adulthood. And then Mark is doing his own version as well, where he's, he, he's not contented with just being a professor. He's not contented with his job at, what's the college called? Edgstow. He, he wants to have this like secret, you know, kind of, um, slightly political, slightly sort of

propagandistic directing of society role. But he doesn't even know at all what he wants. That's the whole point, isn't it? It's just spam this thing. Oh yeah, we won't understand any way. This will be your, you know, blah, blah, blah.

He doesn't, he doesn't know what he's getting into. He doesn't, he doesn't know what it is. He just knows that he wants in on it. And that desire to be in on it is his version of going for a fake adulthood and dodging his real adulthood, which is being a husband and a good professor, essentially. So this is, like, Lewis's critique of all of these people,

but especially Mark and Jane, is that they are being distracted from their true vocation, their true selves, and their true adult selves, their true, fruitful adult selves, by visions of themselves that are essentially phantasms and that will ultimately lead them, to a kind of fruitless isolation. And getting past that fruitless isolation is the point of the book.

I just want to point out, I want to point out that's, uh, correlation does an equal causation, but Susan is the only character in the whole of the Narnia Chronicles who goes to America. We, um, we had, I think we had a bit of a back and forth. in the comments on your chapter, Susanna, where one of the lines that really triggers people about Jane is ransom saying to her at the end, go and have no more dreams, have children instead, which some people then just kind of read straight as a thing. And women don't have dreams, just have children.

Now, most principally, it's actually a reference to the dreams that she was having earlier in the novel, which are troubling her these visions of the, of Al-Kasan being in the prison. and Jane is a sort of psychic. But I think we disagree on whether there is a double meaning there. And actually Lewis knows what he's saying when he writes a novel where the kind of aspiring academic female protagonist is told not to have dreams anymore. Yeah, where are we out on that? It's possible that he means it as a double meaning.

I am so irritated with the anti-Lewis sort of feminist critique that I dismissed that, but I might be too hasty in doing so. I'm happy with that. Actually, I hadn't made this connection before, but there's a passage in Jaber Crow by Wendell Berry where Barry talks about how Troy Chatham, this farmer who wrecks his inheritance, destroys his family,

kind of loses everything in his ambition and his greed, is a dreamer, and that's his problem. And what Barry means by that is that Troy is never content. He's never at rest. If you have a sense of equity, borrow against it. That's his mentality as a farmer. And so he's constantly pushing into the future, this imagined future that never comes to pass, rather than being content where he is with what he's been given. So it's a very similar kind of thing to what you're describing

Susanna is this kind of interior restlessness and inability to receive what one's been given with contentment that then drives one to kind of in the name of trying to make a life for oneself lose your life

not in the way that scripture talks about it but in a more ultimate way or a more final way and that that is the essence of sin in Peralandra is that the good given

is rejected because of the good that you expected as kind of one of the reasons Paralyandra is so wonderful is that Lewis just looks at sin and the fall from a different angle the inner dynamics and he slows it down and spins it out

you know Genesis 3 is such a terse narrative but Paralandra gives you half novel to work out the dynamics of it. And the essence of sin in there is that you expect one good but receive another. Do you take it gladly or do you reject it in favour of the good you imagined trying to obtain that? So I've never quite made that link between the essence of sin in Paralandra and the problem that both Mark and Jane have. But there it is. I mean, there's also the kind of like, do you attempt to have the same good again and again and again when that good might be passing away? And that actually is a connection to Numenor and to the elves in Tolkien, which another interesting bit.

Good one of you describe maybe Jake, because your chapter has to do with this in part, the character of the NICE. It seems to be a very powerful image of certain things that we have within the current context, a sort of progressive politics in certain respects, even though, as we've noted, it doesn't have maybe quite the same gendered coding as you'd have within the contemporary context. But the progressive image is definitely present there in many respects. and as is the corruption of speech that you discuss within your piece, Jake. Can you maybe describe what NICE is and what are some of the ways in which we might sense resonance between it as an image and some of the things that we face with in our own contexts?

Yeah, there's an old essay that Stephen wrote for Calvinist International, Stephen Wedgworth, called the politics of the NICE that I don't think. it's online now because TCI is down. But I hope that gets back online somewhere because that will answer the question better than I think I can. But essentially, so it's the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments. And the idea, now, I mean, as you get into the story, you realize everybody involved has their own spin on what the NICE is and what's behind it and what its goals are, but kind of the stated public-facing philosophy is we are trying to use principles of objectivity and rationality and enlightenment reason to help us remake Britain into a better,

more mature, more efficient society. And so it's this, it kind of begins with this idea that all we have really is raw matter. You can do with it what you want and the people who have power who can use it effectively to advance their ends are going to win. I'm sorry, I'm jumping around a little bit because there's, as I said, there's a lot there and like there's a cleric character who thinks the NIC is a totally different thing and then there's a scientist who has his own spin on it. But yeah, it's a materialist kind of technocratic, scientific organization that is trying to to make British society more rational.

So maybe a very telling scene is Mark is in this small village with another sociologist, and they're doing a report that it's kind of already been predetermined that this village is going to get bulldozed so they can reroute a river for some reason or another. But they need the two sociologists to go out there and write up a report on how backwards and antiquated this village is so that they can then sell the act of bulldozing the village to the British public. And they're sitting in this little pub and Mark's having a beer and the other guy who's with him says something about how if people must use these stimulants, I wish they would have them in a more hygienic place. And Mark is kind of like, I don't think that's the point.

It made me think of the Jane Austen line about how balls were. would be much more rational if there was more talking and the other characters like more rational perhaps, but less like a ball. That kind of in a lot of ways captures what is going on with the NICE. It's this kind of unmoored, ungrounded rationality let loose on creation in every imaginable direction. And precisely because it is so ungrounded and amoral, it also then, becomes a very convenient kind of gathering point for tons of people who have their own purposes

and objectives that they want to fulfill through the Institute. So like Ferry Hardcastle, who's the head of the police, I don't think she cares about all of the experimentation and scientific stuff. She's just a person who gets off on being cruel to others, and this is the vehicle that allows her to do that. So it's a somewhat tricky thing to describe, because on the one hand, you're describing the ideology, and then on the other, you're describing the uses to which that an institution bound by that ideology can be put by its members. And there is some line. I forget where I think it's around, it's in the context of Marx propaganda where it's like the institute, it doesn't, like, it could be, it could be thought of as fascist or it could be thought of as communist. It doesn't matter.

and Ferry Hardcastle is based on this woman who was, I think she was like a suffragette, and then she was a member of the British Union of fascists, and then she was like a Fabian Society member. I forget what the whole track of her life was, but she's based on a real person. And that question of like, is this, is what the NICE is progressive politics? sort of in a way, but also not. And then there's this whole other aspect of it, which is like the NICE combined with Weston's ambitions is a lot, is much more like Elon, as we discussed before. It's like using, you know, you can very easily imagine, you know, AI rather than the AlkaSan's

head being the thing that the macrobes are using to attempt to corrupt the human race. spoilers, demons become involved. Much to the surprise of the materialists who originally called them down. You can very easily imagine a kind of right-wing Silicon Valley TechBrow aspect of what the NICE combined especially with Weston's interplanetary ambitions could be. And that's a kind of interesting dynamic. when we first, when all of us were first talking this way, we were thinking much more, at least I was,

thinking much more straightforwardly, like, oh, the NICE is, like, progressivism gone wild, or like technological, you know, managerial, managing of human life gone wild. And that's what we have to fight. And Lewis is very clear within the book that actually goes beyond political partisanship. There's a sense in which this is,

a reality that's at play on both sides of the political aisle. Yeah. And the dynamic that really kind of can get you either way. Like it doesn't really, obviously, it matters what your ends are. But even if your ends are hypothetically good, like even if your ends are, you know, hypothetically Christian, if you have that dynamic of the inner ring, of the desire to be thought of as not shockable, as one of the guys, as, you know, it could be, it could be either left or right.

It doesn't really matter. Like that corruption of the actual self can come from any direction. The hard castle says at some point, I don't know if I just said this, my connection was a bit spotty a second ago. Hardcastle says the real power never is political. It's always apolitical. And all of that is just being games. Now, as Jake has said, everyone in the NIC has a different idea of what it actually is.

So you have to take things that members of the NICE say about it with a pinch of salt. But that maybe seems to be one of those moments where Lewis, the author, is sort of winking through and telling you something you should trust. And it is then what does she mean by this? that because she she thinks she's in the know i don't know that we know that hard castle knows about the sorts of knows there knows about the macrobes no i don't think she does um so what does whatever she thinks she means by that isn't what we the readers then know that quite rightly the real power isn't um political it's demonic um but she then perhaps has a sort of more naked

sense of kind of just a cruel of power um uh in what she and understands by that. So I think in the point about kind of progressivism, perhaps the Elon side, let's say, Western very much. I think Elon is still the Western of out of the silent planet.

The Western of Paralandra has become a Hagealian and given up on man as such and just wants life to persevere. And it's when he gives his big Higalian speech that the devil enters him. Holland would recently say

consciousness to thrive on as many planets as possible. Like that's his goal at the moment. Yeah. Yeah, I have a sort of, yeah. But then that's a line I then here parroted by a friend of mine who is a sort of typical secularist new labor guy, new atheist guy. And his sort of rationale for morality and ethics is the well-being and suffering of conscious beings.

And so he's a kind of guy who says in theory, if like the five dimensional beings from interstellar like came down, we would have to like roll over and die so that they could be happy because they're like more conscious than us. So maybe on somewhere in between. But there's that, there's this, and that's the sort of techno-progressivism.

What we now tend to people by progressives is a kind of what they see as a moral progressivism that, you know, we want ethics, we want equity, we want, you know, that kind of thing. Which I don't really think is in view in the NICs,

at NIC at all. There's not a huge amount of cant even about kind of eliminating suffering as such. So I just wonder if this is, sorry. It's more about cleanliness and hygiene. Yeah. At an organization, I think, yeah. I mean, there's not even a lot of discussion of equality. I think what it is is that we don't have that kind of, thanks Mrs. Thatcher.

have that kind of like socialist like nanny state the bad version that England had for a while and kind of still has a bit like like we don't have it's back it's back we don't have that sense of creeping unified boring bureaucracy that is going to smush every privately owned you know cute little cottage um into we don't i can say you're out of the country right now, Susie. I mean, we do, but it's for some reason it's not as terrifying because there's so many other things to be terrified of.

Well, I think we're 70 years into it. It's a lot less for us to feel like to be taking away. I mean, it is like... Signs for homes in my neighborhood in Lincoln. Huge private equity funds coming in, buying out people's homes. Every now and then, like, so in England, the thing that freaks me out,

the most is that you're not allowed to carry a knife around. It strikes me as like so... That's very unbranded, that that would be the thing that really freaks you out. Hey, Susanna, you know you have those ancient American laws that like nobody actually follows anymore. We have those two. That's one of them. I mean, you actually have to carry a knife around and, you know, hunt on your own land and on a gun, whatever. Like, I'm not going to start.

The differential there is we don't have our own land to hunt on. that's the issue. It's not that's a problem to carry knives around. I agree. I agree. Blame William the Conqueror for that.

Why, I didn't. The book has, the books have three different planets and view. Leave any English but long enough and he'll get to enclosure.

So you need to bring this back in. We start off on Mars and then we have Venus and then of course we return to Earth, the silent planet. And it seems to me

that a lot of the book has this really earthy flavor. It's about non-contraceptive sex, for instance. There's a sense of coming down to earth and also avoiding some of these forms of organization that are seeking to escape something of the earthiness. It's a return to the deep depths of the English soil and its history and trying to unearth literally something from its past. What does it mean to live on the silent planet in the light of Lewis's vision within the trilogy? How does it bring us back down to Earth after this journey into space? I think to maybe go back to the difference between Narnia and the Ransom Trilogy,

I think one could broadly maybe make a distinction between the two and that Narnia, is more about a closeness to Christ himself. And ransom is about a closeness to the world he's made. Maybe we could do the two books here. If Narnia is much more about special revelation. And the Ransom trilogy, more about, let's say, general revelation. But it is done, it is in a Christian obtained way and the way that you're reintroduced to it, perhaps, by special revelation.

Maybe I'm bored brush straights here, but yeah, it reintroduces you, as you say, to sex, to nationality. We haven't got to the Arthurian stuff yet and Logos and whatnot, which Holly Ordway wrote a great chapter on. I think there's a lot more work to be done there, but I think, for me, a lot of the Arthur stuff goes to kind of questions about national identity and Britain and whatnot. So, yeah, I think the ransom trilogy is kind of pushing you back to the world that God has made and how you live in relation to that, that question. Yeah, it's it's pushing you back into your body and like not letting you get away from that for a minute. And and also, I mean, but it's not unbaptized to natural law. There is the kind of there are these two, it's natural law, but it's very much baptized to natural law. And there is a warning, a strong warning about the danger of, I guess what you might almost call it like

associating with Rusty Reno's strong gods. without the mantle of Christ over you. And that's, you just have to read the book. Yeah, I think this is maybe another part of it that can make it feel a little remotes, is remember that Lewis is writing this amidst World War II when there's fascist powers in ascendance, communist powers and ascendance, like those are the things kind of in the news, as he's writing.

And what he's really trying to do is he's trying to hold out a Christian humanism as an alternative to all of the other ascendant ideologies. Alan Jacobs book has some, in the Year of Our Lord, 1943 is really helpful on this, and defining this kind of intellectual tradition around Lewis and Tolkien. And you can pick up on it in Elliott, I think, in Auden, Like it's there, there's a number of thinkers all at this time kind of trying to reckon with what will the world look like after the war. And they're contending for a sensibility and kind of vision of life that has largely been forgotten at this point. In some ways, like the closest contemporary, like major thinker reference I can think of would be like Solzhenitsyn's Harvard address.

So it's a The kind of habits of thought and way of life And even theological philosophical political sensibilities that Lewis is arguing from And also trying to hold out to everyone else Are just largely forgotten because Lewis's side basically lost after the war Like that's one of the points that Jacobs makes in his book is they lost and a lot of that tradition of that tradition has been lost except for this is the funny thing

is that like we still have Nornio, we still have Lord of the Rings like these the best, some of the best selling stories of the 20th century still hold out this world that we kind of turned away from. And so when you try to kind of push this story or some of these other tales of theirs into our current politics,

you're already off because they're doing something just fundamentally different from anything that is widely known or recognized today. It is, you might call it another doubtless, very different post-war consensus. Oh, no. Sorry. Life on the Silent Planet, essays in Christian Living from C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy can be purchased from the Davenant Press. I'll leave the link to that in the show notes.

Thank you so much for joining me, Rhys, Jake and Susanna. This is a book that I found very helpful what I've read of it so far, and I will definitely be recommending it to others and the Ransom Trilogy, which is, as mentioned earlier on, one of the deep, resonant sources of imagery and imagination within the Davenant Institute

and one that we always recommend to others. And it's great to have a companion volume to recommend with it now. Thank you.