David Brooks doesn’t usually inspire me, or inspire me to even read him with the chance of getting inspired, but a piece that he did yesterday, describing the modern depletion of imagination, was terrific and made me want more, but now I’m adrift and have much too much work to do to get it.
The article centered on a piece about C S Lewis:
The essay, which appeared in Books & Culture, is called “C. S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem,” by Michael Ward, a chaplain at Peterhouse College at Cambridge. It points out that while we moderns see space as a black, cold, mostly empty vastness, with planets and stars propelled by gravitational and other forces, Europeans in the Middle Ages saw a more intimate and magical place. The heavens, to them, were a ceiling of moving spheres, rippling with signs and symbols, and moved by the love of God. The medieval universe, Lewis wrote, “was tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine.”
Lewis tried to recapture that medieval mind-set, Ward writes. He did it not because he wanted to renounce the Copernican revolution and modern science, but because he found something valuable in that different way of seeing our surroundings.
The modern view disenchants the universe, Lewis argued, and tends to make it “all fact and no meaning.” When we say that a star is a huge flaming ball of gas, he wrote, we are merely describing what it is made of. We are not describing what it is. Lewis also wanted to include the mythologies, symbols and stories that have been told about the heavenly actors, and which were so real to those who looked up into the sky hundreds of years ago. He wanted to strengthen the imaginative faculty that comes naturally to those who see the heavens as fundamentally spiritual and alive.
I’ve been trying to work through Bullfinch’s Mythology recently, in an effort at self-erudition. One of the disturbing things about reading the book is its rationale:
If no other knowledge deserves to be called useful but that which enlarges our possessions or to raise our station in society, then mythology has no that appellation. But if that which tends to make us happier and better can be called useful then we claim that epithet for our subject. For mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.
Without a knowledge of mythology, much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.
This is the constant sell of Bullfinch, that if you read the book, you can understand references in poems and decode their meaning. Not to unlock their magic, feel what it’s like for absurd but wonderful images to mean something deep and emotional, or tap into stories that tap into obscured parts of our psyche — but to understand poems and literature which are almost as removed from us as the mythic stories they reference.
On the rare occasions when I read Shakespeare, I am always struck by how alive the 16th century was with magically powered plants. References to properties of plants abound in Shakespeare, and I think how cool it would be to walk in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and to see flowers which are pretty, smell nice, and have medical/magical/(al)chemical properties. How much more alive and rich the place would be. But that’s gone to us.
So . . . When I see a passage about how night skies used to be magical and once inspired wonder, I want more. Brooks goes on to tantalize even further:
The medievals had a tremendous capacity for imagination and enchantment, and while nobody but the deepest romantic would want to go back to their way of thinking (let alone their way of life), it’s a tonic to visit from time to time. As many historians have written, Europeans in the Middle Ages lived with an almost childlike emotional intensity.
(Tantalize comes from the story of Tantalus, who as a punishment for stealing ambrosia, was put in a pool of water beneath the branches of a fruit tree. Whenever he bent to drink the water would recede away from him, whenever he reached up for fruit, the tree branches would move just out of his grasp. I knew that without looking it up, but I also know it because I learned a bunch of Greek myths in High School so I could be clever and witty in Extemporaneous Speaking. I’m not sure if that’s good or not.)
At the beginning of Foucault’s Pendulum, the narrator tells of a couple who suffers from this post-medieval condition:
A moment later, the couple went off — he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite
Yeah, so I want more out of this Brooks column and there’s nowhere to go. He doesn’t provide a link for the Ward essay, which seems selfish for one who is lamenting the closing of our imaginations, “many historians” gives me nothing, and oh, how I wish there were some implicitly titled “If you like this or care about the night skies, you should check out…”
The internet’s best contribution to this dilettante’s life is “More…” and I have none.
