Landscape of the Mind

 

"If I know nothing of my own garret," I thought, "what is there to secure me against my own brain? Can I tell what it is even now generating? - what thought it may present me the next moment, the next month, or a year away? What is at the heart of my brain? What is behind my think? Am I there at all? - Who, what am I?"

- Lilith by George MacDonald

You are in your mind all day. It is an extraordinary thing we have as humans, to be in thought, consideration, musing, pensiveness. Truly amazing, it is, as we can revisit memories and times from the past, all from our perspective. We can dream and sometimes remember dreams that might be realistic or outlandish. This is all both a gift and a challenge that we have such power in our minds. Because we have the choice of what we do with it all. While revisiting memories can be a joy, from some wonderful encounter, trip, conversation, or event, it can also allow us to choose to hold onto something that leaves us bitter, that stirs irrationality, or that causes us to resist ideas of reality. 

As humans we aren't very good at letting go and we tend to get comfortable in a mindset and don't want to step out into reality. We like the control of it, even if we know it's likely not the best for us to hold onto. We are too comfortable in our own way, and think it is not really anyone else's business anyway. We are each the ruler of our own thoughts and can do whatever we want to. A fierce independence separated from an objective moral value is the way of the world today, as C.S. Lewis wrote about. He points out that the moral environment is not something we invented, it is something we discovered. We hear often today that everyone can make their own values and do whatever they like, rather than subscribe to some "rules" that seem restrictive, and yet those who are living with that idea are actually abiding by the ideas that values are objective in order to stake their claims. If you truly step outside the objective values then you are running your life by irrationality and emotion of the moment. 

I have written several posts about my love for Lilith by George MacDonald. I am just diving into another re-read, because this book is beloved. It's fantasy, and so odd and strange in the best ways that leave me thinking and musing its questions and paradoxes. It begins with a young man, who has the views of a scientific materialistic mind, who has come back to his family home to live, and it's ancient and full of hidden passages. He sits in the library reading most days, until he starts seeing things. An elderly librarian of old days who appears then disappears. Rumors of the house being haunted leaves him skeptical, until he sees the old man again, and follows him through many twisting passages and staircases to an unknown quarter. He views a mirror into a landscape that looks into another world, and stumbles into it, landing in the other realm, met by this older man, who sometimes looks like a raven and sometimes an old man. The narrator doesn't believe he has come through a door, as he never saw a door (remember, he's a materialist and only believes what he sees), and Mr. Raven begins to befuddle his brain - 

"I never saw any door!" I persisted.
"Of course not!" he returned, "all the doors you had yet seen - and you haven't seen many - were doors in; here you came upon a door out! The strange thing to you," he went on thoughtfully, "will be, that the more doors you go out of, the farther you get in!"
"Oblige me by telling me where I am."
"That is impossible. You know nothing about whereness. The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home."

If this sounds a little bit like a mix of C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle ("I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!") and The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, I would agree. C.S. Lewis was hugely influenced by MacDonald, seeing him as his mentor (like Dante viewing Virgil as his mentor). Lewis Carroll was good friends with George MacDonald and spent a lot of time with the family. The writers and books speak to one another in real time and across time, it's wonderful. 

It invokes the wonder and mystery of the world beyond. Shown in ways that stretch our imaginations. So here we go on this journey of the landscapes of the mind, with George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis. Through the imagination of a story published in 1895, re-visiting with Lilith always opens me to the deeper landscapes, into places that offer seeing truth and wisdom, through doors leading further up and further in.

I reach for a landscape in my mind.
It is full of beauty and calm, a place
Familiar like memory from the deep,
But telling that it's only the surface.
There is so much more, we think
We know all the detail we see
It passes by us each day ensured
By our preeminence we feel free
While held fast in the grasp, held.
The hardest thing is to loosen the fingers
Strangely secure to grasp the control
Though preventing true freedom in divine 
Whence in release allows air to extol. 

Sundry Reading Days

 

As laughter here breeds laughter, there above sheer happiness shoots brilliant flares. Below, a darkening shadow marks the saddened mind.

- Paradiso, Canto 9, Dante

Readers read together and alone. The beauty of reading is that it can be solo, or you can read with others either at the same time, aloud, or silently. If you are like me attached to the physical book (the wonderful feeling, smell, texture, essence of the book itself), batteries will not run out, no books will run out of charge. No books will kick you out when your subscription time has elapsed. In fact, books invite you in - to deeper understanding, learning, and perspective. Inviting you to linger on the pages. 

Reader, are you constantly looking for more time to read? Etching out our schedule so that you squeeze a few hours (or more) into weekends to read? Cast aside other plans to read? Decide not to go out because you'd rather read? Ask everyone you know what they are reading? Ponder to yourself how anyone could think there was such a thing as too much reading? 

If you are wondering why someone would want to read so much, it's a fact of sundry reading that you get a wide variety of books to enjoy and learn from. Last weekend I finished reading Plato's Phaedrus, his take on friendship, and then finished reading The Divine Comedy by Dante in a modern translation I had not read before and loved it. Then I summed up last week by reading The Early Church by Henry Chadwick, which starts from the beginning of the church in the ancient world and into the first few centuries AD. Then, just for fun I threw in Die with Zero by Bill Perkins, a book about living experiences now to build up memory dividends and not waiting for some future date, and also My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff, a memoir of a young women in NYC entering into the literary agent world in the 1990s. 

In this delicious stew of books, we have philosophy, fiction/poetry, history, business/finance, and non-fiction. From ancient BC writings, to the current modern day ideas. I would argue that you cannot get this robust flavor or serendipitous compilation of ideas and thought-provoking encounters except by exploring the world of books and allowing such meetings to occur, mix, and provide a plethora of musings.

Perhaps you think me too fastidious to place such importance onto books and these chance encounters. But I would come back and say that books talk to one another across time, space, and my tiny apartment. C.S. Lewis is always referencing ancient writers and I go to my shelf to grab that book to read. Dante seeks wisdom as his mentor Virgil comes out of the ancient world to guide him. Books reference one another, play off one another, build off older ideas, describe ideas in context of today. The more I read, the more I learn about to read more from the references. Who were your authors reading? How did they formulate their ideas?  It's a cycle of research I am very glad to get on and around every corner there is a whole new shelf of authors to discover.