Meaning and Inspiration – Page 2 – Literary Art and Illustration

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder – November, 1927 [Mary Drevenstedt] [Revised post]

This blog post (my first blog post, from August of 2016) displays the cover, and Mary Drevenstedt’s interior illustrations, for the first (1927) edition of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

You can view cover art for paperback editions of the novel here.

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(Frontspiece)

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Marquesa de Montemayor (37)

Marquesa de Montemayor (65)

Marquesa de Montemayor (77)

Marquesa de Montemayor (86)

Esteban (91)

Esteban (113)

Uncle Pio (149)

Esteban (173)

Uncle Pio (205)

Perhaps an Intention (221)

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder – October, 1949 (November, 1927) [Lawrence Butcher]

My first post at “this” blog – well, my very first blog post, “period”, from August of 2016 – showed the cover and interior illustrations of the first (1927) edition Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. That post (now updated and a little simplified from its original version) included an image of the cover of Washington Square Press Edition’s 1967 paperback edition of Wilder’s novel, which has rather subdued cover art. (See below…)

I’ve since acquired a copy of Pocket Book’s 1949 paperback edition of the book, which clearly and vividly displays Lawrence Butcher’s original cover art upon which the cover of the Washington Square edition was based. Butcher’s art strikingly depicts the central thematic elements of Wilder’s story: Brother Juniper, with a somewhat downcast yet deeply contemplative expression; the “bridge” itself, upon which are walking the the five characters (Alfonso G., Nina, Manuel B., Alfonso V., and Vera N.) whose lives, stories, and ultimate fate form the basis of the novel; the hand (or, Hand?) of fate (or God?), suspended over the bridge in an indeterminate gesture – destiny or salvation, or both? – behind which a sky depicted in yellows of varying brightnesses forms a vivid backdrop. (Note that the very brightest shade of yellow – yellow verging into white – falls directly upon Father Juniper.) Casting the sky in yellow, rather than hues of gray, blue, or violet, creates a visually arresting cover:

Arresting symbolically; arresting aesthetically.

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From all this saddening data
Brother Juniper contrived an index for each peasant.
He added up the total for victims
and compared it with the total for survivors,
to discover that the dead were five times more worth saving.

______________________________

It looked almost as though the pestilence had been directed
against the really valuable people in the village of Puerto.

______________________________

And on that afternoon
Brother Juniper took a walk along the edge of the Pacific.
He tore up his findings and cast them into the waves;
he gazed for an hour upon the great clouds of pearl
that hang forever upon the horizon of that sea,
and extracted from their beauty a resignation
that he did not permit his reason to examine.

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Here’s the Washington Square Press Edition of the novel. The cover art, obviously adapted from the 1949 Pocket Books edition, has identical elements (except for the Hand above), but perhaps for reasons of copyright, and, budgetary constraints, is vastly simplified from the original version.

If the muted blue and green background doesn’t carry the same visual “punch” of the Pocket Books version, the story, and the novel’s message, remains the same; remains constant.

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The discrepancy between faith and the facts
is greater than is generally assumed.

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And, Pocket Books’ 1972 edition of the novel, the cover of which (I think by Peter Schaumann) is deeply symbolic. Note that Father Juniper’s face – his identity? – has been replaced, if not supplanted, by the Bridge of San Luis Rey.

Those Who Fall, by John G. Muirhead – 1986 [Cover by Eric Joyner, Interior Illustrations by Susan Coons]

This post has been updated to include Tom Ferrell’s laudatory review of Those Who Fall, from The New York Times Book Review. The review follows…

‘I Drop Bombs. That’s My Job’

THOSE WHO FALL
By John Muirhead.
Illustrated. 258 pp. New York:
Random House. $18.95.

By Tom Ferrell

The New York Times Book Review
February 15, 1987

PEOPLE who have been in battle have a claim on our attention, as the Vietnam veterans keep insisting. This is not because we are grateful, or even because we should be. There’s a terrible disproportion between risk and gain, increasing with time. The Americans in a World War I cemetery lost all they had to lose, but it would be a bold and speculative accountant of history who might try to show just how we are better off in 1987 for men who died very young in 1917.

John Muirhead isn’t dead, though men were killed in his plane and more than enough airmen went down in flames before his eyes. He too has trouble defining his claim on our attention. This is how “Those Who Fall” begins:

“I suppose I am like most men who soldiered for a time. I think that something unusual happened to me; some particular meaning was revealed to me so I should set it down. Men have been boring their wives, their children, and other men with these kind of stories from Marathon through Chickamauga, and I’m no different from the lot. Having survived it all, I can’t leave well enough alone, but must ponder on it and remember and talk at least about one part of it that was, I think, a kind of glory.”

Mr. Muirhead, whose first book this is, is now a retired engineer. In early 1944 he was a B-17 pilot based near Foggia, Italy, flying missions up the Adriatic and over the Alps to targets like Regens-burg, Munich and Wiener Neustadt. For combat soldiers, the men of his heavy bomber group enjoyed reasonable material conditions: hot meals, dry beds in which they could safely sleep, even hot water at times. Then they would rise, before dawn, to start a long day’s ride over an armed and hostile industrial society, 10 men in a contraption 75 feet long and weighing not all that much more than a New York City bus.

The chief hazards were fighters – Germany still had at that time enough planes, pilots and fuel to mount a vigorous defense – and flak. “We edged past Pola,” Mr. Muirhead writes, “and were saluted with a barrage of flak that for all but a few bursts fell short of the low-left squadron. Three stray shells exploded in the center of the formation. I could see the orange flame in the middle of the black puffs. Two successive bursts erupted off the tip of our right wing and magically an array of star-shaped holes appeared in our windshield. … It never seemed to us that the flak came from anything on the ground. Not from guns that men fired. Flak came from the sky itself; it blossomed there.” Things got rapidly worse and stayed worse for hours; on this trip to Regensburg, a particularly horrible one, Mr. Muirhead’s left waist gunner was killed, one engine was shot out and his group lost 11 of 21 planes.

• • •

Fear and self-induced amnesia became the poles of Mr. Muirhead’s service life. He avoided knowing the other members of his crews. He tells us, repeatedly, that he forgot why the war was being fought and didn’t want to know. “I work in this little parish,” he tells a nonflying officer friend. “I’m employed to fly a bomber from here to there. I drop some bombs there, and then I come back here – if I’m lucky. That’s my job; I’m used to it.”

On June 28, 1944, he was shot down over Bulgaria, surviving with most of his crew. Defeat brought a kind of relief, but apparently not only because capture enhanced his chances of living out the war. “Peace and comradeship,” he writes, could now replace professional relations among his crew and his new acquaintances in captivity. Though he nowhere says so, I suspect he was glad to see his responsibility diminished. Another pilot’s error in formation that had destroyed two B-17s and 20 men returns oppressively to his memory several times in his narrative.

His P.O.W. camp was atop a hill, with splendid views; but life in it was very lousy, literally. Also hungry and unmedicated, though it isn’t clear that his Bulgarian captors were in much better case; the Germans had stripped their unfortunate ally to support their own military machine as their situation deteriorated on both fronts. In September, with the Russians massed on the Bulgarian border, the camp commandant opened the gate and released the prisoners. What happened after that Mr. Muirhead doesn’t say.

WE haven’t been bored; the battle stuff has been keenly drawn, the terror and desperation, some of it quiet, are as real as can be. There’s a lot of soldierly helling around and a lot of funny obscene conversation, funny in the way reflex obscenity can be when it supplants or augments official military jargon (there’s also a lot of effortful, quasi-poetic writing, much of which deserves good marks for trying). And there’s enough nuts-and-bolts matter about caring for planes and running the squadron to fix the whole tale solidly in the slot of 1944 material technology. All excellent of its kind, and it is a kind, the kind that feeds little bookstores and catalogue houses specializing in “militaria” and “aeronautica.”

But what about the glory? Promised at the start, it begins to glimmer in the P.O.W. camp when the men win a tiny victory over toilet regulations. “To endure we sought to win such trifles to measure the day. We had become aliens of the poorest kind, and we had to find more than bits of bread to live on. … The last hour, the last minute, the last second of the last day, would come to pass, opening the way for us. That would be the moment of our glory, our long-remembered glory.” And so it proved, when Mr. Muirhead and two comrades, with four legs among them, walked out the prison gate and across their hilltop – a victory parade without a band. Military memoirs don’t dare to dress themselves in glory much any more, and maybe you had to be there, but Mr. Muirhead has the courage to trust his memories. I’m convinced he was there.

Tom Ferrell is an editor of The Book Review.

I suppose I am like most men who soldiered for a time.
I think that something unusual happened to me;
some particular meaning was revealed to me so I should set it down.
Men have been boring their wives,
their children,
and other men with these kind of stories from Marathon through Chickamauga,
and I’m no different from the lot.
Having survived it all, I can’t leave well enough alone,
but must ponder on it and remember and talk at least about one part of it that was, I think,
a kind of glory.

On the twenty-third of June, 1944,
I ended my time as a bomber pilot flying out of Italy with the 301st Bomb Group,
and became a prisoner of war in Bulgaria.
My last mission was to Ploesti.
Although that name had its own dreadful sound,
the other places and other names all took their toll
whether you feared them or not.
It mattered very little when you finally bought it.
The odds were, one always knew, that something was going to happen.
It was not felt in any desperate way,
but rather it came as a difference in consciousness
without one’s being aware of the change.
In the squadron we learned to live as perhaps once we were long ago,
as simple as animals without hope for ourselves or pity for one another.
Completing fifty missions was too implausible to even consider.
An alternative, in whatever form it might come, was the only chance.
Death was the most severe alternative.
It was as near as the next mission,
although we would not yield to the thought of it.
We would get through somehow: maybe a good wound,
or a bail-out over Yugoslavia or northern Italy; the second front might open up,
and the Germans might shift all their fighters to the French coast.
We might even make it through fifty missions – a few did.
But such fantasies didn’t really persuade us,
not with our sure knowledge that we were caught in a bad twist of time
with little chance we would go beyond it.
Our lives were defined by a line from the present
to a violent moment that must come for each of us.
The missions we flew were the years we measured to that end,
passing by no different from any man’s except we became old and died soon.

I don’t know whether any of this is true or not.
Everything happened that I have said happened,
but it’s memory now, the shadow of things.
The truth lives in its own time, recall is not the reality of the past.
When friends depart, one remembers them but they are changed;
we hold only the fragment of them that touched us and our idea of them,
which is now a part of us.
Their reality is gone, intact but irretrievable,
in another place through which we passed and can never enter again.
I cannot go back nor can I bring them to me;
so I must pursue the shadows to some middle ground,
for I am strangely bound to all that happened then.
We broke hard bread together and I can’t forget:
Breslau, Steyr, Regensburg, Ploesti, Vienna, Munich, Graz,
and all the others; not cities,
but battlegrounds five miles above them where we made our brotherhood.
It’s gone and long ago; swept clean by the wind, only some stayed.
Part of me lives there still, tracing a course through all the names.
I don’t know why.
What is it that memory wants that it goes through it all again?
Was there something I should have recognized?
Some terrible wisdom?
The kind of awful knowledge that stares out of the eyes of a dying man?
I was at the edge then and almost grasped the meaning,
but I lived and failed the final lesson and came safe home.
I linger now, looking back for them, the best ones who stayed and learned it all.
“It was as if in greeting that three of the tiny creatures came out from the boards around the stove and scurried toward me. I was sitting on Mac’s bunk. He used to feed them crumbs every time he came in the tent. A fourth mouse joined his friends and, while they nibbled happily, I began the sad chore of going through Mac’s belongings.” (pp. 66-67)

“I don’t have any damn matches.”

“I handed him mine. He took them without a word; he struck five of them before he got the pipe going. He had forgotten his cigarette, which was still smoldering on the bomb cart where he had placed it.” (p. 114)

“The ground was rushing up at me! I was moving toward a high ridge! I swept over it, and then I plunged through the upper branches of a giant pine; mu chute caught and was held fast while my inertia drove me over a deep, rocky gorge. My forward motion was violently snubbed, and I was sent rushing back toward a massive trunk. I missed it by three feet, but continued to swing wildly beside it. After a time, the motion ceased. I hung there over the steep incline of the gorge. The base of the tree reached deep into the slope; it was much too far to drop.” (p. 194)

__________

In this strange life, we lived in the narrow dimension of the present.
We didn’t seek the future, for it was not there;
and if we could not move into it or beyond it,
we could not return to our past.
We were dull and listless,
but we did not have the true languor of young men
whose dreams were of worlds ahead of them,
and who saw the present only as prelude to it.

If we were without dreams, without a past or a future,
and were caught in the stillness of the present,
our vision then became wise.
There was peace in the absence of clamor;
there was serenity in the days without battles.
If this tattered place where we lived
were to be the full measure of our lives,
we would find some sweetness in it.
A small mouse nibbling a piece of biscuit in my tent
was as wondrous as a unicorn.
The soiled streets of Foggia were full of light,
and one time when I was walking there,
I heard the pure voice of a woman singing.
I learned each day of the goodness of life.
I cherished what was given to me,
holding it just for the moment it was given,
for I knew it was fragile and could not be held for long.

__________

The Muirhead crew prior to departure for Italy. Author John Muirhead is in front row, far left, holding headphones. Notice that the aircraft in the background is a B-24 Liberator, which the author initially flew before assignment to the 301st Bomb Group. (USAAF photo, from dust jacket of Those Who Fall.)

The Missing Air Crew Report (MACR) – #16203 – covering the author’s final mission: Target Ploesti, Roumania – Date June 23, 1944. John Muirhead, as pilot, is listed first in the crew roster.

The second page of the MACR, listing the crew’s enlisted personnel (flight engineer, radio operator, and aerial gunners).

Eyewitnesses to the loss of Muirhead’s B-17, S/Sgt. William E. Caldwell and S/Sgt. Anthony J. Petrowski.

John Muirhead, mid-1980s.

Mr. Sammler’s Planet, by Saul Bellow – 1969 (January, 1970) [Unknown Artist]

Mr. Sammler’s Planet, by Saul Bellow – 1969 (1977) [Roy Ellsworth]

And since he had lasted –
survived –
with a sick headache –
he would not quibble over words –
was there an assignment implicit?
Was he meant to do something?

______________________________

“During the war I had no belief, and I had always disliked the ways of the Orthodox.
I saw that God was not impressed by death.
Hell was his indifference.
But inability to explain is no ground for disbelief.
Not as long as the sense of God persists.
I could wish that it did not persist.
The contradictions are so painful.
No concern for justice?
Nothing of pity?
Is God only the gossip of the living?
Then we watch these living speed like birds over the surface of a water,
and one will dive or plunge but not come up again and never be seen any more.
And in our turn we will never be seen again,
once gone through that surface.
But then we have no proof that there is no depth under the surface.
We cannot even say that our knowledge of death is shallow.
There is no knowledge.
There is longing, suffering, mourning.
These come from need, affection, and love –
the needs of the living creature, because it is a living creature.
There is also strangeness, implicit.
There is also adumbration.
Other states are sensed.
All is not flatly knowable.
There would never have been any inquiry without this adumbration,
there would never have been any knowledge without it.
But I am not life’s examiner, or a connoisseur, and I have nothing to argue.
Surely a man would console, if he could.
But that is not an aim of mine.
Consolers cannot always be truthful.
But very often, and almost daily, I have strong impressions of eternity.
This may be due to my strange experiences, or to old age.
I will say that to me this does not feel elderly.
Nor would I mind if there were nothing after death.
If it is only to be as it was before birth, why should one care?
There one would receive no further information.
One’s ape restiveness would stop.
I think I would miss mainly my God adumbrations in the many daily forms.
Yes, that is what I should miss.
So then, Dr. Lai, if the moon were advantageous for us metaphysically, I would be completely for it.
As an engineering project, colonizing outer space,
except for the curiosity, the ingenuity of the thing,
is of little real interest to me.
Of course the drive, the will to organize this scientific expedition must be one of those irrational necessities that make up life –
this life we think we can understand.
So I suppose we must jump off, because it is our human fate to do so.
If it were a rational matter, then it would be rational to have justice on this planet first.
Then, when we had an earth of saints, and our hearts were set upon the moon,
we could get in our machines and rise up …”
(236-237)

Margotte had much to say.
She did not notice his silence.

By coming back, by preoccupation with the subject,
the dying, the mystery of dying, the state of death.
Also, by having been inside death.
By having been given the shovel and told to dig.
By digging beside his digging wife.
When she faltered he tried to help her.
By this digging, not speaking, he tried to convey something to her and fortify her.
But as it had turned out, he had prepared her for death without sharing it.
She was killed, not he.
She had passed the course, and he had not.
The hole deepened, the sand clay and stones of Poland, their birthplace, opened up.
He had just been blinded, he had a stunned face,
and he was unaware that blood was coming from him
till they stripped and he saw it on his clothes.
When they were as naked as children from the womb,
and the hole was supposedly deep enough, the guns began to blast,
and then came a different sound of soil.
The thick fall of soil.
A ton, two tons, thrown in.
A sound of shovel-metal, gritting.
Strangely exceptional, Mr. Sammler had come through the top of this.
It seldom occurred to him to consider it an achievement.
Where was the achievement? He had clawed his way out.
If he had been at the bottom, he would have suffocated.
If there had been another foot of dirt.
Perhaps others had been buried alive in that ditch.
There was no special merit, there was no wizardry.
There was only suffocation escaped.
And had the war lasted a few months more, he would have died like the rest.
Not a Jew would have avoided death.
As it was, he still had his consciousness, earthliness, human actuality –
got up, breathed his earth gases in and out, drank his coffee,
consumed his share of goods, ate his roll from Zabar’s, put on certain airs –
all human beings put on certain airs – took the bus to Forty-second Street
as if he had an occupation, ran into a black pickpocket.
In short, a living man.
Or one who had been sent back again to the end of the line.
Waiting for something.
Assigned to figure out certain things, to condense, in short views,
some essence of experience, and because of this having a certain wizardry ascribed to him.
There was, in fact, unfinished business.
But how did business finish?
We entered in the middle of the thing and somehow became convinced that we must conclude it.
How?

– Saul Bellow –

Give Us This Day, by Sidney Stewart – 1958 [Harry Scharre?] [Revised post]

(This post has been updated to include the back cover of the 1958 paperback edition of Give Us This Day, as well as the front cover of the 1990 edition. (Scroll to bottom.))

Manila:
December 1941

IN THE LAND where dead dreams go lies the city of Manila,
as it was before the war.
Manila, where the white man didn’t work in the afternoon because it was too hot.
Manila, with its beauty and its poverty and its orchids at five cents apiece.

What could a soldier do with a handful of orchids
if he had no one to give them to?
I used to buy those orchids.
I’d pay my nickel for them and stand there awkwardly holding them in my hand.
I would run my finger over the satin petals and then,
embarrassed,
I would give them to the first little girl I met,
because there was something very lonely about buying orchids
when you had no one to give them to.

____________________

I began to plan the things I wanted to do when I went home.
The promises I had made to the boys about seeing their parents.
I thought of the things that home meant to me.
The things that freedom, and being home, would mean.
I thought of seeing women again, white women,
and being again where people laughed,
where laughter was good and life was good.

I wondered if ever again things would worry me.
I thought what I would do with my life.
I had never asked to live, but God had spared me.
Now I knew there was an obligation within me to justify my life.
I must do something.

My mind wandered back to the times
when Rass and John and Weldon and Hughes
sat together around the fire in the evenings.
We talked about the things we wanted to do
when we were free and we were home again.
Rass had wanted to go into the diplomatic service.
John had wanted to be a professor again.

“I’m going to be a writer,” I said.
“I’m going to write novels.”

We used to laugh about it.
They were interested in the things I wanted to write about.
Once, when we were very hungry, John had turned to me.

“Some day, Sid, I wish you’d put me in one of your books.”

“Yes, Stew,” Rass said.
“I wish you’d write a book about this, about all of us.
Will you?
Could you do that for us one day?
Write a book about all of us.
Something that we could keep.”

I remembered what I had promised them.
I would write a book about them some day.
But I felt cold inside and I thought, “No, they’ll never read that book now,
that book I’m going to write about them.
About their faith and hopes, their goodness and their beliefs.”

______________________________

Biographical blurb about Sidney Stewart, from the jacket of the book’s hardcover (1957) edition.

______________________________

1990 edition of Give Us This Day. Artist? – unknown.

Lost Horizon, by James Hilton – 1933 (1967) [Unknown Artist]

“There is a reason, and a very definite one indeed.
It is the whole reason for this colony of chance-sought strangers living beyond their years.
We do not follow an idle experiment, a mere whimsy.
We have a dream and a vision.
It is a vision that first appeared to old Perrault when he lay dying in this room in the year 1789.
He looked back then on his long life,
as I have already told you,
and it seemed to him that all the loveliest things were transient and perishable,
and that war, lust, and brutality
might some day crush them until there were no more left in the world.
He remembered sights he had seen with his own eyes,
and with his mind he pictured others;
he saw the nations strengthening,
not in wisdom, but in vulgar passions and the will to destroy;
he saw their machine-power multiplying until a single-weaponed man
might have matched a whole army of the Grand Monarque.
And he perceived that when they had filled the land and sea with ruin,
they would take to the air…
Can you say that this vision was untrue?”

“True indeed.”

“But that was not all.
He foresaw a time when men,
exultant in the technique of homicide,
would rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing would be in danger,
every book and picture and harmony,
every treasure garnered through two milleniums,
the small,
the delicate,
the defenseless – all would be lost like the books of Livy,
or wrecked as the English wrecked the Summer Palace in Pekin.”

“I share your opinion of that.”

“Of course.
But what are the opinions of reasonable men against iron and steel?
Believe me, that vision of old Perrault will come true.
And that, my son, is why I am here,
and why you are here,
and why me pray to outlive the doom that gathers around on every side.”

“To outlive it?”

“There is a chance. It will come to pass before you are as old as I am.”

“And you think that Shangri-La will escape?”

“Perhaps.
We may expect no mercy, but we may faintly hope for neglect.
Here we shall stay with our books and our music and our meditations,
conserving the frail elegancies of a dying age,
and seeking such wisdom as men will need when their passions are all spent.
We have a heritage to cherish and bequeath.
Let us take what pleasure we may until that time comes.”

(James Hilton)

The Marauders, by Charlton Ogburn, Jr. – 1956 (1960) [Unknown Artist]

“Being unready and ill-equipped is what you have to expect in life.”

“… I say bad luck.
But in looking back in it I found myself wondering.
For nothing could have been better calculated than that experience to bring home to me a lesson that has to be learned.
It was one I could wish I had been imparted to me early in life.
It was one I believe must have been understood in advance by those who gave Galahad its record of heroism.

It is this.
Being unready and ill-equipped is what you have to expect in life.
It is the universal predicament.
It is your lot as a human being to lack what it takes.
Circumstances are seldom right.
You never have the capacities, the strength, the wisdom, the virtue you ought to have.
You must always make do with less than you need in a situation vastly different from what you would have chosen as appropriate for your special endowments.“

Arrival and Departure, by Arthur Koestler – 1943 [Wood]

What, after all, was courage?
A matter of glands, nerves; patterns of reaction conditioned by
heredity and early experiences.
A drop of iodine less in the thyroid,
a sadistic governess or over-affectionate aunt,
a slight variation in the electrical resistance
of the medullary ganglions,
and the hero became a coward;
a patriot a traitor.
Touched with the magic rod of cause and effect,
the reactions of men were emptied of their so-called moral contents
as a Leyden jar is discharged by the touch of a conductor.

‘Why do they look at me that way?’

‘They don’t look. It’s only your imagination.’
‘They ask themselves: What is he doing here?
Why does he not go where he belongs?’
‘But you belong nowhere, you fool.’

‘How can one live, belonging nowhere?’

‘You belong to yourself. That is the gift I made you.’

‘I don’t want it. Your gift is out of season.’

‘Then what do you want?’

‘Not to be ashamed of myself.’

‘What are you ashamed of?’

‘Of walking through the parks while others
get drowned or burned alive;
of belonging to myself while everybody belongs to something else.’

‘Do you still believe in their big words and little flags?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Are you not glad that I opened your eyes?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘What were your beliefs?’

‘Illusions.’

‘Your search of fraternity?’

‘A wild goose chase.’

‘Your courage?’

‘Vanity.’

‘Your loyalty?’

‘Atonment.’

‘Why then do you want to start again?’

‘Why, indeed? That should be your job to explain.’

But that precisely was the point which Sonia could not explain,
for apparently it was placed on a plane beyond her reasoning,
and perhaps beyond reason altogether.

Don’t be a fool, said Sonia’s voice.

This is the ark and behind you is the flood.

That land is doomed and it will rain on it

forty nights and forty days.

Who has ever heard of an inmate of the ark

jumping overboard to walk back into the rising flood?

But why not, Sonia? There is something missing in that story.

There should have been at least one

who ran back into the rain,

to perish with those who had no planks under their feet…

Go on, said Sonia’s voice.

Go on, what happened to that fool after he went back?

The Lord who saw into that man’s heart became ashamed of himself;

and he reached out with his hand to keep that man dry in the rain…

* * * * * * * * * * * *

“Do you mean,” Peter stuttered,
“that you have done what you did – just as a sport?”

The other shrugged.
His attention was focused on the task of drinking from the glass
without spilling any of its contents.
“Don’t you think,” he said at last,
“that it is rather a boring game,
trying to find out one’s reasons for doing something?”

Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis) – 1965 (1943) [Bernard Symancyk] – Macmillan # 8690

“My dear Ransom,
I wish you would not keep relapsing on to the popular level.
The two things are only moments in the single, unique reality.
The world leaps forward through great men
and greatness always transcends mere moralism.
When the leap has been made our ‘diabolism’
as you would call it becomes the morality of the next stage;
but while we are making it, we are called criminals, heretics, blasphemers…”

“How far does it go?
Would you still obey the Life-Force
if you found it prompting you to murder me?”

“Yes.”

“Or to sell England to the Germans?”

“Yes.”

“Or to print lies as serious research in a scientific periodical?”

“Yes.”

“God help you!” said Ransom.

* * * * * * * * * * *

It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile.
We have all often spoken –
Ransom himself had often spoken –
of a devilish smile.
Now he realized that he had never taken the words seriously.
The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister;
it was not even mocking.
It seemed to summon Ransom, with horrible naivete of welcome,
into the world of its own pleasures,
as if all men were at one in those pleasures,
as if they were the most natural thing in the world
and no dispute could ever have occurred about them.
It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it.

It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation.

Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything
but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil.
This creature was whole-hearted.
The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle
into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence.
It was beyond vice as the Lady was beyond virtue.

________________________________________

You can view the cover of Avon Books’ 1957 edition of Perelandra (Avon # T-157), here.