To Some Ladies at Wantage
the dedication of CS lewis’s Perelandra (yes, i was just on the toilet, thank you for asking) is
To
Some Ladies
at
Wantage
why does that sound so cool knowing that he wrote it? funny how i haven’t read CS lewis in so long. i grew up swimming in his books, a happy fish. i swam in them too much, probably. just pulled this one out of a box of old books. price on the front is $1.50, and written in sloppy kid print on the inside is my name and phone number with a “french seven” i toyed with for a couple of years. i’d also found a pen roughly the same color of the cover, and inked through the letter “L” and the last “A” of the title, so if you hold it in the right light it reads Pere andr. yeah, that’s a good title.
the word “heath” appears a couple of sentences in. as a young heavy reader of classic novels, i probably read that word hundreds of times, and heard it in movies or other places. but guess what? i pretty much don’t know what a heath is. i couldn’t decidedly direct you to a knoll, or tell you if a loquacious man is talkative or given to quiet self-reflection. sure, i have a pretty good idea, but since i don’t seem to have suffered in my enjoyment or understanding of books with fairly common words i really don’t know, i think they must not be very important. what do you say to that?
laconic. i probably look that up every 7 years or so. why? no idea. it’s not a word i want to use, and most of the time i see it i get the drift without being sure of exactly what most people mean with “laconic”. if i had to tell you a rough definition of it to save my life, i’d give me a 33% chance on the first hit. in my mind laconic and loquacious are opposites, though maybe they aren’t really. no — don’t tell me! i don’t want to know.
vagina. i think that has something to do with a hurricane or flood. a bankruptcy? or is it a warm hollow? there’s one — hollow. “i lost jimmy-earl down by ther holler.”
“yer did?”
“yeh i deihd!”
no idea what a hollow is. show me a picture of a draw and a hollow, i’d be stumped. oak tree? lark? maple? lost. i am shamed when out hunting with country boys. trying to get my first deer, a seasoned woodsman helping me was trying to direct my blind eyes to a deer about 400 yards away. he was naming one natural landmark after another while i panicked, thinking, “but it was never so important in CS lewis books.”
yes, i am an efficiency freak in some things, perfectionist in others. that basically means i save a lot of time to waste on being a fool. apparently, i’m not the only efficiency freak. after a cross country job videotaping turkey hunters in the 80s, i was riding to the denver airport with one of the hunters and some hunter wives. he was a neurosurgeon in virginia, and a funny, intelligent guy. he and the wife of another hunter were talking about the landscape, and somebody mentioned a “butte”. somebody else, i think it was the doc, said, “what’s a butte?”
and out of the four people in the car, i don’t think anybody knew with confidence. but a “crested butte”? oh sure, i could tell you what one of those is.
same thing with names when reading. i’ve talked with many people who do what i’ve done since i was a tyke. if you’re reading a book and a strange name comes up that you don’t want to sound out, you just assign a mental primary key to it, like a database. it’s blehhhhh. and then his brother with the even more confusing name is crahhh. like that. kinda makes it a bummer when you go see lord of the rings and have to hear some dumbass actually say the word for real. you jerk — that guy’s name was “blehhhhh”!
it’s the great thing about reading. you can skip. do you really care in some novel that the bedstand was rich oak, with a burnished finish that made his drink slide for days, like down the bar at a five-star hotel? (that was pretty bad, huh?) i don’t. i don’t care that there was a large promenade outside of twelve oaks. skip. skip. skip.
did anybody really read the 56-page monolog in atlas shrugged? not me! skim skim skim skip skip skim skip. well, i do know a guy who says he read that speech, but he was probably just trying to make me mad, since i told him to not.
i remember when i first discovered lewrockwell.com. i would read many of the articles intently. so much of it was new to me. within a year, i was a skim pro. i often wondered, of the emails i’d get in reaction to articles, how many people read the whole thing. one guy i’m pretty sure read one of my articles, because he gave me a complete rundown of everywhere he thought i’d screwed up (probably 25 places at least). almost wish i’d had a blog then, so i could have asked him for permission to publish it.
back in the CS lewis days though, i savored almost every word. even in high school. i remember devouring that cliche opus war and peace. what tight, meaningful dialog that had in my translation (think i still have that). those were the days when i was looking to talk like a smoking jacket asshole. in high school i read war and peace specifically so i could say i’d read it. i wasn’t prepared for what happened though, when about 100 pages in i couldn’t put it down. what the cliche war and peace snobs won’t tell you is that it’s a helluva soap opera. good stuff. sexy too. guys my age (42) marrying knockout 16-year-old girls. if i recall correctly, i think the main female character was engaged at 14. well, it was 14 or 16, i think. guess i need to read it again. page flipper. tolstoy, you badass.
there’s another russian author i’d mention, but that would get me talking about the name of this blog, and this is too rambling already.
AS I LEFT the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom’s cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit. The flat heath which spread out before me (for the village lies all behind and to the north of the station) looked an ordinary heath. The gloomy five-o’clock sky was such as you might see on any autumn afternoon. The few houses and the clumps of red or yellowish trees were in no way remarkable. Who could imagine that a little farther on in that quiet landscape I should meet and shake by the hand a man who had lived and eaten and drunk in a world forty million miles distant from London, who had seen this Earth from where it looks like a mere point of green fire, and who had spoken face to face with a creature whose life began before our own planet was inhabitable?
do you want to be a professional writer? there are worse learning techniques than simply typing the writing of your heros.
in my next life i want to read books on tape. have wanted to do that for years now, but… i never did. no idea why, especially since i have all the recording equipment to do a good job with it, and some women have always liked my voice when i’m not talking like a dork.
shall i read to you, my dear? i will convey gently what happens to Ransom on Perelandra. put your ear close to my mouth for a while. then you can make me breakfast and…
i need to find a rich divorcee to bang.
March 25th, 2006 at 16:55
When Perelandra was translated into Portugeuse, the dedication was translated as “To Some Wanton Ladies”.
March 25th, 2006 at 17:30
i googled the phrase before posting, and saw that claim. seemed to be all from the same person, but i’m not sure.