Excellent critical review of the life and work of C.S. Lewis in the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik. The "true believers" at National Review are up in arms because it isn't hagiographical in nature, but John Derbyshire recognizes that, far from being an attack on Lewis, it is a clear-eyed and wise appreciation of his appeal.
“Everything began with images,” Lewis wrote, admitting that he saw
his faun before he got his message. He came to Bethlehem by way of
Narnia, not the other way around. Whatever we think of the allegories
it contains, the imaginary world that Lewis created is what matters. We
go to the writing of the marvellous, and to children’s books, for
stories, certainly, and for the epic possibilities of good and evil in
confrontation, not yet so mixed as they are in life. But we go, above
all, for imagery: it is the force of imagery that carries us forward.
We have a longing for inexplicable sublime imagery, and particularly
for inexplicable sublime imagery that involves the collision of the
urban and the natural, the city and the sea. The image of the street
lamp in the snow in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”; the flock
of crying white birds and the sleeping Narnian lords at the world’s end
in “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”; the underground abode of the surviving
Narnian animals in “Prince Caspian,” part “Wind in the Willows” badger
hole and part French Resistance cellar; even the exiled horse’s
description of his lost Northern home in “The Horse and His Boy,”
called Narnia but so clearly a British composite (“Narnia of the
heathery mountains and the thymy downs, Narnia of the many rivers, of
the plashing glens, the mossy caverns and the deep forests”)—these are
why Lewis will be remembered.
For poetry and fantasy
aren’t stimulants to a deeper spiritual appetite; they are what we have
to fill the appetite. The experience of magic conveyed by poetry,
landscape, light, and ritual, is . . . an experience of magic conveyed
by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual. To hope that the conveyance
will turn out to bring another message, beyond itself, is the futile
hope of the mystic. Fairy stories are not rich because they are true,
and they lose none of their light because someone lit the candle. It is
here that the atheist and the believer meet, exactly in the realm of
made-up magic. Atheists need ghosts and kings and magical uncles and
strange coincidences, living fairies and thriving Lilliputians, just as
much as the believers do, to register their understanding that a narrow
material world, unlit by imagination, is inadequate to our experience,
much less to our hopes.
