December 9, 2005

• Fairy Tales
  
  “It’s all in Plato.”
  — C. S. Lewis 

  Talking Narnia to Your Neighbors
  ChristianityToday.com
  by Keri Wyatt Kent

  “The summer Lindy Lowry was 20,
  she rejected the Christian faith
  she’d had since childhood–
  dismissing it as a fairy tale
  that made no sense
  in a world full of evil.”

  Tales from
  The New Yorker:

        
  

  NEW FRONTIERS
  

    “Brokeback Mountain” and

  “The Chronicles of Narnia.”

    by ANTHONY LANE

  Brokeback Mountain:

  “This slow and stoic movie, hailed as a gay Western, feels neither gay nor especially Western….”
  
  The Chronicles of Narnia:

  “If the movie has to forgo Lewis’s narrative tone, with its grimly
  Oxonian blend of the bluff and the twee (‘And now we come to one of the
  nastiest things in this story’), that is fine by me. And, if there is
  Deep Magic, as Lewis called it, in his tale, it resides not in the
  springlike coming of Aslan but in the dreamlike, compacted poetry of
  Lewis’s initial inspiration—the sight of a faun….”

  Concluding Unscientific Postscript
  

  From The Circle is Unbroken,
  a web page in memory of
  June Carter Cash:

  Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (“Q”), quoting Socrates–

  “By Hera,” says Socrates, “a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents! This clearing, with the agnus castus
  in high bloom and fragrant, and the stream beneath the tree so
  gratefully cool to our feet! Judging from the ornaments and statues, I
  think this spot must be sacred to Acheloüs and the Nymphs.” 

  See, too, Q’s quoting of Socrates’s prayer to Pan, as well as the cover of the May 19, 2003, New Yorker:

   

    For a discussion of the music that
  Pan is playing (today’s site music),
  see my entry of Sept. 10, 2002,
  “The Sound of Hanging Rock.”

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