Of other worlds

I have not read all of the pieces in this book, but what I've read is fantastic. I will make some comments about the pieces I most enjoyed, and list some quotations from each.

"On Stories" is Lewis' quintessential essay about, well, the "story-ness" of stories; it may be likened to Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-Stories," which despite its narrower scope, covers many of the same ideas. Lewis describes the two different ways in which stories are enjoyed by different people, which is really a distinction of the people and not the stories themselves: Through "excitement" or through the greater atmosphere created by the story. He prefers the latter. A few great quotes, completely out of context:

(After describing a scene from [b:Last of the Mohicans|38296|The Last of the Mohicans|James Fenimore Cooper|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320511322s/38296.jpg|2064030]) "Dangers, of course, there must be: how else can you keep a story going? But they must...be Redskin dangers. The 'Redskinnery' was what really mattered."

"Nature has that in her which compels us to invent giants: and only giants will do."

"No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty...."

(After referring to the story of Oedipus and [b:The Hobbit|5907|The Hobbit|J.R.R. Tolkien|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328953407s/5907.jpg|1540236]) "We have just had set before our imagination something that has always baffled the intellect: we have seen how destiny and free will can be combined, even how free will is the modus operandi of destiny. The story does what no theorem can quite do."

"The more imagination the reader has, being an untrained reader, the more he will do for himself."

"The real theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state or quality."

"In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive."

In "On Criticism," Lewis admirably touches on one of my great pet peeves (along with another problems of literary critique): Those people who claim to know what the author intended. "In fact," he says, "most of what we call critical writing contains quite a lot of things beside evaluation." He goes on to name those things and show why they are bad. Some more discontextual quotations:

"I think fatuous praise from a manifest fool may hurt more than any depreciation."

"Ignorant as [an author] may be of his book's value, he is at least an expert on its content."

"To have read an author who affects one like a bad smell or a toothache is hard work."

"...the meaning of a book is the series or system of emotions, reflections, and attitudes produced by reading it." [cf. the penultimate quote from "On Stories" referenced above]

"Where [the critic] seems to me most often to go wrong is in the hasty assumption of an allegorical sense..." (Tolkien also disliked hasty allegory)

I originally read "After Ten Years" in college (in the fall of 1998, I believe...) in [b:The Dark Tower and Other Stories|22548|The Dark Tower and Other Stories|C.S. Lewis|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328876445s/22548.jpg|14571577] and loved it immediately. I was immensely intrigued with the idea of Helen's fading beauty, and it inspired me to write a rather poorly constructed song called "Yellow-haired Man," which I still melancholically sing in my echoing boudoir from time to time. It's too bad Lewis never finished it; I think it could have rivaled [b:Till We Have Faces|17343|Till We Have Faces A Novel of Cupid and Psyche|C.S. Lewis|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328875067s/17343.jpg|2072983].