"Once upon a Wardrobe" by Patti Callahan

I hate to read names in novels and not be able to pronounce them. It slows me down, and I'm already a very slow reader. So I'm reading "Once upon a wardrobe" a novel by Patti Callahan for book club this afternoon (see, I told you I was slow) and there is a character named Padraig. By p. 142, I'm just calling him Patrick because phonetically (pad-rag) it sort of sounds like that to me. So I looked it up. Close enough. Podric

https://youtu.be/ffUVEq8xTsE?si=5bxfKzgJPgzNxyrt

I finished the book at 11:15, fixed lunch, we ate at 11:30, and after lunch I summarized the entire novel for Bob, whose eyes were starting to cross. But I should be able to remember it by 1 p.m.

S4E98 – AH – "After Hours" with Patti Callahan - Pints With Jack

Shadowlands, the movie

Monday evening at Lakeside we enjoyed the movie Shadowlands about C.S. Lewis and his wife Joy at Orchestra Hall (movie theatre) where I sat with Barbara Martin. It had been raining very hard, so my tarp was actually occupying the seat between us. Our book club had read a fictionalized account of Joy Davidson Gresham several years ago, but I wasn't terribly familiar with their story. I noticed that one son had been left out of the story of their friendship, marriage and her death. So last night at an art show I asked Barbara about it, and she told me of the unfortunate life of the older son David and why he was left out of the story. Today she sent me this link which explains a lot, in case you saw Shadowlands. Douglas Gresham, the stepson of Lewis, has had a very interesting life, and survived some very difficult times.

An Untold Tragedy: Douglas Gresham and C.S. Lewis’s Final Years – The European Conservative

C.S. Lewis tried to help his schizophrenic step-son | The Bridgehead
I wrote about Douglas and his life with Lewis in a 2017 blog. Collecting My Thoughts: C. S. Lewis’ son Douglas Gresham

Plot of Shadowlands (from Wikipedia)

"In the 1950s, the reserved, middle-aged bachelor C. S. Lewis is an Oxford University academic at Magdalen College and author of The Chronicles of Narnia series of children's books. He meets the married American poet Joy Davidman Gresham and her young son Douglas on their visit to England, not yet knowing the circumstances of Gresham's troubled marriage.

What begins as a formal meeting of two very different minds slowly develops into a feeling of connection and love. Lewis finds his quiet life with his brother Warnie disrupted by the outspoken Gresham, whose uninhibited behaviour sharply contrasts with the rigid sensibilities of the male-dominated university. Each provides the other with new ways of viewing the world.

Initially, their marriage is one of convenience, a platonic union designed to allow Gresham to remain in England. But when she is diagnosed with cancer, deeper feelings surface, and Lewis' beliefs are tested as his wife tries to prepare him for her death."

C.S. Lewis on the times we live in

Written by the famed Anglican author C.S. Lewis in 1948. Very applicable to today:

“How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of chronic pain, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways.

It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about death. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”

Living Bulwark (swordofthespirit.net)

C.S. Lewis quote for our times

 This makes me think of the pro-abortion team of Biden-Harris and their threat of a national lockdown, and their entire method of governing, for that matter.

Today’s lecture on C.S. Lewis

Dr. Jerry Root of Wheaton College is the main speaker and preacher of the week at Lakeside August 12-16. He’s been studying C.S. Lewis since 1970 and is a delightful speaker filled with humorous stories and erudition.  In fact.  I really couldn’t take notes, I was so deep in his sentences—up to my knees at least.  But I did note that he mentioned Lewis enjoyed Boethius, and that Root had never heard of him until studying Lewis.  Boethius, said Root, was also an influence in every field of endeavor in the western world, we almost can’t move ahead without examining him.  So when I went home for lunch, I looked him up to see why everyone from Chaucer to Tolkien,  Aquinas to Shakespeare to Lewis read him. Here’s what I found at Ligonier ministries site. https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/boethius-philosopher-theologian/
“One of the least known but most significant Christian thinkers of antiquity was a sixth-century layman called Anicius Manlius Torquatus Severinus Boethius, or simply Boethius for short. The son of an old senatorial family, he lived between 480 and 524, being consul (a largely ceremonial political position) in 510, and then Master of the Offices at the Ostrogothic court in Ravenna in 522. [He was tried and executed for treason.] He was later canonized by the Catholic Church as Saint Severinus.
Boethius’ contributions to Western civilization in general and theology in particular are wide-ranging and significant. Indeed, he adapted a number of Greek works into Latin, probably including Euclid’s Geometry; these works laid the ground work for the so-called quadrivium, or group of four academic disciplines (music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy). The quadrivium combined with the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic), to form the seven liberal arts . . . , the seven liberal arts became the foundation of Western higher education; thus, the work of Boethius was, in the long run, instrumental in profoundly shaping the whole concept of university education.”
“. . . Theologically, Boethius’ great contributions lie in his five Opuscula Sacra (Little Sacred Works) and his magnum opus, The Consolation of Philosophy. The former group of five little tracts, the Opuscula Sacra, covers issues relating to the doctrines of the Trinity, the nature of the Catholic Faith, and the Incarnation. The most significant of these are undoubtedly nos. 1–3, which deal with the Trinity. Given the fact that Boethius’ work on the Trinity was to be a standard textbook in the Middle Ages, and that writing a commentary upon it was to be a basic part of theological education, the importance of his work in this area cannot be overestimated.”
Carl Olson at Catholic Answers on C.S. Lewis and Boethius. https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/true-happiness-and-the-consolation-of-philosophy
The influence on music and art. https://www.verdigrismusic.org/blog/boethius
Much of this lecture I heard this morning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycWQMJxLPoM

C. S. Lewis’ son Douglas Gresham

Douglas Gresham being interviewed about his step-father, C.S. Lewis:  “I mean, for Jack (Lewis) to even imagine a world in which millions upon millions of babies are slaughtered before they’re even born, simply because they’re too young to defend themselves, that sort of horror Jack would have attributed to hell, not to earth at all. So I think he’d find it difficult to live in today’s world as many of us who care about people and care about the world do. But it’s difficult for me to put words into his mouth, of course, I wouldn’t try to do so.”

Following his mother’s death in 1960 and Lewis’ death in 1963, Douglas and his brother David inherited Lewis’ estate.  Douglas Gresham is an actor, writer, produces films, lives in Malta and is a Christian.  His brother David is an orthodox Jew.  http://bustedhalo.com/features/busted-douglas-gresham

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/12/17/surprised-by-c-s-lewis-why-his-popularity-endures/comment-page-5/  Scroll down for photo of Gresham. “Gresham, though, snorts at the suggestion that his mother damaged Lewis’ friendship with Tolkien. “It never happened,” he says. Gresham says that when he went to visit Lewis in the hospital during his last days, he saw Tolkien. Tolkien told him he could live with him if anything happened to Lewis, Gresham says.”