Why English...?

When I saw the Chronicles of Narnia on the syllabus for this class, I admit I simply stared in disbelief. I first heard them read aloud by my mother as a six or seven year old. I think I read most of them again at various points in elementary school. And before this summer, I hadn’t touched a Narnia book since 8th grade, when I took an online literature class on the series. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about them much since then, except to remember, fondly and in frustration, how vastly superior they were to the movies that have come out over the last few years. I still have all seven of my hardcover copies on my bookshelf at home, and I suppose I had it in the back of my mind that I would read them to my children someday. I never even dreamed I’d study them in college. 

Yet here I am, having turned the last page of The Last Battle for the fourth time, and now I’m supposed to write a journal entry about the experience. Trying to decide on a topic, I found myself mulling over all kinds of intellectual, scholarly angles to explore. Obviously, this time through the books I caught quite a bit I’d missed on my first three go-rounds. Which aspect of Lewis’s stories to critique and analyze with my newly acquired college-age brilliance? But somewhere in that process I started thinking about my previous experiences with the series. I started thinking about what it means to grow up with literature. When Lucy first encounters Aslan in Prince Caspian, they have an intriguing exchange that, not so surprisingly, meant little to me as a child:

“AsIan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.” 

    “That is because you are older, little one,” answered he. 

    “Not because you are?” 

    “I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

The Narnia books are like Aslan in this way. They have grown with me. Now I am big. And, like looking through an old diary, reading them has reminded me of what it was like to be small, and everything in between. 

I grew up as a reader. By the time my brother Phil, three years my senior, entered preschool, I was already an expert at sounding out the first level of Bob Books. But truth be told, instrumental as Bob Books may be, they lack, shall we say, the substance of the kind found in more sophisticated works of literature. So at that young age, I more often discovered inspiration on the page by looking over my mother’s shoulder as she read aloud to the family, listening carefully to the words as I scanned the pictures and thereby forming a complete image in my mind. Hearing the same stories over and over, that image would often become so solidified that I could recall both words and pictures without the book in front of me, sometimes much to my parents’ amusement. Prime example: I could never understand, three year old that I was, their silent chuckles when I reached the line “uncircumcised Philistine” during a recitation of my favorite Bible story, David and Goliath. 

As time went on, the books we read grew both in length and in words per page. Fear not, we didn’t just forget about such classics as The Story of Babar, Where the Wild Things Are, The Velveteen Rabbit, and countless others. But in addition to the odd storybook, my mother introduced us to the new and fantastical journeys of Dorothy and Toto, Laura Ingalls, the four Pevensies, and many others. These lengthy series not only captured my imagination—they held it every night for weeks and months on end. Gone, and somewhat sadly at that, were the pictures on every page. But I soon found that my mind was capable of making up its own. And here opened a whole new world—a world without limits, not confined to the page of a book, but as boundless and expansive as the depths of my imagination. I found that I was no longer an appreciative and increasingly sleepy spectator at our nightly literary rendez-vous. I became part of the stories themselves, walking along the yellow-bricked road, splashing playfully in the waters of Plum Creek, charging the ranks of the White Witch... all while lying enraptured on the carpet of the living room floor. 

As I grew older and more confident in my reading skills, I would devour book after book in my free time in addition to my mother’s offerings. The sheer number of these volumes is a bit staggering; in just two months during third grade I churned through all 58 of the original Hardy Boys mysteries at a rate of one per day. The principle of “quality, not quantity” hadn’t quite sunken in yet. I would stay up hours after my bedtime engrossed in one epic narrative or other, even going so far as to use a shoebox with a peephole cut in it to hide my lamplight from my parents. I still have a whole bookshelf of those novels that played such a key role in my elementary school years, with such titles as The Golden Goblet, Where the Red Fern Grows, My Side of the Mountain, and The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. And I wouldn’t just read a book and put it behind me. The volumes that I particularly enjoyed I would reread three or four times, just for the heck of it. I also took pride in revisiting, “for myself,” many of the books I’d heard read out loud. I made many return trips to Oz, Narnia, and the early American frontier. 

I adored those stories. They offered me an escape from my by turns uneventful and emotionally trying life as the peacekeeping middle child with three rather unruly siblings. I imagined I was the main character in these adventures, my favorite fantasy being that of a runaway with a pet falcon living off the land in the Catskill Mountains. Truth be told, I even contemplated hollowing out one of the hemlocks on our property in the woods of northeast Pennsylvania, moving in, and seeing how long I lasted. Some would criticize such role-playing as creating an unhealthy alternative reality to avoid having to deal with real life. And they could be right. But I wouldn’t trade those hours of running through the forest with my golden retriever in pursuit of an imaginary raccoon for anything in the world. To be honest, a part of me misses the blithe innocence of those afternoons of fanciful diversions all those years ago. 

But grow up I did, and by the time I reached middle school I was hungry for more challenging fare. Indeed, by the end of 8th grade I had accomplished some rather ambitious literary feats, including but not limited to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Montgomery’s entire Anne of Green Gables series. It was quality, and not just quantity, I desired now. I have my parents and older brother to thank for providing a never-ending stream of “good books,” from those early childhood classics they read as bedtime stories to volumes they had themselves studied in high school and college, and, truth be told, handed over much more skeptically. This hunger for good, enriching novels continued all the way through sophomore year, and the titles I accumulated on my bookshelf are far too numerous to list.

When I reached junior year, I left home and with it home school, making the transition to boarding life at a college preparatory school in Stony Brook, Long Island. At the Stony Brook School, I found I didn’t have to ask for books. I was kept more than busy enough with required reading for English class. Not that I was complaining—thanks to my teacher Mr. Morley, I was now given the opportunity to not only read great literature, but to learn to discuss it and write about it as well. The time of role-playing was long over, but a new sense of excitement came from the analysis of books that I couldn’t just read, that I had to actually work to understand. From Shakespeare to Milton to Dickens to Waugh, we students in Honors English 11 looked beyond the plot to the themes that lay beneath—and I, simply by paying attention, became a fuller person because of them. It was this class, reinforced by Mr. Johnson’s excellent AP English course the following year, that made me want to be an English major. 

But my love for literature started far earlier, before I knew what “analyze” meant, before I’d any idea who Frank L. Baum or C.S. Lewis were, back when I thought English and American were two distinct languages. Whether I knew it or not (and I didn’t), those books I read as a child taught me more about humans and human nature and the nature of the world we live in than any science or history class I’ve taken since. If I’ve taken anything from this last visit to Narnia, it’s a profound sense of gratitude to authors like Baum, Lewis, Milne, Grahame, and so many others who deigned to apply their brilliant minds to the creation of children’s stories that are profound enough to affect their young readers, often for life, without them even realizing it. Lewis once said, “A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.” If that’s true, and I think most would agree that it is, all I can say after this rereading of his Chronicles is that his children’s stories are some of the very best. 

Where Am I?!

Hello everyone,

Don't worry, I'm not amnesiac, or waking up from a bad dream, or experiencing a sudden bout of homesickness. The title's more what I'm imagining all of you are wondering, seeing as I haven't posted anything but boring intellectual stuff and a few sentimental poems since we got to Durham. Lame, I know. I've been letting my inner Lit major take over. 

In all seriousness though, I'm not sure how best to fill you in on the last three weeks without dragging on forever. Let's put these summarizing skills to the test, shall we? 

Durham: huge, first-floor, single room. Classes again = homework. Really bad cafeteria food. Coffee at Esquires every day... may or may not have made special friends with a certain male barista. 4th of July = throwing tea in the river + singing the national anthem. Two chapels with Wesley Hill (author of Washed and Waiting). Tour of Durham Cathedral, where they filmed part of Harry Potter. Got really bored one night and made a music video to Sk8r Boi. Good week. 

Ambleside: LAKE DISTRICT!!! Absolutely gorgeous. Youth hostel food was better than St. Chad's (college @ Durham). William Wordsworth's house. Grasmere gingerbread. Hike through the fells (see pic). Euchre by the lake. Saw Bridesmaids. Rented a rowboat / crossed the lake to see Wray Castle, among other things Beatrix Potter's vacation spot. Day out on the lake = got very tan. Best blueberry scones EVER. Homework / more Euchre. Saw Larry Crowne. One of the best weekends of my life.

Oxford (first 2 weeks): smaller single room. Very interesting bathroom setup. AMAZING food. Classes again = homework. Have read / will have read 18 books for this trip. Got to see Sam Lee + the Morleys! Three meals so far at The Eagle and Child (meeting place of the Inklings). Visited C.S. Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College (pronounced Maudlin). Harry Potter 7.2, opening day, IN the city Hogwarts was primarily filmed. Found the Oxford boathouses. Discovered Moo-Moo's milkshakes + Ben's Cookies + G&D's ice cream = I am getting fat. Ultimate Frisbee in University Park. Saw Tree of Life. Day trip to Stratford, home of William Shakespeare. Saw Macbeth (Royal Shakespeare Company). King James Bible exhibition at the Bodleian. Lots of souvenirs, lots of postcards, LOTS of Euchre. Yep yep yep!

Well, there you have it. Not a half bad sum-up. It's hard to believe how much we've done in the last six weeks. It's even harder to believe there are just two left. I'll try to be better at posting a variety of good stuff between now and the end! God bless, everybody.

Linnea

Absolution

The sight of a pale sun rising

Sending its reflection

Slowly out over the water

The sound of gentle waves lapping

As the tiny swells break

On the stony shore of memory

The knowledge that no matter what trouble

The world has gotten itself into now

The swift-flowing current will, must go on

Must carry all the transgressions

And with them the triumphs

Of ten thousand years’ humanity

Following its course to the sea

Where it forfeits itself

And it is too deep for memory

Life in a River Town

Poets love rivers. Look up "river" on PoemHunter.Com and you will get twelve pages of results. 119 poems. In the anthology of London poems we read for my Poetry & Place class, somewhere around a third of the contents were inspired by the Thames. This is a tendency that has intrigued me ever since we started the course back in June -- the tendency of so many poets, ostensibly writing about a city, to select as their focus no man-made landmark, but the city's river itself. 

Take, for example, Edmund Spenser's famed "Prothalamion," a 180-line nuptial song written on the event of a double wedding of English nobles. Somewhat ironically, the marriage itself isn't really even mentioned until the final three stanzas. Interestingly enough, the theme the first seven focus on, and that serves to unite the poem in its entirety, is the river Thames. Spenser introduces the "silver streaming" river, "paynted all with variable flowers," in the first few lines, and ends each stanza ends by repeating the line, "Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song." The editor's note states, "Early and late, rivers run through the poetic landscape of Spenser's verse, watering and refreshing all that country." Why is Spenser, why are so many of the poets, so enchanted with the river as a source of inspiration?

Though I have never put it in words before, I think I may know. I grew up in a river town. Not just a town near a river, but a town that is in many ways defined by the river. Its name, appropriately enough, is Milford, called thus because it contains both a water-powered mill and a ford, as in shallow place to cross the river. The river, by the way, is the Delaware, and it has taught me, through personal experience, of the magic that called to Spenser, and to many of the other poets we've been reading. For a river is many things. It is at once a mode of transportation and an obstacle hindering transportation. It is a part of nature we imagine we have conquered, with our dams and bridges, but every now and then, it floods its banks and rips up foundations by their roots, tossing entire houses about like matchboxes. 

That might sound melodramatic to some, but I assure you it's no exaggeration. As I said, the Delaware has taught me many things, and one of them is to respect the sheer power of water. For every year, around mid-March, the same river that I swam in on hot summer days, skipped rocks on as I licked at ice cream cones, and drove across without a second thought on my way to New York or New Jersey turned into a raging, muddy, debris-filled icy torrent, and anyone who knew better stayed away from the banks until the current resumed a more normal flow. But some years, the combination of snow melt and heavy rains turn this torrent into a full-fledged flood. I'll never forget the sight of porches, trailers, and complete houses hurling down the river and smashing into bits on bridge pilings. Water, like God himself, gives life and takes it away. 

But how it does give. There is a reason so many cities around the world are built on rivers. They offer protection, supply fish to eat and water to drink, irrigate crops, aid in transportation, facilitate trade and commerce, and are an endless source of entertainment. You could say they are the ultimate multitaskers. Yet they are also something else. Rivers are beautiful. We surround them with ugly buildings, we pollute them with our garbage, but there is in them an inherent pulchritude that we cannot spoil. The sight of a pale sun rising, sending its reflection slowly out over the water, the sound of gentle lapping as tiny waves break on the stony shore, the knowledge that no matter what trouble the world has gotten itself into, the swift-flowing current will go on, following its course to the sea... it's no wonder the poets are so enchanted. 

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it." - Norman Maclean

Till We Have Faces

This is the third time I have read Till We Have Faces. I have called it my favorite book for about half a dozen years now. When people ask why, I tell them, “Because I have never read anything like it. And because I love the ending.” Both of these statements are true, and I suppose that together, they make a fairly decent “short answer” to a complicated question. But to be honest, I think itʼs a question Iʼve never fully answered, even to myself. This seems like an appropriate time to do just that.

1. I have never read anything like it.

No two books are the same. But some are pretty darn close. Original thought, at least in literature, has in large part given way to self-promotion and money-making. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “You donʼt write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.” If weʼre being completely honest, this doesnʼt appear to be true for the majority of published authors today. Lewis, on the other hand, had something to say, perhaps more so in Till We Have Faces than in any of his other works. For this story, which he published in his sixties, was one he had been toying with and mulling over and reevaluating since his teenage years. When a mind like Lewisʼs spends that much time on something, you pay attention to what he ends up saying about it.

Of course, I didnʼt know any of that backstory when I first read Faces as a thirteen year old. But even then I could tell, without a doubt, that this book was different. So what is it thatʼs so distinctly original about this novel? Well first, the premise itself: “a myth retold,” the cover states -- a revamping of the story of Cupid and Pysche. Only a writer as supremely knowledgeable and self-confident as Lewis would come up with the brilliant plan to improve on the Greeks.

But improve he does, and this leads into a second point: the character of Orual. I cannot think of a protagonist with whom the reader can sympathize more fully. Lewis transforms a periphery “evil stepsister” archetype into a supremely human heroine, whose honesty about the disappointment and tragedy of life and self cut straight to the core. Telling the tale from the perspective of one of the traditional villains, Lewis transforms the story from an enchanting but remote myth to a deeply moving narrative that fairly encapsulates the human experience.

Third and lastly, the religious complexity and ambiguity, which all but forces the most earnest thought and deliberation out of the reader. This sets the work apart not merely from Lewisʼs other writings, though it certainly does that, but from any work of narrative fiction I (and many far more qualified) know. Unlike the Narnia series, Faces is in no way an allegory, and cannot be construed as such. In fact, there is no direct presentation of Christianity at all. It says more about Christian faith by defining what it isnʼt than anything else. As the Fox says towards the end, “The way to the true gods is more like the house of Ungit . . . oh, itʼs unlike to, more unlike that we yet dream, but thatʼs the easy knowledge” (295). The hard knowledge is indeed far more difficult to ascertain. And I donʼt doubt that this was something Lewis not only understood, but fullyintended. For as he writes in The Abolition of Man, “You cannot go on ʻexplaining awayʼ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away” (99). Thus, as opposed to reasoning out Christian theology as he does in his numerous apologetic works, he chooses instead to simply touch on bits and pieces of it, with imagery and description perhaps more closely paralleled by the book of Revelation than anything else. But it is certainly no easy book to explain away. It is the kind that draws the reader in and holds him spellbound till long after the last page is turned. And Lewis defends this type of enchantment in Weight of Glory, saying “Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us” (45).

2. I love the ending.

The title Till We Have Faces is ambiguous at best, and like many good titles, only starts to make sense at the end of the story. I confess the first time I read it, I didnʼt understand it in the slightest. I only had some vague notion that it was beautiful. I still loved the book, which probably says something about its enchanting power, but imagine my sheer euphoric delight when upon my second read I, sophisticated sixteen year old that I was, uncovered so much more of the “deeper meaning.” It made me fall in love all over again, much the same way this last go-round has done through the academic approach itʼs forced me to take. Iʼm far from fully understanding the ending, and (again, much like the book of Revelation), the more I think about it, the more I come to realize this.

What, then, do I love about it so much? This is one of those times where I could ramble on forever, but for the sake of the assignment, Iʼll try to be succinct. I canʼt think of any piece of narrative fiction as brutally honest about human nature and specifically human selfishness as Orualʼs complaint against the gods on pages 290-293. “Lightly men talk of saying what they mean,” she states afterwards, knowing, as we do, that she has just done so. Itʼs a telling statement. What we actually think and feel and want we rarely, if ever, admit to anyone, even ourselves. For we are all fundamentally selfish beings, and what we crave is approval. We want to be told we are right, that our lives and actions are justified, that our motives are honest and our errors and flaws are not our fault. We see this no clearer than at the climax of Orualʼs rant, as she rambles, “I was my own, and Psyche was mine, and no one else had any right to her” (291).

This is a sobering subject. But it is only when we acknowledge these base desires, and more than that, come to realize how incredibly petty and unjustified they are, that we finally begin to know ourselves. And it is only once this happens that we can start to change. As Orual asks in one of the most intriguing sentences I have ever encountered, “How can [the gods] meet us face to face till we have faces” (294)? This change, the redemption that she undergoes, is by contrast one of the most beautiful subjects I could hope to explore. For even as Orual states, “ ʻI cannot hope for mercy,ʼ ” the Fox replies, “ ʻInfinite hopes--and fears--may both be yours. Be sure that, whatever else you get, you will not get justiceʼ ” (297). And she doesnʼt. For though she endures earthly punishment, her response upon realizing this is to exclaim, “ ʻOh, I give thanks. I bless the gods” (301), for she is able to see that it is indeed a blessing. And finally she is made beautiful at last, seeing herself for the first time in a relationship with, rather than in opposition to, the god she once thought to curse. She, and the reader along with her, understand for the first time what he meant when he told her, “ ʻYou also shall be Pysche.”

In this way, Till We Have Faces, in many ways one of the heaviest books I have ever read, becomes at its end one of the most hopeful and redemptive. I love it because, though I cannot claim to understand it, it quite simply resonates. As I said earlier, Lewis avoids making explicit statements on Christianity and instead leaves us with bits and pieces. In so doing, he also leaves us full of the wonder and mystery of our faith. We forget, for the time being, the logical, intellectual side of religion and remember, perhaps for the first time in a long time, that, as Pascal so eloquently put it, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”

Not A House

From the side it looked Careless, yet precise

Just a pretty house, Each and every pane

With church-like windows            Of glass, each roof tile

And a cupola, Appeared on paper,

Neat, cream-colored boards Made transportable

Set on rugged stone.                 By my kindly pen.

"I will capture you," “There now, I’ve got you,”

I whispered softly;                         I said from my seat

I set pen to page,                       Across the garden,

To write, no, to draw;                   Sticking my new sketch

To lend permanence                   Jauntily between

To the little house. The leaves of a book.

Scribbles took on shape, Getting up to leave,

Forming, bit by bit, I walked round the front;

The hedgerows, the trees,           My eye was caught

And a garden wall; By the cross on the door;

Then the house itself,                 “I am not a house,”

With church-like windows.            It said -- “God lives here.”

Explaining Explanation (And Failing)

Explanation is a funny thing. Or rather, man’s constant demand for it is funny. And I mean funny in the most tragic sense possible. 

The first question recorded in the Bible is in Genesis 3:1, where the serpent asks Eve, “ ‘Did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden?’ ” Any Sunday school child can finish the story from there, chronicling the back-and-forth between woman and snake, which culminates with that fateful bite from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the ultimate casting out of Man from Paradise. In the story of the Fall, anyway, curiosity did much more than kill the cat. 

Yet humans were clearly created to be inquisitive. This should require no proof beyond the way in which we have pushed and continue to push every conceivable boundary, leaving in our wake everything from the wheel to the printing press to the airplane to the internet. Indeed, God commanded us to “ ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground’ ” (Genesis 1:28). But there are clearly things we were not meant to know, or the forbidden fruit would not have existed in the first place. 

So where is the line? What questions are off limits? These, at least, are questions we don’t ask ourselves nearly enough. I don’t know who first said “There is no such thing as a stupid question,” but I’ve always found it to be one of the most ignorant axioms I’ve ever heard. Of course there are stupid questions. To not recognize this is more dangerous than we should like to realize or admit. In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis writes of man’s quest for knowledge, “The true object is to extend Man’s power to the performance of all things possible. He rejects magic because it does not work; but his goal is that of the magician” (95). It is our nature to seek an answer to everything, but do we ever stop to think whether there are things we ought not -- or, God forbid, cannot -- know? 

Well, we used to, I think. Back when we had a healthy respect for Nature and the All-Powerful Being people still believed existed behind it. Was this respect ever contorted into gross ignorance and superstition? Certainly, but at least we were humble enough to recognize our own fallibility. We were just as curious then; we had to be, or else how did we get from there to here? But we knew, better than we know now, that some things simply cannot -- and indeed, should not -- be explained. It is hard to know when we first started to violate these mysteries, but Lewis, writing in 1943, believes that this violation is approaching its climax. “The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won” (73). 

It never ceases to amaze me how much faith we humans have in our own capabilities. Reading these lectures of Lewis’s brought to mind portions of a speech I once memorized that illustrates this arrogance perfectly. It is John Steinbeck’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He states, “We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God. Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life and death of the whole world - of all living things. The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in Man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand. Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and wisdom we once prayed some deity might have. Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: in the end is the Word, and the Word is Man - and the Word is with Men.” 

Well, Lewis would agree with the first part. We have indeed usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God. But he would not see this as something to be proud of. For he almost laughs at the notion that “ ‘Man has Nature whacked’ ” (66), replying, “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument” (68). And he is not simply referring to the potential for one group of people to physically wipe out another (the atomic and nuclear technologies that Steinbeck is referencing in his speech were not yet invented in 1943), though that might have been at the back of his mind. Let us not forget, The Abolition of Man is a treatise on education, not on war or even on technology, and as such is less about control of the body than control of the mind. 

So what is dangerous about the way the mind of Man has developed? It is certainly not that we ask questions. As we have already established, God created us to be inquisitive. He also created us to get hungry -- that does not mean we should eat ourselves to death. Lewis was a big believer in the “golden mean.” That is, finding the virtuous path between two opposing sins. To stick to the food metaphor, we are not to starve, nor are we to be gluttons; we must satisfy our hunger and no more. Where, then, is the golden mean when it comes to explanations? It would be not merely sad, but sinful to totally neglect our inquisitive nature. But, as Lewis writes, “You cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it” (99). This, of course, begs the question, how far is too far? How should we know if what we are trying to see through is the last thing between us and transparence? 

And this is where I cannot find a concrete answer. It is hard even to know on which side it would be better to err. For I don’t want to put blinders on to the world and numb my mind to curiosity. To do so would be not to obey God but to obey Man, or at least that part of Man that should like nothing better than for me to stop questioning all that goes on around me. Lewis warns against this in his first lecture in this series. Nor do I want to turn into a skeptic who, because he cannot find an answer to everything, in the end cannot believe in anything. As Lewis concludes his final essay, “If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see” (99). I would in no way venture to disagree. But as Man increasingly moves toward total control over Man, it is hard to know how to find my way without turning into either slave master or slave.