[Surprised by Joy] Cardboard Castles

Narnia
Originally uploaded by Sethicus.

You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.

One of the things that I have learned since coming to Torrey is the constructive power of the imagination. I have often been accused by my teachers of having an overactive imagination (which often bore fruit during class), which led to my natural belief that my imagination was a disaster needing to be squelched. My mother was instrumental in encouraging me to focus my imagination in such a way as to harness the productive energies therein. She would encourage me to draw planes and trains and cars, to tell stories that would defy physical and biological principles, and to soil my clothes in our backyard sandpit building all sorts of tracks and arenas for my imagination to run wild.

Lewis continues on in Surprised by Joy to remark how void of poetry his early worlds of invention were. Sadly, I find that my has always been deficient in the area of poetry, except that I have come to cherish "that which is poetic" in many significant ways. Whenever I discover a friend with one of those souls which bleeds poetry, she (as is usually the case) instantly gains an influence in my life. I tend to revere that which I do not possess, and I likewise revere those whose souls are full of the poetry that I do not comprehend. As I remember, it was Vanauken's A Severe Mercy (given me courtesy of Kathryn Jones) that first clued me in to the power of poetry over the soul. After that, it was the Torrey Theatre experience that showed me that my soul was not dead to the moving power of art and beauty, as I had previously suspected to be the case.

Thus endeth the first reflection on the dozen or so Lewis books I will be reading in the coming months.