i can't even begin to talk about how much this book moved me once i sat down and gave it the time it deserved. i'm going to write about this book; professionally, i mean. or as close as professionally as an undergraduate can get. academically maybe, but it is a bit more than that. there is no grade riding on this, no deadline, just my own personal motivation to do it right. clive staples is one of the few writers i know who just gets it, who sees the world the way that i see it. okay, for all of you out there who just associate him with narnia, feel free to check out right now. granted, The Last Battle means a whole hell of a lot to me, the authorial voice really comes out in his philosophical works and in the Perelandra series. until this book, the closest i ever felt to C.S. Lewis was probably in The Problem of Pain (you can read more about that here). there is something about him and i can't articulate it (at least not yet), which oddly enough, brings me to my point.
the complaint was the answer. to have heard myself making it was to be answered. lightly men talk of saying what they mean. often when he was teaching me to write in greek the fox would say, "child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." a glib saying. when the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. till that world can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? how can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
