Literature

Authors

• Dante: "In that part of the book of my memory...there is a saying 'Here beginneth the new life."

Opening line of Dante's Vita Nuova (The New Life), trans. by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I first heard this quoted by the holographic doctor in Star Trek: Voyager.

Michael Palmer's comments in his Preface to the above translation:
"...layers of text of varying hues & degrees of opacity." So visual!

Topics

• Myth:

Notes: C.S.Lewis

Re. Myth & Universal Truths:

“In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction. At this moment, for example, I am trying to understand something very abstract indeed—the fading, vanishing of tasted reality as we try to grasp it with the discursive reason. Perhaps I have made heavy weather of it. But if I remind you, instead, of Orpheus & Eurydice, how he was suffered to lead her by the hand but, when he turned round to look at her, she disappeared, what was merely a principle becomes imaginable. You may reply that you never till this moment attached that ‘meaning’ to that myth. Of course not. You are not looking for an abstract ‘meaning’ at all. If that was what you were doing, the myth would be for you no true myth but a mere allegory.¹ You were not knowing, but tasting; but what you were tasting turns out to be a universal principle. The moment we state this principle, we are admittedly back in the world of abstraction. It is only while receiving the myth as a story that you experience the principle concretely.

When we translate we get abstraction—or rather, dozens of abstractions. What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), &, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level. Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley; in hac valle abstractionis.² Or, if you prefer, myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular.”³

1 Here Lewis is using ‘allegory’ to mean ‘naïve allegory’ as Kellog presents it in his Preface to the Fairie Queene. There is, apparently, at least to Kellog & others, a more subtle, complex (or sophisticated?)form of allegory. I’ve only begun to explore that. It does appear, however, that there is a form of story-telling that combines the 2, combines the power of myth w/ the symbolism of allegory without violating the experience, the mythic impact of the story. The Odyssey seems to fit this description, the story of Perseus & Medusa, various Star Trek’s & other SciFi’s at their best, also (S.T.:TNG’s “Remember Me,” “John Doe,” & “Farpoint” come to mind, also StarGate’s story of Daniel in the Sarcophagus w/ his friends in the mines, which reminds me of another S.T., “Cloud City(?)”—a similar meaning in a different story).

2 “In this valley of separation.”

3 C.S.Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, The Grand Miracle & Other Essays, “Myth Became Fact,” (New York, Ballantine Books, 1970), pp. 40-41.

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