They Saw The Palace?
"And so," he said, "when her two sisters had seen the beautiful palace and been feasted and given gifts, they--""They saw the palace?"
"Stranger, you are hindering the sacred story. Of course they saw the palace. They weren't blind. And then--"
It was as if the gods themselves had first laughed, and then spat, in my face. So this was the shape the story had taken. You may say, the shape the gods had given it. For it must be they who had put it into the old fool's mind or into the mind of some other dreamer from whom he'd learned it. How could any mortal have known of that palace at all? That much of the truth they had dropped into someone's mind, in a dream, or an oracle, or however they do such things. That much; and wiped clean out the very meaning, the pith, the central knot, of the whole tale. Do I not do well to write a book against them, telling what they have kept hidden? Never, sitting on my judgement seat, had I caught a false witness in a more cunning half-truth. For if the true story had been like their story, no riddle wold have been set me; there would have been no guessing and no guessing wrong. More than that, it's a story belonging to a different world, a world in which the gods show themselves clearly and don't torment men with glimpses, nor unveil to one what they hide from another, nor ask you to believe what contradicts your eyes and ears and nose and tongue and fingers. In such a world (is there such? it's not ours, for certain) I would have walked aright. The gods themselves would have been able to find no fault in me. And now to tell my story as if I had had the very sight they had denied me...is it not as if you told a cripple's story and never said he was lame, or told how a man betrayed a secret but never said it was after twenty hours of torture? And I saw all in a moment how the false story would grow and spread and be told all over the earth; and I wondered how many of the other sacred stories are just such twisted falsities as this.
~C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, Ch. 21, (1956)
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*throws arms around Ammi* Ammi!!! So nice to see you. Long time since I've heard from you!
You just HAVE to read Till We Have Faces. I read it for the first time just recently, and I couldn't put it down. I think it is one of Lewis's best books.
Thanks for the link to Chesterton. I'll be sure to check it out.
It is an astonishingly good book, but I have to admit that I didn't really 'get' it until the third reading. The first part of the story is a straightforward argument/accusation against the gods (the protagonist is pagan). The argument is very convincing and got me for a while because I didn't make any sense of the second part. It is a good thing for me the story is so brilliant I kept re-reading.
Okay, I'm saying this here because I'm apparently too verbose for the Tagboard.
Re: The subscription thing
You need a blog aggregator. What it does is, sits on your desktop and when a blog you subscribe to has a post, it appears in your aggregator. That way you don't have to keep visiting a dozen blogs a dozen times a day checking for updates. I've never used one since I've only had dial-up and it only makes sense for an always-on broadband connection. So I couldn't direct you to a good one. It's kind of like a wire service for blogs.
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