What Do They Teach Them at These Schools?
"Well, sir, if things are real, they're there all the time.""Are they?" said the Professor; and Peter didn't know quite what to say.
"But there was no time," said Susan. "Lucy had no time to have gone anywhere, even if there was such a place. She came running after us the very moment we were out of the room. It was less than minute, and she pretended to have been away for hours."
"That is the very thing that makes her story so likely to be true," said the Professor. "If there really a door in this house that leads to some other world (and I should warn you that this is a very strange house, and even I know very little about it) - if, I say, she had got into another world, I should not be at a surprised to find that the other world had a separate time of its own; so that however long you stay there it would never take up any of our time. On the other hand, I don't think many girls of her age would invent that idea for themselves. If she had been pretending, she would have hidden for a reasonable time before coming out and telling her story."
"But do you really mean, sir," said Peter, "that there could be other worlds - all over the place, just round the corner - like that?"
"Nothing is more probable," said the Professor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, "I wonder what they do teach them at these schools."
~C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
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On this day:
1955 Lewis is elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
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Doesn't the Prof come across as the antithesis of all those stories where the children cannot talk to the adults available 'because they'd never believe us' so the children have to tackle the problem themselves?
Here we have an adult having to convince the children of something that seems most unlikely. And doesn't he argue it well? Esp the thing about the time difference.
Yes! Here you have the voice of reason, and he is saying "sure, nothing is more likely than worlds 'round every corner". It makes the story all that much more true to the reader too.
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