My Summer Reading so Far

Alice is completely read and I adored it. Definitely something I will revisit often. I'm going to try to pick up a Lewis Carroll biography if I can before the summer ends. I really want to acquire more insight into his life and background. Next on the agenda is Surprised by Joy written by C.S. Lewis. I have begun to read it and so far, it reads like any other autobiography. I am so encouraged by his wit as I hope to absorb and master it for my writing eventually. Here is one of my favorite excerpts so far:

"To this general happiness there was one exception. I remember nothing earlier than the terror of certain dreams. It is a very common trouble at that age, yet it still seems to me odd that petted and guarded childhood should so often have in it a window opening on what is hardly less than Hell. My bad dreams were of two kinds. those about specters and those about insects. The second were, beyond comparison, the worse; to this day I would rather meet a ghost than a tarantula. And to this day I could almost find it in my heart to rationalize and justify my phobia. As Owen Barfield once said to me, 'The trouble about insects is that they are like French locomotives - they have all the works on the outside.' The works - that is the trouble. Their angular limbs, their jerky movements, their dry, metallic noises, all suggest either machines that have come to life or life degenerating into mechanism. You may add that in the hive and the anthill we see fully realized the two things that some of us most dread for our own species - the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective."

I don't believe that his irrational (but eloquently and rather rationally described) fear of insects gives much, if any, insight into that which lead up to his conversion but that remains to be revealed. It's just interesting to think that someone so incomprehensibly afraid of insects is one of my greatest heroes. Maybe that gives some kind of insight into my condition and state of mind more than anything else.