Saturday, January 14
Miscellaneous Thought
I wonder if this renaissance of popular interest in some of the work of the Inklings (in the form of the Lord of the Rings movies and Narnia) might be an opportunity to introduce the world to other dimensions of their world--like Chesterton, who certainly influenced Lewis, or the fiction of their neglected friend Charles Williams, who seems to have become the unfortunate José Carreras of the group. If you want conspiracy, intrigue and the Holy Grail, one could easily film Williams' War in Heaven rather than resorting to the slapdash Da Vinci Code. Certainly, The Man Who Was Thursday could be, in the right hands, a visual romp far wilder than The Matrix or any wanna-be Jules Verne adventure, and one with greater philosophical clarity.
Of course, in the right hands is the key: it took me years to figure out what Chesterton was getting at (even a detailed reading of the work can misunderstand it as pantheist--I seem to remember seeing a Forward added by the author in a later edition intended to refute charges of this, but it's missing from my copy), and only after cheating by reading the annotated edition by Martin Gardener did I finally get the point. Perhaps better to wait for more intelligent times and more capable artists.
Of course, in the right hands is the key: it took me years to figure out what Chesterton was getting at (even a detailed reading of the work can misunderstand it as pantheist--I seem to remember seeing a Forward added by the author in a later edition intended to refute charges of this, but it's missing from my copy), and only after cheating by reading the annotated edition by Martin Gardener did I finally get the point. Perhaps better to wait for more intelligent times and more capable artists.
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
