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edenfallingJadis in the garden: separation from God is only a punishment if you believe in him.
[ETA: The AO3 crosspost and the ff.net crosspost are now up.]
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Heart's Desire
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"Come in by the gold gates or not at all," the garden's maker had written. And truly, there was no need to turn aside, walk a quarter-circle around the hilltop, and clamber over the wall, but Jadis was the Queen of Charn and she bowed to no one.
She would have the apple on her own terms, as she had earned everything else in her life.
The fruit was sharp and almost painfully sweet, with a metallic tang underneath that expanded to bitter and salt in the aftertaste. The juice was shockingly dark for such a fair-fleshed fruit. Jadis licked the red-brown stain from her hand and laughed.
Pure theatrics: the apple bled. Was that supposed to induce guilt or shame?
The Lion had made this world, she acknowledged, but she had been here at the making; her magic was thus woven deep into its earth and air, inseparable from its very fabric of being. Until this world died, the Lion must adjust his plans to account for her. And even after, she could continue -- if that simpering fool had learned to travel between the planes, surely so could she! And she would learn to cross directly, without the crutch of that horrible, drowning place between the worlds.
A breeze stirred the garden, swirling petals and scent from the tree. Jadis sneezed, and then nearly gagged on the rotting sweetness of the silvery perfume. Stumbling, she turned aside, holding her arms across her face as if to block the very air from attacking her.
The air stilled. The scent dissipated.
Jadis lowered her arms and clenched her free hand, seething. So. The Lion had fashioned a trap for those who defied him and ate the fruit unbidden. But even he could not stop the apple from performing its function; already she could feel new strength coursing through her blood and bones like a river of ice, scouring away her mortality.
She had forever, now. She had new magic to master, a new world to conquer, a new foe to destroy. If the Lion thought that a mere tree would defeat her or that length of days would lead her to despair, he was a fool, as her sister had been.
Jadis ran her tongue across her teeth, savoring the iron tang of immortality, and took another bite.
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Inspired by the 4/27/09![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
15_minute_fic word #108: hungry
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Near the end of The Magician's Nephew Aslan tells Digory and Polly that Jadis "has won her heart's desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want: they do not always like it."
I never believed him. First, people do not always get what they want; anyone who claims otherwise is engaging in sophistry or wishful thinking. Secondly, the sense I got of Jadis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was emphatically not of a woman mired in despair. Jadis is too practical to give in to despair or wallow in depressive introspection, and I am not at all sure she's even capable of misery; her emotional repertoire seems limited to anger, frustration, fear, hatred, pride, triumph, (self-)satisfaction, and sometimes a pure joy in skill and motion. Possibly also greed or covetousness, but I think even her ambition is more a surety that everything already does belong to her, and she just has to make people acknowledge that truth.
Jadis is evil, no two ways about it. She's selfish, cruel, and probably sociopathic -- other people are not real to her except as tools or obstacles. But length of days with an evil heart is only miserable if you know and care about your relative moral standing. If you don't -- and Jadis doesn't -- then length of days gives you time for everything you find pleasurable, like magic and conquest and fighting.
So with all due respect, I must disagree with Aslan (and therefore, more relevantly, with C. S. Lewis). :-)
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NOTICE! There is an extensive discussion in the comments on the Livejournal version of this post, which happened after I imported my journal to Dreamwidth. I think it is worth checking out.
[ETA: The AO3 crosspost and the ff.net crosspost are now up.]
---------------------------------------------
Heart's Desire
---------------------------------------------
"Come in by the gold gates or not at all," the garden's maker had written. And truly, there was no need to turn aside, walk a quarter-circle around the hilltop, and clamber over the wall, but Jadis was the Queen of Charn and she bowed to no one.
She would have the apple on her own terms, as she had earned everything else in her life.
The fruit was sharp and almost painfully sweet, with a metallic tang underneath that expanded to bitter and salt in the aftertaste. The juice was shockingly dark for such a fair-fleshed fruit. Jadis licked the red-brown stain from her hand and laughed.
Pure theatrics: the apple bled. Was that supposed to induce guilt or shame?
The Lion had made this world, she acknowledged, but she had been here at the making; her magic was thus woven deep into its earth and air, inseparable from its very fabric of being. Until this world died, the Lion must adjust his plans to account for her. And even after, she could continue -- if that simpering fool had learned to travel between the planes, surely so could she! And she would learn to cross directly, without the crutch of that horrible, drowning place between the worlds.
A breeze stirred the garden, swirling petals and scent from the tree. Jadis sneezed, and then nearly gagged on the rotting sweetness of the silvery perfume. Stumbling, she turned aside, holding her arms across her face as if to block the very air from attacking her.
The air stilled. The scent dissipated.
Jadis lowered her arms and clenched her free hand, seething. So. The Lion had fashioned a trap for those who defied him and ate the fruit unbidden. But even he could not stop the apple from performing its function; already she could feel new strength coursing through her blood and bones like a river of ice, scouring away her mortality.
She had forever, now. She had new magic to master, a new world to conquer, a new foe to destroy. If the Lion thought that a mere tree would defeat her or that length of days would lead her to despair, he was a fool, as her sister had been.
Jadis ran her tongue across her teeth, savoring the iron tang of immortality, and took another bite.
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Inspired by the 4/27/09
15_minute_fic word #108: hungry---------------------------------------------
Near the end of The Magician's Nephew Aslan tells Digory and Polly that Jadis "has won her heart's desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want: they do not always like it."
I never believed him. First, people do not always get what they want; anyone who claims otherwise is engaging in sophistry or wishful thinking. Secondly, the sense I got of Jadis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was emphatically not of a woman mired in despair. Jadis is too practical to give in to despair or wallow in depressive introspection, and I am not at all sure she's even capable of misery; her emotional repertoire seems limited to anger, frustration, fear, hatred, pride, triumph, (self-)satisfaction, and sometimes a pure joy in skill and motion. Possibly also greed or covetousness, but I think even her ambition is more a surety that everything already does belong to her, and she just has to make people acknowledge that truth.
Jadis is evil, no two ways about it. She's selfish, cruel, and probably sociopathic -- other people are not real to her except as tools or obstacles. But length of days with an evil heart is only miserable if you know and care about your relative moral standing. If you don't -- and Jadis doesn't -- then length of days gives you time for everything you find pleasurable, like magic and conquest and fighting.
So with all due respect, I must disagree with Aslan (and therefore, more relevantly, with C. S. Lewis). :-)
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NOTICE! There is an extensive discussion in the comments on the Livejournal version of this post, which happened after I imported my journal to Dreamwidth. I think it is worth checking out.
on theology, ethics, and authorial intent, part 1
Date: 2009-05-10 05:26 am (UTC)You don't seem to care much for LB, so I won't go into it except to say that I see Lucy's statement about the stable as a continuation/knowledge of Christianity as an outcome of her search for Aslan in our world which began in VODT.
My basic problem with TLB is that in order to see it as an emotionally satisfying and ethically acceptable ending, you must agree to some tacit assumptions that I cannot agree to: namely that this particular crisis is self-evidently insoluble in a way that previous crises weren't; that senseless, random death (as opposed to, say, death in service of a cause) can be seen as a happy or even desirable ending (or is somehow not senseless and random); and that it is good and admirable for Aslan to call down the end of all things, divide all souls into the saved and the damned, and go home without a qualm. I realize that it's a relatively faithful dramatization of the Apocalypse mythology, and that if you believe in a literal heaven and God's plan and so on, it may not come off as senselessly, arbitrarily cruel. But because I do not share those beliefs, even if I can intellectually see that the book is a coherent treatise about humanity's powerlessness without God, and a vivid dramatization of John's revelation, my emotional reaction is visceral disgust and betrayal, because my ethical framework is shaped by the assumption of randomness rather than the assumption of a divine plan.
If Lewis had included even as much as three sentences in which someone explained that Narnia was growing old and had reached the end of its appointed time, or that the lack of community that makes it difficult for Tirian, Jill, and Eustace to rally support is a sign of the coming end, I might have been more reconciled to the end of the world. As it is, Roonwit's tale of calamity in the stars did not make me think 'end of the world' but made me think 'great crisis' -- and all the previous great crises had been solved.
The basic Christian idea of humanity is that we have become 'bent': we view ourselves as gods and want to be left alone to worship ourselves and our pleasures, to put it one way. Those who do not, through grace, love God would not want to be anywhere near him .... It would be unjust for God to force people who don't want to be anywhere near him to stand in his presence for eternity. It would be cruel. So God gives them what they want: to be away from him, to live their own lives without his presence. And, like the dwarfs in LB, they'll live exactly how they expect to live.
Maybe so. That is not, however, the impression I got from TLB. The dwarfs are left alone to believe what they want; I can accept that. However, the great sorting of souls does not simply leave those who don't love Aslan alone. Instead of coming into the stable and being allowed to ignore Aslan's presence, the Talking Beasts cease to be Talking Beasts which always felt, to me, as if Aslan were taking away all chance of them ever regretting that choice and choosing anew -- taking away their minds and selves and, if we're talking religion, their very souls. Which is horrifically unjust and cruel. (It's also discriminatory, since he doesn't turn the humans who reject him into mindless beasts. That always bothered me.) Furthermore, all those who fear and hate Aslan do not simply refuse to enter the stable. They swerve off into Aslan's shadow, which has a terribly ominous feel; either they are immediately transported to hell, or they remain in Narnia and die in ice shortly thereafter, or they are unmade as the Talking Beasts have been un-souled.
I think the implication of finality bothers me most: the idea that you get only one choice, and must abide by it for the rest of eternity, as if you will never learn or change but will be fixed from that moment onward. Lewis implies (by saying that the children never saw the damned again) that hell is forever. That is a denial of life and free will, and I find it ethically unacceptable.
Re: on theology, ethics, and authorial intent, part 1
Date: 2009-05-12 04:53 am (UTC)My basic problem with TLB is that in order to see it as an emotionally satisfying and ethically acceptable ending, you must agree to some tacit assumptions that I cannot agree to: namely that this particular crisis is self-evidently insoluble in a way that previous crises weren't... and that it is good and admirable for Aslan to call down the end of all things, divide all souls into the saved and the damned, and go home without a qualm.
I had always taken the crisis as one they were expecting to solve in some way. I believe there's talk, after the Calormenes take over Narnia, that Tirian and the others would rescue the Narnians near the stable and wage a guerilla war such as happened in Prince Caspian. Basically those Narnians at the stable were the only hope for the continuation of Narnia. And once Narnia fell completely, the world fell: because Aslan originally created the world for Narnians, with humans kinda sneaking in here and then. And, really, all that is good about that world doesn't really die, but is experienced as it 'should have been' had evil not entered into the world.
the great sorting of souls does not simply leave those who don't love Aslan alone. Instead of coming into the stable and being allowed to ignore Aslan's presence, the Talking Beasts cease to be Talking Beasts which always felt, to me, as if Aslan were taking away...their very souls...Furthermore, all those who fear and hate Aslan...swerve off into Aslan's shadow, which has a terribly ominous feel; either they are immediately transported to hell, or they remain in Narnia and die in ice shortly thereafter, or they are unmade as the Talking Beasts have been un-souled.
I can see where you're coming from here. But I don't see how the swerving of the creatures into the shadow deviates from what I said previously. They all came and looked into Aslan's face. Than they made a choice, to either stay with Aslan or go into the shadow. It was their choice, Aslan did not force them to go either way. As for the 'dumbing' of the Talking Animals...I'm not sure where to go with that, actually. There's no Christian theology that I know of that indicates anything of the sort happening at the end times. Possibly Lewis was postulating that, since Talking Animals were created differently from humans, their end would be different as well. Perhaps it was even meant as a kindness: instead of letting them go into the shadow, they can live eternally as regular beasts. Perhaps that's what they wanted. I agree, it's hard to take sometimes, though. I'm the first to admit, Lewis isn't perfect.
I think the implication of finality bothers me most: the idea that you get only one choice, and must abide by it for the rest of eternity, as if you will never learn or change but will be fixed from that moment onward. Lewis implies...that hell is forever. That is a denial of life and free will, and I find it ethically unacceptable.
I do not see how a final choice denies free will and life. People freely choice to spend eternity away from God. I think it highly unlikely that people will change their minds once they reach eternity. Of course, that's due to my perception of hell. To me, hell is a place where people are allowed to be their sinful selves, without the light of God that sometimes pierces the darkness of this world. Lewis' The Great Divorce shows this idea, actually, though I warn you it's a hard read and I don't understand about a third of it. Actually, the Great Divorce is interesting in that it postulates that people are given a chance to 'visit' heaven from hell and that some, very few, choose to stay: Lewis implies that, to those who choose heaven their time in hell was Purgatory. I don't have solid views on the existence of purgatory, but it seems a plausible explanation.
Plus, honestly, would you truly like a fluid eternity? It would just be an extension of this life and would cause heart-break and darkness. I would find an unsettled eternity unbearable, always wondering who might change their mind. It's hard enough in this world. A fixed eternity allows for joy.