The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Chronicles #67 ｜ That Hideous Strength with Nick Dixon： Part I

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome back to Chronicles, where today we're going to be talking all about

00:00:17.920 That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, concluding the Ransom Trilogy, the Cosmic Trilogy.

00:00:24.680 So once again, I'm thrilled to be joined by Nick.

00:00:26.920 Good to be here. Yeah, it's so important to get this whole trilogy nailed.

00:00:30.340 And this one, I think, is so important because this is the one that Lotus Eaters fans are going to love because it's politically so prophetic.

00:00:36.280 Oh, yes, gosh. I mean, it's hard to pass a chapter without going, that was prophetic. That's relevant today.

00:00:44.480 Wow. I know people in our political landscape who are just like this and on and on.

00:00:50.660 I mean, actually, when we first began to discuss the idea of covering this trilogy together, you said to me, to be fair, and you're not the only one to say this, of course, you can just read that hideous strength on its own, which is a little strange for a trilogy.

00:01:06.520 You wouldn't say, oh, well, if you just read Return of the King, you don't need to read Fellowship and Two Towers.

00:01:12.240 But having said that, I absolutely understand why that, you know, that the people have that view.

00:01:18.600 But at the same time, I'm very, very glad that I did decide to read Out of the Silent Planet and Perilandra first.

00:01:25.820 Not only, of course, because we like to do things properly here, but also as well, because I feel like so much of it really changes.

00:01:34.620 I imagine it would change the dimension of the reading

00:01:38.300 and the view from which you come at it.

00:01:40.300 Because when you get to the end of Perelandra

00:01:42.700 and you realise that Ransom has saved Venus from the fall

00:01:47.540 and that actually now all of the Oyasu and the beings of Meleldil

00:01:53.180 are actually now going to lay siege to Earth

00:01:56.020 to try and free it from its fallen state.

00:02:00.820 Well, you come into this novel and you think,

00:02:04.620 okay, how is that going to happen?

00:02:06.800 But you know, whereas if you haven't read

00:02:08.880 either of those novels before,

00:02:10.880 you kind of come in with a very ordinary world of discovery.

00:02:14.640 And so it works both ways, I think.

00:02:16.800 But I'm certainly glad that I read the other two first.

00:02:20.020 Yeah, it's ideal to, but you could understand it

00:02:22.320 because it changes so much,

00:02:23.560 because the protagonist even changes,

00:02:25.260 you could read it on its own, more so than Perilandra.

00:02:28.120 Lewis claimed you could read any of them on their own,

00:02:29.880 he always says in the prefaces,

00:02:30.940 but Perilandra, I think you'd be struggling a little bit.

00:02:33.100 But I think this one you could, and obviously the first one you could because it's the first.

00:02:35.780 But yes, obviously ideal to read them all.

00:02:37.640 We like to do things properly, as you say.

00:02:39.200 And they're so much fun to read.

00:02:40.500 They're so easy to read.

00:02:41.640 Yeah, I've become incredibly attached to these.

00:02:43.920 And I'm very grateful to you for sort of like, you know, putting them my way.

00:02:48.920 Literally giving them to you.

00:02:50.040 Literally giving them.

00:02:50.900 Yeah, this was your copy.

00:02:52.780 Yeah, they all were.

00:02:53.820 So thank you.

00:02:54.600 All right.

00:02:54.980 So I suppose just to begin, this one to conclude was published in 1945, right towards the end

00:03:01.060 of the war.

00:03:02.180 And as a result of that, the setting of this one,

00:03:05.120 just as it was said in Perilandra that the war is still going on

00:03:09.740 as Ransom is out over on Venus,

00:03:12.420 now we find ourselves in an England that is some short time

00:03:18.460 after the war itself, and things have returned

00:03:21.480 to a level of peace and normalcy.

00:03:25.220 And obviously, yeah, exactly as you say,

00:03:27.320 our chief protagonist in this story is not Elwyn Ransom himself. In fact, it's a dual

00:03:34.180 protagonist story. We have two protagonists. We have Mark and James Studdick, who are recently

00:03:40.420 married. They've been married just before the story begins and settling down for a new life

00:03:46.460 together. And one of the things that I really liked about the framing of this story is how you

00:03:55.000 follow these two paths that seem to be diverging from one another you know absolutely jane obviously

00:04:02.100 goes down the path of um beginning to understand her visions mark finds himself further and further

00:04:09.580 ensnared by the bureaucracy of the nic uh of nice as i suppose it is and um and yet you know spoiler

00:04:19.600 At the end, through both of those experiences, they find a way to come back together again

00:04:26.600 and to actually move on and sort of evolve out of those experiences

00:04:31.320 to hopefully have a far more robust and loving marriage

00:04:36.180 than we find them enjoying at the beginning of the novel.

00:04:39.340 Yeah, very wholesome message.

00:04:40.580 So just to sort of set that out for people, a couple of things.

00:04:43.760 One is that Lewis says at the start, this is a fairy tale for grown-ups.

00:04:47.800 So it's slightly different from science fiction in a way.

00:04:50.420 And it being a fairy tale for grownups,

00:04:52.160 he says it's going to start like all fairy tales in the normal world.

00:04:54.940 And he says when we read fairy tales

00:04:57.060 and they start with a lumberjack or a petty king or something

00:04:59.440 and it's a snowy field, he's like,

00:05:01.120 that was the reality they were living.

00:05:02.820 That was not part of the fairy tale.

00:05:04.720 It was when you encountered mystical things in the forest,

00:05:06.760 then you enter the fairy tale.

00:05:08.140 He said, so what I'm doing instead is starting it in a real world

00:05:10.600 that I know, which happens to be the university world.

00:05:12.900 And that's how I'm starting my fairy tale.

00:05:15.060 Because people are like, why is it in a university?

00:05:16.420 and that's the reason and wait it's in the preface so they won't ask why for too long if

00:05:20.100 they've read the preface but and you and what as you say you get two characters you get with two

00:05:25.460 different drives and goals and different flaws and mark's flaw is that he wants to be in the inner

00:05:31.380 ring and lewis wrote an essay called the inner ring it was about how this desire for power and

00:05:36.760 this idea there's always a room of elite people that you want to get into and how dangerous this

00:05:41.560 is in the essay he's slightly less skating than the novel implies because he says i suppose there

00:05:46.700 ultimately has to be this in a ring because somewhere someone somewhere is running things

00:05:50.280 and he says it's more the desire to get into it that's the problem i think i said that in a

00:05:53.640 previous episode really here we have the desire to get into this bad and the actual thing is bad

00:05:57.960 the nice is incredibly evil which i'm sure we'll get into so that's his goal and that's his flaw

00:06:02.940 then jane is a bit different she has what would now of course be dismissed as a misogynist

00:06:08.260 It's the Lewis-type plotline, which is she's basically a feminist.

00:06:11.700 You might not use that exact word, but she's concerned with her own life.

00:06:14.660 She doesn't want to be burdened by children.

00:06:16.080 She wants to be free and so on.

00:06:17.260 But her arc is realising, hang on, actually, I should just have children

00:06:21.540 and get over myself, essentially.

00:06:24.040 And that's her arc.

00:06:25.240 And there's nothing...

00:06:25.860 Message for our time.

00:06:27.280 It is what it is.

00:06:28.440 Lewis is just...

00:06:29.420 That's Lewis.

00:06:30.220 It's a Christian message.

00:06:32.640 So that is broadly the outline, yeah.

00:06:34.300 So just to agree with what you said, but add a slight little bit.

00:06:36.840 Sure.

00:06:37.060 And of course, important to mention as well that the title itself is borrowed from an old 16th century poem by David Lindsay and is a reference and kind of epigraph for the Tower of Babel.

00:06:51.140 Yeah.

00:06:51.260 And so that's really what we're looking at here.

00:06:53.660 We're looking at the nice, trying to create a technocratic, bureaucratic, progressive Tower of Babel in the modern age and the folly of such a project.

00:07:04.760 because actually, even though there are obviously thousands and thousands of years

00:07:09.640 that separate us from the theoretical Tower of Babel

00:07:13.280 that was obviously attempted to be constructed in antiquity,

00:07:17.260 that doesn't make it less foolhardy now

00:07:20.800 just because we're surrounded by more equipment, greater knowledge,

00:07:24.840 greater industry, and all of the advancements that could make it so.

00:07:29.180 It is still as foolhardy a mission today as it would have been back then.

00:07:33.340 Yeah, and it's really the sin of hubris, arrogance, isn't it? We sort of know that immediately. Okay,

00:07:38.340 this is Babel, so it's going to be about hubris. And I won't give the spoiler of what happens,

00:07:42.860 but this is their undoing at the end in a Babel-themed retribution at the end.

00:07:49.720 Yeah, very good. Very satisfying.

00:07:51.840 Yeah, very satisfying. Well done. Crazy imagination Lewis had. And one thing I said to you before we

00:07:57.300 started as well is just to add, since it's coming to my head now, because he does have Merlin and

00:08:02.680 supernatural and all these things. He has this extraordinary imagination, but he also has the

00:08:05.560 underpinning philosophy. But what I was saying to you was, how many authors write their own

00:08:09.320 philosophy and then explore it in fiction? So he explicitly says in the preface that this is a

00:08:14.680 fictional exploration of the ideas in the abolition of man, which I brought along as well,

00:08:19.960 which is Lewis's little philosophical work. And he wrote many philosophical style works,

00:08:25.560 but that's perhaps his most enduring. And he wrote the apologetics like

00:08:28.760 mere Christianity. But this was his philosophical work to establish the foundation of objective

00:08:33.060 moral law in a pre-Christian sense that could be found in the Babylonians, the ancient Egyptians,

00:08:39.000 the Vikings, the Romans, and in the Old Testament. And he was saying, there is such a thing as the

00:08:44.180 moral law. There is such a thing as an objective reality out there. If you ignore this, you ignore

00:08:49.220 it at your peril, because then you're in the world of you're playing God. You're saying everything's

00:08:53.360 subjective. We can control things, and that will go very wrong. But when I say he had his own

00:08:58.400 philosophy. If you think about greats like Dostoevsky, perhaps he did that with Notes

00:09:01.640 from Underground. He sets up the philosophy first, then he explores it in fiction. But

00:09:06.340 what you normally get in philosophical fiction is a milankundera exploring Nietzsche or something

00:09:10.300 like that. But Lewis was such a towering genius that I think you could have a barely comprehensible

00:09:15.880 level. His mind was like, you know, Lewis's mind is like an entire universe or something.

00:09:20.840 Oh, yeah. If I were to, if Lewis were here today and I were to meet him, he'd be like,

00:09:25.040 you're a bit of a sicky, aren't you? That's how I feel like I would deserve to be trained.

00:09:29.200 It'd be too nice, but you wouldn't say it. But it's extraordinary, the things he could do.

00:09:33.760 His knowledge was unbelievable, but also to be a trained philosopher. And by the way,

00:09:38.080 I can just bash out a sort of enduring set of children's classics as well,

00:09:42.320 and a brilliant science fiction trilogy. It's unbelievable. And so he sets up The Abolition

00:09:46.160 of Man as his own philosophy. And it's his take on Plato, and of course there's precedent,

00:09:50.320 but it's his own philosophy, philosophical argument.

00:09:53.540 And then he backs it up with that hideous scent in fictional form,

00:09:56.920 and it's brilliantly done.

00:09:58.400 So that's why it helps to know.

00:09:59.640 But that's the essential fact that you need to know

00:10:01.340 that the abolition of man is about saying

00:10:03.440 there is a real moral law out there.

00:10:06.100 It's metaphysical.

00:10:07.020 It's pre-Christian, but it does exist,

00:10:09.760 and we ignore it at our peril.

00:10:11.060 And just one example quickly is in the abolition of man,

00:10:14.360 he's looking at a textbook that a couple of educators have come up with,

00:10:18.080 And they say things like, they talk about Coleridge and they say, Coleridge...

00:10:22.240 Oh, about the waterfall being pretty or sublime.

00:10:25.000 Correct, yes.

00:10:25.980 And he says that one of them was right, it was sublime, it wasn't pretty.

00:10:29.720 Why is that?

00:10:31.100 And the authors of this textbook conclude it's because feelings are subjective

00:10:35.760 and really the person was referring to their own feelings of sublimity or however it's...

00:10:40.540 But actually Lewis immediately points out that doesn't make sense

00:10:44.280 because if the waterfall's sublime, their feelings will be humble.

00:10:46.560 So it doesn't make sense immediately.

00:10:48.080 and it's not true, he says really the difference is

00:10:50.820 the waterfall is sublime.

00:10:52.700 Things can be something, they exist, they have a reality,

00:10:55.460 beauty is real, and there is a word that suits it better.

00:11:00.020 There is a right word for it, and great literature comes

00:11:02.700 when you find the right word versus when you don't.

00:11:05.680 And what they're trying to debunk in this textbook

00:11:08.080 that he's completely sort of destroying is the idea

00:11:11.620 that you can ever, they're saying it's all subjective

00:11:13.560 and the whole way down.

00:11:15.420 He's saying, no, no, good literature, which is much harder

00:11:17.840 to figure out what it is, is the difference between, yes, I think that is the right description

00:11:21.640 versus that isn't, because there is a truth out there.

00:11:25.200 And just to finish, he, of course, in the book, calls this the Tao, which he's taking

00:11:29.500 from the ancient Chinese, but he means the moral law that seems to exist through all

00:11:34.860 ancient cultures.

00:11:35.900 And his claim is there is this moral law.

00:11:38.520 We can avoid it.

00:11:39.600 We can try to wriggle out of it, but that will be a problem.

00:11:44.940 And I'm just on a roll, so I'll give one more.

00:11:46.820 No, no, please, please.

00:11:47.300 I get really into this. I'll just give one more example. He talks about not liking young children,

00:11:54.500 Lewis himself, but he says, I recognize this as a flaw within myself because I recognize the

00:11:59.380 existence of the Tao, which would be children are delightful. He said, this is not a subjective

00:12:04.340 idea. They are delightful. This is such a universal idea that young children are delightful. He goes,

00:12:09.220 and if I find that they're not, that's actually a flaw in me where I'm diverging from the Tao,

00:12:14.340 as he calls it. And in Aristotle's terms, you might say it's the four states where,

00:12:20.280 which I know Carl's talked about in the past, where you have the virtuous man who wants to do

00:12:23.940 good and does good, the continent man who is tempted by bad but manages to do good,

00:12:28.980 the incontinent who is tempted by bad and does bad but knows it's wrong, and then the vicious

00:12:34.760 who just does wrong wantonly and doesn't care. And if Lewis is saying, I recognise that young

00:12:40.860 children are delightful, but I failed to feel that myself. He's being, I would say, incontinent

00:12:44.900 because he's recognizing it for failing in that instance. But funnily enough, in Lewis's life,

00:12:51.140 when he took on those evacuees, which led him to be inspired to write Narnia, he found that,

00:12:56.180 oh, he did like the children. So I wonder then, this is me speculating, if he then became either

00:12:59.720 continent, thinking, oh, I should probably do this, or maybe became virtuous, realizing I actually do

00:13:04.260 enjoy this. And so maybe he reached it in that example. But it's a big difference between Lewis's

00:13:09.080 morality, which is, I'm failing here, I'm falling short. And what is sin if not a falling short as

00:13:13.980 well? harmatia, the idea of the arrow falling short being the Greek word that's usually translated

00:13:19.240 as sin, meaning an arrow falling short of the target. So that's an idea. There's something

00:13:23.780 real out there. We can fall short in a description. We can fall short morally. Whereas the people in

00:13:29.000 the nice, the enemies in this book, don't recognize any such thing. And they say, no, no, that's all

00:13:33.200 bunk. It's all nonsense. We're going to give you a new programming that's better because actually

00:13:37.960 all there is really is instinct or what what is is just worth venerating on it in it on it in

00:13:44.320 itself if we want to reproduce then we just say okay that's what we want to do but there's no

00:13:48.620 higher metaphysical goal i've taught i feel like for an hour so i better stop no that was absolutely

00:13:54.120 marvelous thank you um and just one thing as well to second your point a wonderful point but um

00:14:00.180 this of course is laid out very very clearly at the beginning of the bible in genesis where even

00:14:06.420 before the creation of Adam, when God is laboring over the six days to obviously create the heavens

00:14:12.160 and the earth and all of the stars and the water and the animals and everything, and it was good.

00:14:19.600 The idea of it being a goodness is alive within the cosmos even before man being born to perceive

00:14:29.000 that goodness. That's how eternal it is. It would be good even were there not a single man

00:14:35.560 earth with the moral agency to act in rebellion against that goodness or work in obedience to

00:14:43.220 that goodness. It simply always is one good or evil. So let's begin by talking about Mark and

00:14:51.280 Jane then because they find themselves and the story works so well because of how little time

00:14:58.500 they actually spend together. And even when they do have those few moments on the page where they

00:15:06.080 are together, mostly at the beginning of the story, you can feel the gears grinding and stall,

00:15:12.460 and you can feel the dysfunction between the two of them. Because ultimately, Mark is someone who

00:15:19.380 is a fellow at Bracton College, which is pointed out to be this very, very old, venerable college,

00:15:26.780 which had people like 10 particular chosen men of the kingdom

00:15:33.200 all the way back to 1300

00:15:34.940 that were basically just there to academically understand the laws of England

00:15:39.480 so that they could steward it

00:15:41.340 so that they didn't go around like what Nice end up doing

00:15:46.900 hacking away at all of the trees

00:15:49.940 and metaphorically the beauty of the kingdom of England

00:15:54.820 And so they were the stewards of it.

00:15:56.760 And Mark finds himself getting co-opted because exactly, as you say, that yearning from him to find himself in the inner circle.

00:16:06.640 And the problem that Mark finds is that there is always a larger inner circle to fall into.

00:16:13.300 Every single time he goes up or thinks, oh, now I've made it, there's always one step further he could go into the inner, inner, inner sanctum.

00:16:22.460 and every step he takes to get there

00:16:26.180 destroys something of his soul,

00:16:28.240 which obviously we'll get to later on.

00:16:30.740 So he's very, very busy.

00:16:32.880 He's got a career where he wants to be someone.

00:16:35.840 He doesn't necessarily want to do anything important,

00:16:39.780 but he wants to be surrounded by important people.

00:16:43.780 And he wants to, you know, I mean,

00:16:45.480 the kick he gets out of driving in the car

00:16:49.380 with a feverstone, Divine,

00:16:51.740 You know, our old friend Devine back from out of the silent planet, you know, to be in the big car, going to the big house, the big mansion and everything.

00:16:59.460 It all fills him with this sense of importance and pride.

00:17:04.700 And yet for Jane, exactly as you say, her problem is that she obviously liked Mark.

00:17:12.800 There were sparks when they first met, and they'd enjoy their conversations together, and friends become lovers, and then the natural progression is just, I suppose, marriage, because that's what people are supposed to do.

00:17:27.720 But there's not really that deep spiritual understanding of the commitment of marriage.

00:17:36.240 They get married, and then they're trying to just carry on with their individual lives in a way that they kind of thrived off of before the marriage.

00:17:46.300 They're not ready to accept the fact that that stage of their life that they were pursuing is over now, and it's now time to work together as a unit.

00:17:56.480 you know, before the eyes of God. And Jane at the very beginning of the novel is remembering

00:18:02.780 the marriage vows and about the fact it's supposed to lead to some stability and it's supposed to

00:18:09.340 lead to a happiness within them. And Jane is miserable. Jane's really miserable at the start

00:18:15.460 of this novel. And this is all compounded by the fact that she's having these terrible dreams. Well,

00:18:21.240 I say dreams, they're more nightmares really

00:18:23.800 as she feels them

00:18:25.920 and she's had this dream

00:18:27.760 of

00:18:28.040 some body being exhumed

00:18:31.840 from a grave

00:18:32.640 and

00:18:33.500 she doesn't understand what it means

00:18:37.660 and it's really really scary to her

00:18:39.920 and at the same time

00:18:41.760 you have Mark over at

00:18:43.680 Bracton and this is

00:18:45.700 where we get the first, you can really tell

00:18:47.620 just how much Lewis hates

00:18:49.800 the progressive element that's that's the term he uses for the the people at the university yes

00:18:55.820 who are involved in a certain little group the progressive element so you know when lewis says

00:18:59.540 progressive it's gonna be villainous it's like the experimental school in one of the the narnia

00:19:04.180 books he absolutely it's called experiment house and he just tears it apart so whenever you get

00:19:08.660 progressive or experimental with lewis you're like it's something bad's about to happen so the uh

00:19:13.220 the progressive element uh if i remember correctly is being headed by cory and for the beginning so

00:19:19.540 So it's like, oh, for Mark, it's like, oh, I'm in with them.

00:19:22.400 And, you know, I'm a part of that crowd now.

00:19:24.580 I'm in the inner circle.

00:19:25.860 I get to listen in to the conversations that they have.

00:19:29.100 I get to be surrounded by these very educated people.

00:19:32.740 But then, as we see here, on page 15, we begin to talk about the fact that NICE,

00:19:39.420 the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments.

00:19:42.580 Yeah, and isn't that brilliant, by the way?

00:19:44.500 Brilliant.

00:19:44.820 about things like SAGE, these twee acronyms that are always sinister, nice, and it's the

00:19:52.660 most sinister possible thing. We had SAGE during Covid.

00:19:55.300 Yeah, and they just bury it beneath an anachronism. Because if they were actually specific and

00:20:00.820 precise in their language, you would immediately discover how nefarious...

00:20:05.220 Yeah, the dystopian Satanists trying to ruin everything. They wouldn't call themselves that.

00:20:09.620 Yeah, but that's so prophetic as well. I'm sure there were already bodies like that in Lewis's

00:20:14.020 time but it really does if you think you think of covid or you think of anything we have now

00:20:18.060 you know these progressive people are telling us we're experts we're technocrats shut up this is

00:20:23.260 for your own good and invariably they're evil we've seen that but also as well i mean to actually

00:20:29.480 just linger on that point you were making about covid as well i think back to people like chris

00:20:35.340 witty right yeah you know neil ferguson no one knew who he was no before the lockdown but all

00:20:41.480 of a sudden is on TV every single day. The nation is just listening in to his every word as he

00:20:48.680 guides them through. And you can tell the power just goes to their heads so quickly. It's the

00:20:53.940 fact that once they get hold of this... Some guy like Neil Ferguson, who's this guy? Oh,

00:20:59.960 he was the guy that ruined BS, the mad cow disease area. He came up with a catastrophic

00:21:07.260 prediction was totally wrong CSE and all that stuff now he's broke his own rules yeah now yeah

00:21:12.120 now he's back breaking his own rules coming up the model we're all going to die where you have

00:21:15.300 to wear masks forever you will always have to distance some of the things they were saying at

00:21:18.140 the time like these things they were claiming these things were going to be permanent I was

00:21:20.940 listening at the time going this is nonsense but we were all taught to listen to these people so

00:21:25.080 yeah this book is basically those people if they were also communing with devils which they may

00:21:30.200 have been before we know who knows chris witty devil whisperer um but on page 15 lewis begins

00:21:37.600 to lay out the most controversial business before the college meeting was the question of selling

00:21:42.920 bragdon wood the purchaser was the nice the national institute of coordinated experiments

00:21:48.700 they wanted a site for the building which would worthily house this remarkable organization

00:21:53.860 the nice was the first fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory

00:21:59.860 on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world.

00:22:04.180 It was to be free from almost all the tiresome restraints,

00:22:08.120 red tape was the word its supporters used,

00:22:11.000 which have hitherto hampered research in this country.

00:22:14.500 It was also largely free from the restraints of economy,

00:22:17.920 for, as it was argued, a nation which can spend so many millions a day on a war

00:22:22.780 can surely afford a few million a month on productive research in peacetime.

00:22:27.080 The building proposed for it was one which would make a quite noticeable addition to the skyline of New York.

00:22:34.800 The staff was to be enormous, and their salaries princely.

00:22:38.500 Persistent pressure and endless diplomacy on the part of the Senate of Edgestow,

00:22:43.500 which is the small village where the college is located,

00:22:48.000 had lured the new institute away from Oxford, from Cambridge, from London.

00:22:52.180 It had thought of all these in turn as possible scenes for its labours.

00:22:56.300 At times, the progressive element in Edgestow had almost despaired, but success was now practically

00:23:02.180 certain. If the gneiss could get to the necessary land, it would come to Edgestow, and once it came,

00:23:08.120 then, as everyone else, things would at last begin to move. It's an interesting point. So they've,

00:23:14.360 gneiss have scouted around London and Oxford and Cambridge, and they've now found themselves,

00:23:20.320 this particular progressive element of Bracton have found themselves set on securing a deal

00:23:27.380 to sell Bracton Wood, which is not, I mean, obviously the point that Luce is making is that

00:23:33.480 all of the land holds some deeply metaphysical value. But in the case of this one in particular,

00:23:39.740 they talk about the fact that there has never been a Britain, in the ancient sense of the word,

00:23:45.160 without Bracton Wood. It has always been there. It is pre-Roman. It goes right back into the

00:23:51.640 myths of the past. And of course, also as well, relevantly for us, it is also mythically where

00:23:59.060 the wizard Merlin is supposed to have been buried from the time of King Arthur.

00:24:06.280 And yet it has been protected and the wood has been protected. It has stood throughout all of

00:24:12.780 history and now this progressive element comes along and says well we have to take into account

00:24:19.000 the sciences and we have to look at the treasury of the college and you know we are struggling

00:24:24.540 with our expenses right now and they'd set us up for the rest of our careers and just all of these

00:24:29.460 material enticements and this is one of the things that i think really serves um that

00:24:35.620 to your strength well when being read as the last of a trilogy which is that when ransom goes to

00:24:42.340 Malacandra in the first one, you see all of these different aspects of Malacandra in society,

00:24:49.860 the Hrosa and the Fithaltrigi, all working together in harmony, right? There's no clashing

00:24:55.540 of egos. There's no, this people have this agenda and this, like they all have their own particular

00:25:00.380 skills, but they all use them in a very peaceful, harmonious equilibrium. And obviously Ransom also

00:25:07.320 goes to Perelandra and you see the Green Lady who is just totally uncorrupted by these ambitions.

00:25:17.520 And so this is one of the things that I really like about that hideous strength that by concluding

00:25:22.240 the story on earth and showing all of these different sects of the college, all of the

00:25:27.660 different personalities in Nice, all of the different personalities in St. Anne's later on,

00:25:33.260 you begin to understand just how grievously wounded Earth is

00:25:40.220 and the life of Earth in comparison to the other planets

00:25:43.880 that Ransom has visited.

00:25:45.960 Yeah, that's a good point, yes.

00:25:47.700 Because we're, of course, Thul'Chandra, the silent planet.

00:25:50.120 We are the fallen planet.

00:25:51.500 That is a good point.

00:25:52.540 And it's setting up the tradition versus the sort of year zero

00:25:55.360 of the Gneiss.

00:25:56.720 And, of course, the Gneiss has their own nefarious aims

00:25:59.140 because they want to get a hold of Merlin and so on.

00:26:01.380 There's also all of that.

00:26:02.260 I can't add much to your point

00:26:04.640 there's a minor thing that I noticed

00:26:06.100 the passage just before that is the one where

00:26:08.820 bizarrely Lewis switches to first person

00:26:11.080 for the only point in the whole novel

00:26:13.140 he says the only time I was a guest at Bracton

00:26:15.240 I persuaded my host to let me into the wood

00:26:16.760 it's a brief section of a few pages

00:26:19.320 the whole novel's in third person

00:26:21.240 except for that, I just found that really weird

00:26:23.240 I've looked into that and couldn't figure out why

00:26:24.780 the only reason I can think is he sort of inserts

00:26:27.160 himself a little bit into each book doesn't he

00:26:28.900 so maybe that was like I want to

00:26:30.720 be in this book as well.

00:26:32.840 But the rest of the book is third person.

00:26:34.180 That was bizarre.

00:26:35.000 I almost put it down to a Lewis kind of Lewisism.

00:26:37.800 Do you know the way he smashed out work so quickly

00:26:40.280 that he was known for not having

00:26:42.460 the same rigorous mythology as Tolkien?

00:26:45.000 I could almost see him just shoving in a first person

00:26:46.800 and forgetting to correct it.

00:26:48.480 But maybe it was there for a reason.

00:26:50.060 But anyway, that's a formal point.

00:26:52.180 But yeah, you're absolutely right.

00:26:53.020 You've got the ancient wood contrasted

00:26:55.140 with the year zero technocrats of the nice.

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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - October 10, 2026

PREVIEW： Chronicles #67 ｜ That Hideous Strength with Nick Dixon： Part I

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