The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - October 24, 2026


PREVIEW： Chronicles #69 ｜ That Hideous Strength with Nick Dixon： Part III

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1534

Episode Stats


Length

16 minutes

Words per minute

182.48

Word count

2,973

Sentence count

166

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

15

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 And so moving on from Merlin, so their plan in the end, Ransom tells him, the Oyasa are going to come from deep heaven, and they're going to assist us. 0.88
00:00:26.380 And Merlin talks about the fact, oh, but wouldn't that be breaking the seventh law, he says, 0.77
00:00:32.480 or something like that, about the fact that they actually can't intervene physically.
00:00:37.500 They can't literally put themselves into the battle on earth.
00:00:41.120 It can only be left to us and our souls and our faith in them.
00:00:46.480 And Ransom says, yes, that would have been the case had the other side not broken that covenant first
00:00:55.640 because that's exactly what, going right back to Out of the Silent Planet,
00:01:00.560 it was Weston and Devine who first broke that pact
00:01:04.940 by bringing Ransom to Malacandra in the first place.
00:01:10.420 They crossed the threshold into Deep Heaven,
00:01:14.160 and now they have crossed into Deep Heaven.
00:01:16.460 Deep Heaven can cross the threshold into the Silent Planet
00:01:20.140 and reach them as well.
00:01:21.940 So I remember what Oeasa was saying in Out of the Silent Planet,
00:01:24.720 If it was up to me, I would unmake him, but I won't. 0.99
00:01:27.840 Meaning he would just kill Devine because he's useless and evil. 0.99
00:01:30.780 But he's like, but I won't intervene. 0.99
00:01:32.720 But now you're saying they can intervene.
00:01:34.360 Yes.
00:01:35.940 And it's a grand moment because it's kind of the culmination of Ransom's character, of course,
00:01:41.020 where he just says, I am the bridge between Deep Heaven and our silent planet 0.98
00:01:48.100 in this war against the Bentlon, who I assume was not killed,
00:01:53.500 Even though Weston was obviously, I don't know what you want to say,
00:01:56.940 unmade on Perilandra, the devil himself was not destroyed,
00:02:01.180 even though he inhabited Weston's body.
00:02:03.660 In fact, if anything, it's obviously, it must be the bent one
00:02:06.800 communicating through the head of Alcasson.
00:02:10.900 Yeah, well, they talk about the macrobes,
00:02:12.280 and the macrobes are either demons or devils or ultimately the devil.
00:02:16.440 Yeah.
00:02:17.520 So then, okay, let's get to the part you've been bursting to talk about.
00:02:20.880 Let's talk about the objective room.
00:02:24.940 So Mark is told that he has to go through this rigorous training.
00:02:30.160 And actually, the thing that is getting in Mark's way is emotion,
00:02:36.180 which is something that you're entirely just get over it, Mark.
00:02:40.480 It's a chemical substance in your head,
00:02:42.700 just making you feel these subjective things.
00:02:45.220 You've just got to abolish that.
00:02:47.180 Everything that just makes you favour things,
00:02:49.980 particularly this, that, and the other, you're just going to have to overcome so you can get
00:02:55.100 fully on board with the mission and not be compromised by everything that has come before.
00:03:01.340 And so Mark is taken into the objective room and I see you've got the book open, so do you want to...
00:03:07.260 Yeah, I mean, well, I've got loads of parts because this is all so crucial, but...
00:03:10.860 Yeah, go for it.
00:03:11.500 If you want, I was just going to describe the room and this is really important. So the room,
00:03:16.220 And by the way, the objective room is one of the great moments in all literature, I'm going to suggest.
00:03:21.560 And we talk about 1984 a lot and these kind of things in Room 101, but we don't talk about the objective room enough.
00:03:27.300 But yeah, in terms of describing it, the room at first sight was an anti-climax.
00:03:31.200 It appeared to be an empty committee room with a long table, eight or nine chairs, some pictures, and oddly enough, a large stepladder in one corner.
00:03:38.440 There's a key part here.
00:03:39.480 A man of trained sensibility would have seen at once that the room was ill-proportioned,
00:03:43.480 not grotesquely so, but sufficiently to produce dislike.
00:03:46.480 It was too high and too narrow.
00:03:48.480 Mark felt the effect without analyzing the cause, and the effect grew on him as time passed."
00:03:53.480 And we go on and find that actually there are strange patterns on the ceiling,
00:03:58.480 but they never resolve into a pattern, so a sort of a coherent pattern.
00:04:03.480 They suggested some kind of pattern.
00:04:04.480 Their peculiar ugliness consisted in the very fact that they kept on suggesting it
00:04:08.480 it and then frustrating the expectation thus aroused. Suddenly he realized this was another
00:04:12.980 trap. He fixed his eyes on the table. There were spots on the table too, white ones, shiny white
00:04:17.800 spots, not quite round, and arranged apparently to correspond to the spots on the ceiling. Or were
00:04:22.260 they? No, of course not. Ah, now he had it. The pattern, if you could call it a pattern, on the
00:04:26.360 table was an exact reversal of that on the ceiling, but with certain exceptions. He found he was
00:04:31.540 glancing rapidly from one to the other, trying to puzzle it out. But the third time he checked
00:04:35.360 himself. He got up and began to walk around. He had a look at the pictures. So there's no clear
00:04:39.840 pattern. Then he looks at the pictures and he finds the pictures are either sort of horror
00:04:44.380 portraits of absurdist things like a woman with her mouth open with overgrown hair in it. But then
00:04:50.320 there's also subversive, subversions, I suppose, sorry, of Christian paintings. And he says,
00:04:56.400 and who was that person standing between the Christ and the Lazarus? And why were there so
00:05:00.380 many beetles under the table in the Last Supper? What was the curious trick of lighting that made
00:05:04.940 each picture look like something seen in delirium. Everything in the objective room is to subtly mess
00:05:10.080 with you and your expectations. And I always remember the part where it's too narrow and too
00:05:14.320 high. The pattern is not resolving into anything because what is this about? It's about inherent
00:05:19.600 beauty. The idea that beauty is real as people like the late Sir Roger Scruton spoke about so
00:05:25.560 much why beauty matters. As Lewis spoke about that beauty is real. It's objective. It can be
00:05:31.600 reached. It can be accessed. It's something we have to aspire towards. It's not random. It's
00:05:35.960 not subjective. And I've always thought this. And when we see these patterns, we naturally want to
00:05:41.220 resolve them. I compared it in a video to a perfect cadence in music. You want it to end,
00:05:49.080 but on the resolve into a- On the right note. On the correct chord. Yeah. Often the first chord
00:05:54.640 of the scale. But it's like, you don't want it to end unresolved. And there was a rumor,
00:05:58.340 I seem to remember from school, a music teacher telling us that, wasn't it that Mozart's dad,
00:06:03.420 to get him out of bed, used to leave it on an imperfect cadence and he had to jump out of bed
00:06:07.540 to finish the chord? It wouldn't surprise me. A right father was Leopold. And it may be an
00:06:13.940 urban myth, but that's the kind of thing you can imagine would bother Mozart because there is a
00:06:16.880 right and a wrong. Why is it some things are good? Some films are good. Some books are good.
00:06:21.360 Some pieces of music are so perfect. And I've always felt this. And even in comedy, in my own
00:06:25.640 humble way a joke would be good that would hit you it'd come to you but that's a good one and
00:06:30.460 then it'd be the one that did the best and you go so i believe and it's hard to prove as this book
00:06:35.820 sort of discusses at times but i believe that beauty is real and art is real and there is such
00:06:40.180 a thing as good and bad and some this is why i've never believed it's subjective when people tell
00:06:45.080 me like comedy subjective or this and that subjective i'm always like no not really there's
00:06:49.560 a small element of taste do you prefer mozart or beethoven okay i'll allow that right but you 1.00
00:06:55.480 If no one can say Mozart is bad, you'd just be an idiot. 1.00
00:06:58.480 Yeah. 1.00
00:06:59.480 And I suppose this goes back to what C.S. Lewis talks about in this eternal truth, this
00:07:05.800 objective truth that we all feel, even those civilizations that were untouched by Christianity,
00:07:10.720 just something that was within the soul of people.
00:07:13.720 Because even though you might have the cathedral at Chatre, or Lincoln Cathedral, or St. Peter's
00:07:22.800 basilica or whatever it is, you know, that are obviously being touched deeply by the beauty and
00:07:28.720 character of Christianity. So it is too that, you know, even though I don't want them in England, 1.00
00:07:35.120 there is something at its best that is beautiful and astonishing about an Islamic mosque in the 0.99
00:07:40.480 same way that there is something beautiful about the architecture of Petra, you know,
00:07:44.480 from the race, the civilization of the Nabataeans or pick anything like people from, you know,
00:07:50.800 the Indian subcontinent, you know, used to be able to make astonishing buildings,
00:07:54.960 not so much these days. But my point is,
00:07:58.480 civilizations have always strived towards beauty when they are working at their best. And somehow,
00:08:05.200 if a civilization has created something incredibly ugly and incredibly beautiful,
00:08:11.040 we all collectively judge them for that, against them, as if there was something broken about them
00:08:16.880 or something not quite right, you know, we become suspicious of them.
00:08:21.820 So, yeah, these things are absolutely true, and you can see it in the objective room,
00:08:25.840 that everything that is objective, everything that mankind has grown to understand about
00:08:32.660 something that is eternal, about human nature, is just to be discarded immediately.
00:08:39.000 And honestly, you know, when he's looking at all of these paintings, you mentioned the one
00:08:43.740 about the woman with, like, all the hair in her mouth and everything.
00:08:46.620 Like, it's growing out of her mouth. 0.97
00:08:48.760 I'm just going to say it.
00:08:50.320 Does it not feel like something that gets put in the Tate Modern these days?
00:08:53.800 Oh, absolutely, yeah.
00:08:54.720 Yeah?
00:08:55.600 I've heard them called...
00:08:56.000 And there's a reason that people hate the Tate Modern.
00:08:58.440 Yeah, I've heard them...
00:08:59.140 Have you heard the term death work?
00:09:01.100 I've heard this term recently, and it's...
00:09:03.520 And there was a thing called Piss Christ,
00:09:06.680 and that was some sort of painting that was meant to be an insult.
00:09:09.500 I think the artist claimed it wasn't actually an insult,
00:09:11.680 but most people took it as an insult.
00:09:13.200 And one can go back to Duchamp's urinal, which, you know, again, you could say he was satirizing the art world.
00:09:19.320 But really, it was like anything can be art.
00:09:21.360 And we lost the idea of beauty.
00:09:23.220 There's these two strands in art.
00:09:24.320 I've talked about it before, I think.
00:09:25.240 But there was two key documentaries on this.
00:09:27.460 There was Why Beauty Matters, based on his own book.
00:09:30.260 And there was one called The Shock of the New, which is about modern art.
00:09:34.300 And you can just compare traditional art, which says there's a certain element of mastery.
00:09:39.360 We're aspiring towards beauty.
00:09:40.700 then there's modern art is there to shock and says what if everything was like meaningless and
00:09:45.340 it's really only one note it can play yeah yeah what can damien hirst and tracy emin do or even
00:09:50.760 the duchamp urinal or even piss christ all these things they can only do one thing which is all
00:09:55.200 we're going to just shock your standards and taste and offend you that's all it can do but
00:10:00.240 why do they shock our taste right exactly because there is something there yeah and as you say and
00:10:06.200 that and you felt that with the modern art example in the book which is essentially what it is yeah
00:10:09.980 It's a modern art and then it's a subversion of the Christian art by putting Beatles under the 0.74
00:10:13.900 Last Supper and saying, oh, you know, what if, who thinks about, let's put the ugliness here 0.96
00:10:19.340 into the beauty and try and pollute it essentially was what those paintings seem to be about. And
00:10:23.580 they're about subverting Christianity, which leads him later to the attempting to get him to stamp
00:10:28.060 on the crucifix. Sure. I'm trying to think what happens just because there's so much flipping
00:10:33.820 about in the book. Oh, just one minor point. Mr. Bultitude gets a little passage where he gets let
00:10:40.220 out into the garden and is not put in his muzzle on this occasion, which is irregular because
00:10:50.060 normally, and he's not muzzled because he's in any danger of attacking a person. He's a very,
00:10:55.900 very good boy, actually, is this bear. But it's more the fact that he's constantly just eating
00:11:01.900 at the vegetable patch and picking at the fruit and everything but on this one occasion he's
00:11:06.460 helped himself to all of the turnips but just as that happens these uh these two blokes drive by
00:11:14.300 see the bear assume it's their bear which is not something most people driving by would assume
00:11:21.180 and mustabultitude actually very just earnestly is taken away by them put in the back of the van
00:11:27.580 Well, they know it's their bear because the gneiss is doing experiments on animals.
00:11:30.700 Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes.
00:11:33.740 And so they mistake Mr.
00:11:35.180 Bultitude for one of their bears, which will be very important later on,
00:11:39.500 which is why it was just good to mention now.
00:11:42.460 Jane has this dream, this profound experience,
00:11:50.060 which is one of something of terror, where the Oyasa of Venus
00:11:55.660 comes to her in this dream and when she's woken up later on she finds that her bed is like it's
00:12:02.620 all torn or like she's been fighting with it and she's woken up on the floor and then she says um
00:12:07.900 i think i need to go and see uh the director and so she goes to ransom and the ransom tries to
00:12:15.100 explain to her look this is this is maleldu and the oyasa trying to reach out to you to communicate
00:12:22.860 the fact that you need to become a Christian.
00:12:28.380 He's saying to her that, look, you've come really far.
00:12:31.620 And honestly, Jane has come very far.
00:12:33.820 They both have, both Jane and Mark in their own way,
00:12:36.520 totally separate from one another,
00:12:39.080 both by, in Jane's case, by being surrounded by people
00:12:43.000 who were willing to just patiently explain these things to her
00:12:45.820 and by Mark's revelation of getting what he thought he wanted
00:12:50.500 and then realising that actually it's totally empty
00:12:54.040 and doesn't give him any meaning in life.
00:12:56.700 They've both come to the revelation of just fixing the things
00:13:00.180 that were wrong with them.
00:13:01.700 But this is like for Jane, this becoming the Christian, 0.90
00:13:06.320 surrendering to Maleldal is the final surrender 0.80
00:13:09.120 that she's been resisting for all of this time.
00:13:13.500 And Ransom has this very, very kind conversation with her.
00:13:17.000 and then she goes out to the garden to meditate upon it.
00:13:21.480 And then she has a genuine religious experience.
00:13:26.220 She sees Malaldu before her 0.97
00:13:28.060 and all of the things that try to rationally keep her
00:13:33.200 on the reservation of atheism are basically just broken away.
00:13:38.140 And she comes to realize that this is the truth 0.90
00:13:40.680 and actually a being like Malaldu
00:13:44.180 who would create you to worship him and to serve him and his glory is actually an incredibly
00:13:51.600 natural and beautiful thing to consider because he's so good and because he wants the best for
00:13:57.780 us. All of the things that Ransom argued so well against Satan in Perelandra, all of this comes to
00:14:06.100 Jane's mind. And so she takes that final leap of faith. And this really ties up towards the end of
00:14:13.680 her character here, which is funny because, again, it's juxtaposed with what Mark is about to
00:14:19.540 encounter with Christianity as well, which is, of course, the stepping on the crucifix and the
00:14:27.160 cross of Christ. Well, yeah, we can get on to that a bit. Just before that bit, there's two things. 0.68
00:14:32.240 Well, there's the bit about the straight line, which I'll have to get into to even explain the
00:14:35.520 crucifix. There's also a bit which is in between these two. I know it's such a long section,
00:14:40.400 It's hard to make it clear, but Mark, I don't know if you were going to mention this,
00:14:45.200 but he finally achieves the sort of realization of his character arc
00:14:48.460 by finally achieving an inner circle, but with the tramp.
00:14:52.280 Yes, yes, that's true.
00:14:53.360 So it says, each understood perhaps an eighth part of what the other said,
00:14:57.480 but a kind of intimacy grew between them.
00:14:59.520 Mark never noticed until years later that here,
00:15:01.780 where there was no room for vanity and no more power or security
00:15:04.600 than that of children playing in a giant's kitchen,
00:15:06.720 He had unawares become a member of a circle,
00:15:09.840 a secret and as strongly fenced against outsiders
00:15:12.320 as any that he had dreamed of. 0.95
00:15:14.740 So he ends up in a circle with this tramp
00:15:17.300 in league against the evil nice.
00:15:20.380 So that's a great moment for Mark. 0.97
00:15:21.860 Just as Jane has to give up her pride and become a Christian, 0.65
00:15:25.660 he has to give up his idea of the inner circle.
00:15:27.680 Yeah, because for Jane, she's obviously,
00:15:30.340 she walked into marriage without actually being able to set aside. 1.00
00:15:34.360 she was just single-mindedly still trying to pursue her career as a professional woman.
00:15:41.380 She wasn't truly committing herself to Mark,
00:15:44.980 and Mark wasn't truly committing himself to her.
00:15:47.700 They both just thought, oh, well, we're married because that's what people do.
00:15:51.320 But we're still kind of out on our own.
00:15:54.720 We're not that union.
00:15:55.820 Yeah, extremely modern.
00:15:57.440 Reading this book from the mid-20th century,
00:16:01.940 extraordinarily modern how Lewis...
00:16:03.820 Well, the malaise we imagine is sort of very recent.
00:16:07.080 Lewis is talking about a lot of it in his books
00:16:08.760 in the 30s and 40s, so it was already there.
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