Booknotes 4.5

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, by C. S. Lewis, published 1955, nonfiction. Rereading this as an adult was different — his father’s parenting in the wake of his mother’s death, for example. I still don’t particularly care for the Boxen or school parts, but the (far too brief) bits about books and languages, reading Greek and Latin and French and Italian, still resonated. I also found myself intrigued by this passage: “The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it ‘annihilates space’. It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from travelling ten.”

A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900–1960, by Nikhil Krishnan, published 2023, nonfiction. It’s about the people at Oxford who did linguistic philosophy, a thing I knew nothing about. (Reading the philosophy canon is something I want to start on sometime soon, by the way.) Really liked it! Particularly the WWII part.

White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems, by Mary Oliver, published 1994, poetry. Replete with vivid imagery from nature. It didn’t resonate with me as much as I wanted it to, but I haven’t written off Mary Oliver. I think often of this quote from her: “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” Oh, in the realm of coincidences that don’t matter but nevertheless spark joy: I got to her poem “Mockingbirds,” about the elderly couple visited by the gods, and realized that barely an hour or two beforehand I had read that very story — Philemon and Baucis — in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Speaking of which:

The Metamorphoses, by Ovid (translated by Stephanie McCarter), published AD 8 (translated 2023), poetry. Excellent translation. So many transformations. (Yes, yes, the title should have made that clear, but I hadn’t expected almost every story to have a person changing into a tree or an animal.) A shocking number of rapes, too — maybe forty or so? Forty too many. Goodness. Overall, a plethora of myths I hadn’t heard of before, along with many I had, and even those I thought I knew, like Midas and Daedalus, often had more to the story that I’d been unaware of. I generally liked the book, minus all the rape and occasional incest, and am glad to have finally read this part of the classical canon. Feeling the itch now to read Homer and Virgil.