Laura Miller by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia Read Free Book Online Page A

Lewis’s words, “as closely bound to his presence as if the three of us had been chained together,” whereupon his own peculiar habits and endless, overwrought lectures monopolized everything they did or talked about. “The theory,” Lewis wrote, “was that we lived together more like three brothers than like a father and two sons.” The reality, of course, was that Albert failed to become a virtual brother and neglected to behave like the father he actually was. Small wonder, then, that Lewis also wrote, “I thought Monday morning, when he went back to his work, the brightest jewel of the week.”
    In modern parlance, we’d say Albert had boundary issues. His heart was in the right place, but he exposed his children to his raw grief, confusion, and fear when they were too young to be anything but frightened by it. He couldn’t grasp that they had thoughts or lives of their own, and so he never gathered that at times, he must necessarily be excluded from both, emotionally and physically. Even as an adult, Jack never entered his father’s house without first checking his pockets for anything he would prefer to keep private; Albert would go through them as casually as he’d enter his sons’ rooms without knocking. And thus, in Jack, “a habit of concealment” was formed. Unless you’ve had a parent of this sort, it’s hard to communicate how powerfully the sensation of perpetual intrusion shapes a child’s character or how fiercely an adolescent is likely to rebel against it.
    Any habit of concealment inevitably leads to the division of one’s life and personality into compartments, and this, I believe, is a signal trait of the bookish child. “I am telling the story of two lives,” Lewis wrote of his early teens in
Surprised by Joy,
meaning that the outer story, set in the series of hateful boarding schools he attended after his mother’s death, must be contrasted with an inner story, contemporaneous with the first. In the inner story, Lewis reveled in “a period of ecstasy” fed by his discovery of classical and Norse mythology and his independent explorations of English literature and the Northern Irish countryside. At home, he soldiered through the weary hours with his father, and when Albert went to work, he would happily devise elaborate sagas set in the imaginary world he shared with Warnie. Best of all, on those rare, cherished occasions when he had the house to himself, he enjoyed the “complete satisfaction” of “a deeper solitude than I had ever known.”
    Like many great readers, Lewis regarded his time alone as his real life. By the age of nine — the same age at which I was thinking that my hunger for Narnia might kill me — he, too, was “living almost entirely in my imagination; or at least . . . the imaginative experience of those years now seems to me more important than anything else.” Like Lewis’s, my material life often seemed to be nothing more than the drab and shadowy interludes between the hours when I could read and retreat to an interior realm furnished with the fabulous treasure I had scavenged from hundreds of books. I sometimes wonder if this kind of inward-turning, inward-dwelling, probably unhealthy temperament is acquired or inherited. Did tumbling into Lewis’s own imagined world at such an impressionable age imprint me with some of his traits? Or did I perhaps get my dreaming ways from my father, who liked nothing better than to escape the rumpus of family life and work alone in his garden?
    Gardens speak to people of this solitary temperament. Even those of us who don’t tend the real ones find the idea of gardens, especially walled ones, evocative. In
Surprised by Joy,
Lewis recalls his first experience of true “beauty,” which appeared in the unlikely form of the lid of a cookie tin that his brother had filled with bits of moss and twigs to create a miniature garden. “What the real garden had failed to do,” Lewis writes, “the toy garden did. It