C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como, Book 41 of 2022

Sometimes I have a book for a few years, suddenly remember I have it, and read it in a couple of days. That just happened with C.S. Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by Jim Como. I have had the copy since it was first published in 2019. I bought it and had it signed by the author at the 50th Anniversary of the New York C.S. Lewis Society. 

Jim is one of the founding members. I joined a decade after the founding of the group in 1979 just after I left active duty in the Army in Germany.  Jim and I have known each other for four decades. I attended meetings of the NY CSL Society about once a year for the past four decades. Like most NYCSL members, Jim lives and works in the New York City region.

I read the book now because I just finished reading CSL's longest book:  English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama. Lewis referred to it by the series name abbreviation OHEL: Oxford History of English Literature. 

I read Jim's book to as a review of all that Lewis wrote before and after the OHEL.

The short introduction includes a brief biography, brief summaries and evaluations of all of Lewis's books and many essays. He even includes a list of the more prominent critics of Lewis and some of the controversies that cropped up during and after Lewis's life.  

After being so far into the weeds of the 16th Century, it was fun to come back to all the ways Lewis wrote and lived.  I have read all of the 40 books published in during the life of Lewis and most of the collections published after he died--a dozen more.  

Lewis is now known most of all for the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia. All of them made into movies I will never see (I don't watch movies of novels I love.)

But Lewis is also a novelist. His Till We Have Faces is, I think, his best book and among the better novels of the 20th Century.  Jim's description of the book and it's place in 20th Century literature is excellent. 

Lewis is also a Christian apologist, a lecturer, a BBC radio personality during WWII, essayist, book reviewer, and a science fiction writer: Perelandra is a brilliant novel, and a literary critic of considerable reputation. Jim's most recent book is about Perelandra. 

Jim's Very Short Introduction convey's all of this in 128 pages.  If you have read only some of Lewis, this book will tell you what to read next. 

And I will also suggest what to read next:  If you haven't read The Four Loves or the essay "The Inner Ring," they should be your next read.

First 40 books of 2022:

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis, Book 40 of 2022

 

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

The longest book of the more than forty books written by C.S. Lewis in his lifetime, took more than forty years for me to finish reading.  

I first read a few pages from English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama in my semester as a full-time student in 1980. In my Western Traditions II class, taught by Theodora Graham, we read the Norton Critical Edition of Utopia  by Sir Thomas More.  

Among the dozen critical essays in the back was an excerpt from Lewis's history. Amid essays claiming More was a communist, a socialist, an authoritarian and number of other political positions that mostly did not exist in the 16th Century, Lewis said the key to understanding the book was the magic map. He said the book was written for friends who shared More's taste for creating worlds--with magic maps. 

It was a refreshing and fun essay in the midst of others with very long faces. 

Twenty years later I read the long first chapter of the book, which is a wonderful summary of the century and its politics and religion.  But I put the book down and did not read it except as a reference until this year. Then I decided to finish it.  

Lewis read everything and everyone who published prose and poetry in the 16th Century in English.  More than one reviewer said Lewis found the only good lines of poetry ever written by some very bad poets.  

Lewis wrote about More and Tyndale as prose writers, and as martyrs. Tyndale, the Protestant, translated the Bible into English. His translation makes up a lot of what would become known as The King James Bible published in the early 17th Century. 

More, a Catholic, wrote in defense of his Church. Both men faced death by torture and burning at the stake worried whether they would break under torment. But neither thought the concept of punishing heresy by death was inherently wrong, even when they were waiting in cells for execution.  When we read old books, we are reading a whole world of different assumptions about life and the universe.

The final 200 pages of the book, 'Golden,' is divided into three sections:  Seventy pages on Philip Sydney and Edmund Spenser, seventy pages on Prose in the 'Golden' Period, and sixty pages on Verse in the 'Golden' Period. 

At several points, Lewis analyzes a sonnet cycle and says where the poet missed the mark in form or content.  Sometimes in relation to the standard of that era, the sonnets of Francesco Petrarch. Then on page 502, after several pages on Shakespeare's longer verse, the first paragraph begins:

Shakespeare would be a considerable non-dramatic poet if he had only written Lucrece: but it sinks almost to nothing in comparison with his sonnets. The sonnets are the very heart of the Golden Age, the highest and purest achievement of the golden way of writing. 

Lewis continues for another seven pages explaining why Shakespeare's sonnets are "the very heart of the Golden Age."

At this point I stopped reading this book, got a copy of Sonnets and started reading them aloud.  It has been years since I read them. They are beautiful. 

As with any book this comprehensive, we can read pieces of the book we care about and omit the rest. Anyone interested in the history of literature or in late Medieval Europe can enjoy the introduction "New Learning and New Ignorance." This 66 page essay could be a short history book all by itself.

Since I have read and loved so many Medieval works, Book I. Late Medieval, was interesting for me just as history of how literature was changed by the break up of the Church and subsequent religious wars and controversies. 

Book II. 'Drab' is repellent just by the title. But it is in this section we learn about Tyndale and More. Reading Lewis on bad poets is interesting just to see how he handles the material.

Book III. 'Golden' is why we read history.  Lewis pulls together all the threads of culture, society, religion, and literature and weaves a narrative to show us in detail how English Literature dragged along for a half century and suddenly flowered in a way no one could have anticipated.

Enjoy! 

First 39 books of 2022:

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

La veritable histoire des trois petits cochons by Erik Blegrad, Book 39 of 2022

 

La veritable histoire des trois petits cochons

The tale of the three little pigs is the 1843 original version, en francais.  The French is simple and the illustrations are lovely.  

In this rather bloodthirsty telling of the tale, the wolf (le loup--he is not called the "Big Bad Wolf" or le grand mechant loup) eats the first two pigs.  The second is shown in a pan with an apple in his mouth fresh from the oven.  

The tale has the third little pig outsmarting the wolf several times before finally getting the wolf so angry he jumps down the chimney into a pot of boiling water. The last illustration is the third little pig eating the wolf doe his supper--at the table with a napkin, silverware and a candle.

The most lovely line in the book is the wolf's repeated threat to the little pigs:

Eh bien! Je soufflerai, et je gronderai, et j'ecraserai ta maison.

Well! I'll blow and I'll roar and I'll crush your house.  

It worked two out of three--then the wolf was dinner......

First 38 books of 2022:

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

The Iliad or The Poem of Force by Simone Weil, Book 38 of 2022

This brief book was written shortly after France was defeated by the Nazis in 1940. Within three years, the author, Simone Weil, would be dead. She would die in the effort to free her country from the Nazis.

The Iliad or the Poem of Force begins: 

The true hero, the true subject at the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away.

She goes on to show how every character in the Iliad is crushed by force.  Every character eventually is afraid and dies by irresistible force. Throughout Weil makes her case that force is the hero at the center of the drama of the fall of Troy.  

The essay is more sad and beautiful than I can easily convey. If you have read Homer, read this essay and weep again with the heroes before the walls of Troy.

First 37 books of 2022:

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Game of Thrones, Book 5, A Dance with Dragons, Book 37 of 2022

 

I just finished book 5 of the Game of Thrones:  A Dance with Dragons. Before I started reading the series at the beginning of the pandemic, I watched the entire HBO series.  Although the series runs eight seasons and 73 episodes, the more I read, the more the video series seemed schematic.  So many details that did not or could not make it into the vast video production.  

Of course, a video adaptation is simply a different artistic work than a book.  The trajectory of the difference is predictable. If the novel and the video series were main branches of a tree, the longer they grow, the farther apart they get. That was how it felt to read the books after seeing the video series.  

Season 1 and Book 1 are very similar.  Book 2 and Season 2 started to diverge. By then of Book 5, I felt I was in a different story, or a version of a different story. At the end of Book 5, every major character was dead, near death, threatened with death, or just miserable.  

Nothing that happened in the last two seasons of HBO series seemed to be the likely path of the characters at the end of Book 5.  

George R.R. Martin said Book six will be published in November of 2023.  I am so looking forward to it. I want to see what the story is like after 11 years of hiatus. Martin has to be influenced by what the HBO crew finally produced, so we will never know what Book 6 would have been without the HBO series.  

I loved the books. The further I went through the books, the more I loved them. 

First 36 books of 2022:

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Colonel Myles B. Caggins III Retires After 26 Years of Service

 

Major Myles B. Caggins, 1st Armored Division, Camp Adder, Iraq, 2009

On Veteran's Day weekend, 2022, Colonel Myles B. Caggins III retired after 26 years of service.  The ceremony was in Chantilly, Virginia, in front of family, friends, comrades and with full military customs and courtesies, plus some twists. The National Anthem was a saxophone solo by Eddie Baccus Jr. It was a first for me, and it was awesome.

Saxophone Solo National Anthem

by Eddie Baccus Jr.

General Vincent K. Brooks, Retired. presided at the retirement ceremony

Presiding at the retirement ceremony was General Vincent K. Brooks, a 1980 graduate of West Point. He retired in 2019 after 39 years, 17 of those years as a general officer. Brooks was a lot of fun. He said Myles served in the White House in the Bush and Obama administrations, but that the peak of his on-air career was his appearance on Jeopardy! Brooks had the audience laughing again and again describing that Jeopardy! performance.

Major Collin Richards, emcee, and Colonel Myles B. Caggins III, Retired, after the ceremony

In my civilian career, I met a lot of people who were leaders and innovators in science including several Nobel laureates. I heard them accept awards. Those speeches could be divided in two types. The first kind of speech is about just how amazing the speaker is. In the second type, the awardee says Thank You to their family, their teachers, their co-workers, everyone! It was a delight to hear all of the he thanks, some with laughter, there were tears for comrades no longer with us, honor to mentors, and a poem for his Mom. 

Myles thanking his daughter Tiffany Champion

Harry and Tiffany Champion

We met at Camp Adder, Iraq, when he was the Public Affairs Officer for 1st Armored Division. I wrote about Myles in Iraq here. We were able to work together several times on stories about soldiers.  When we were together in Iraq, it was his second combat deployment. In 2003 as a Captain, Myles led a support company during the invasion of Iraq. 

Myles on the day of his promotion to Colonel in 2017

We kept in touch in the dozen years since we both returned from deployment in 2010.  I saw Myles get promoted to Colonel in 2017. That story is here.  Following his promotion, Myles deployed for another full-year combat tour in Iraq and Syria in 2019 and 2020. 

Myles first civilian job will be a continuation of his last active duty assignment working in geopolitics.

Don’t Fly TAP – Air Portugal. Nice flight crews, unreliable planes, terrible app

Don't Fly TAP (Air Portugal).

But if you do fly TAP -- Pay attention to their App. 

It took four flights for me to get from Paris to New York on Veterans Day. That was not the day I planned to travel. And I did not book a terrible four-segment super-discount flight. 

Only two of the four flights flights actually took off—though I spent more time on the ground on the runway in Lisbon than the flight to get to Lisbon from Paris. 

I was supposed to fly from Paris to Newark changing planes in Lisbon on November 10. Two days before the flight, I got an email saying the flight was cancelled and I would be flying from Paris to Lisbon at 8am on November 11. At 12:10pm I would be flying to Newark. No options. Take it or leave it.

On November 11, I woke up at 5am. The flight from Paris to Lisbon was uneventful. We boarded the flight to America by 12:30pm then sat on the runway for more than 2 hours until we left the plane at 3pm for the long bus ride back to the terminal. In the terminal they herded all of us to a gate where three nice people from TAP processed two or three people in the first half hour. At this rate it would be Thanksgiving before we all got flights.

While waiting in line to get rebooked, I started talking to the couple in front of me: Iris and Jim. I was telling them that some of the angrier people were, like me, people who had a flight cancelled yesterday. We started talking about how other flights handle cancellations. 

If this were a United flight, our phones would have lit up before we reached the terminal with rebook options. TAP does not do that. I told them that when TAP cancelled my flight the day before, they rebooked me to an 8am departure the next day—they did not offer options. And with TAP, when you check in early, you can’t change anything until, as the agent on the phone told me, they release the reservation from their system. 

To show Iris and Jim what I meant, I hit the My Trips button in the TAP app. When I did, the app said I had been rebooked to JFK and I was leaving in one hour from Gate 41. 

“Oh Shit! I have a flight!” I said loudly. 

I checked. No TAP emails. No TAP messages. If I had not hit My Trips in the app, I would not have known and missed the flight. Iris and Jim did not have the phone app. They went to the TAP website. Nothing. 

Iris and Jim said, "Go to the gate!" I did. And made the flight. Which means the three gate agents who had us standing in Gate 46 for more than an hour had no idea their system was rebooking people. Again, no options. 

Flying into JFK at night instead of Newark means there is no way I can get home. By the time I landed and cleared customs at JFK and took the train to Penn Station New York, the last train from Philadelphia to Lancaster was already gone. 

So, I took NJ Transit to Princeton Junction to the cheapest hotel between NYC and Philadelphia and started catching up on all the sleep I lost getting home. 

I worked for a dot.com twenty years ago before apps existed and when e-commerce was new. In the late 90s and early 2000s, companies that did not have fully integrated systems sometimes had to take data from one system and enter it in another—let’s say communications and reservation management had separate systems. Connecting the two was called a “Sneaker Net.” People walked printouts from one part of the office to another. 

I signed up for every notification I could on the TAP app. I got one email and one text per flight. And the fact that their gate agents had no idea that automatic rebookings were happening says they really don’t understand their own system. United hits you up with options so fast that the angry crowd at the gate never forms. 

If I have not given you enough reasons to fly any other airline but TAP, consider the aircraft themselves. Both of the cancelled flights and the flight I eventually took to America were on Airbus A321 aircraft. They are narrow-body jets with 6-across seating and the only aisle in the middle. The 150 economy-class passengers share 3 toilets. The 200 economy passengers in an A330 (the more common transatlantic aircraft) share 6 toilets with two aisles and twice as many aisle seats. 

You could still choose TAP based on price, but in the sleepless world of transatlantic travel, I will tap a different airline.