My new routine

In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis writes very eloquently on the damning situation of being trapped between doing neither what you SHOULD do nor what you WANT to do and therefore wasting your life in a rut of doing nothing. As is so often the case, Jack manages to explicate the matter very clearly for me, as lately I find myself in this situation quite a bit.

As I mentioned recently, I have been having a real problem with focus these days. When it comes to doing work, particularly for school, I've been encountering an amazing amount of difficulty buckling down to a task and getting anything substantial done. Long periods of time that I mean to use for work often just drift into space-out time where nothing meaningful is accomplished. Because I feel guilty for not getting my work done, I feel like it's unjustified for me to spend that time doing something I'd actually like to do instead, so I end up losing all that time to pretty much doing nothing. I'm not sure what's the cause of it-- tiredness, frustration, something else entirely? --but I hate what it's doing to me. It's a point of pride that I've never missed a deadline in my life, but I never used to be a procrastinator, and I'm pretty sure all that rushing at the last minute is pushing down the quality of my work.

So I am going to put myself on a new schedule. I am a creature of habit in the extreme, so when I get into a habit I tend to stick with it pretty closely. My work hours did in fact get pushed back by one hour, so I'd better make the best of it. Now is as good a time as any  to build a new routine.

I'm going to keep getting up at seven like I have been. And I'm going to get a workout in as soon as I get up. At least a half hour of activity. That will give me enough time to get cleaned up before work. It will also get the workout thing out of the way early, so I won't have it hanging over me for the rest of the day.

I will bring lunch with me to work. That way I won't go crazy with hunger or fill up on junk. I'll either prepare this the night before or leave enough time to stop at the grocery store before work. This will also eliminate the need to figure this out after work, which will delay eating further and keep me from moving into the next thing.

I will spend two or three hours of every afternoon working on homework. I will mark this time on my schedule so that my calendar reminds me. If I work for a relatively short period like that every day of the week, I will not have to focus for too long at a stretch and the frequency will keep the work getting done.

I will also schedule time to make dinner more often. My being so busy and unfocused on top of it has kept me from doing this. Consequently I'm not eating very well, nor have I enjoyed one of my favorite hobbies in a pretty long time. Making an effort to shop for groceries for the week instead of randomly when I need something (a longstanding bad habit of mine) will help this, I imagine. I think I will take some time one day out of the week to plan meals and buy supplies will make me much more efficient in this.

Well. That's going to be a pretty big shift from the haphazard, rushing way I've been carrying on lately. But it's really not working for me, I miss my more organized, focused life. So I think I need a radical shift to knock me out of this rut.

If Screwtape drags my ass to hell, it sure isn't going to be for wasting my life on TV Tropes.

Lewis Shapes Me Still

Like so many young children who prove to be voracious readers, I started with what engrossed my interest— adventure, magic, talking animals, epic struggles. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis seemed a natural fit. They contained everything that lived in my imagination every day, so my love for them was instantaneous and undying; I must have read through those seven books a hundred times. But as many adventurous, magical, epic, talking-animal-containing novels as I read in my childhood, none of them stayed with me the way Narnia did.

Back in those days, before I tried to examine the appeal, I knew only that the stories felt so right to me. It was as if Lewis plugged the brain of someone else directly into mine, and all the visceral feelings that could not be described poured through me as if the book’s experiences were my own. He had an uncanny way of capturing so much of what was so important to an imaginative, idealistic child— wanting to do the right thing even if you don’t know what the right thing is, the guilt you feel when you act small and petty because you’re hurting and exhausted, and the true nature of bravery that isn’t so much about being unafraid as it is pressing on despite your fear. The way I felt through all of those things, all the good things I wanted to be and do, and all the bad things I hoped someone would forgive, Lewis seemed to understand, and so capably put into words.

As I ventured into writing myself, more than anything else I’d ever read I wanted to emulate this ability of Lewis’s— that of conveying how people really felt. Observing the way he did it, I endeavored to learn how to take all the unvoiced gut feelings of my internal self and translate them into words. As I grew, I wondered if there was anything else that could speak to me in the way Narnia did, more to feed the fires of my growing desire for writer’s knowledge. When I learned how much else Lewis had written, I had to read more.

In the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis used the phrase “for the first time” as an expression of the experience of the numinous. To this day, I cannot hear the phrase without the same associations. In reading more and more of Lewis’s work, I discovered many new things that gave meaning to that phrase for me. Through him, “for the first time,” I met many things that were numinous to me. I read his other fantastical fiction, the Space Trilogy and Till We Have Faces. I read his satire, The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. I read his Christian apology, Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles. I read Surprised by Joy and A Grief Observed, his autobiographical works. Though I loved some better than others, every one of them touched me in a unique way, and each one taught me more about how the written word can touch you.

His Christian apology helped me with the questions in my own soul. I am a religious Catholic, but for me it manifests very much internally— a system of belief and values that informs the way I live more than something I often display obviously. I cannot usually connect with religiosity that is expressed more in form than in philosophy. But here was Lewis, for whom faith was not a collection of dos and don’ts, nor empty rituals, nor a lot of pedagogical Bible stories. As was the Deeper Magic from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it was simply the truth of the universe, inbuilt within the bones of the world. It needed to be examined and understood as much as chemistry and physics. Even when I did not agree with his point of view, the method by which he worked it out always made sense to me. For the first time, I had a framework with which to examine and codify my own beliefs.

Though his autobiographical works, I learned more about the life he’d led and the kind of man he was. His existence had often been a hard one— a lonely, difficult childhood, endless family tragedy, and a fraught struggle to come to peace with the nature of God. It was interesting to contrast his person with that of J.R.R. Tolkien, a contemporary of his and another author I’d grown up on. Tolkien was so certain of himself, of his identity and of the things he believed, and had been all his life. Lewis, by contrast, had none of the comfort of easy truths. Every truth he’d ever come to he had suffered dearly for, deconstructing, tearing his own guts apart so that he could examine every hidden piece. And for the first time I saw from where his grasp of humanity came. He knew himself at all costs, from the totality of his strengths to the depths of his weaknesses, that knowledge coming to him only by the stark, merciless self-judgment he enforced on his struggle to attain it. And from his self-knowledge came knowledge of man, by the same uncompromising process. He was so ruthlessly fair, clear-eyed enough to regard the complicated nature of humanity with just the right measure of judgment and compassion. He articulated both “Who am I, that it is so wrong that I should suffer?” and “I am such that my suffering does signify.” He was so full of that burning contradiction, so strange and yet so critical, of the everything and the nothing of our state, unafraid to at once accept the burden and claim the significance.

In seeing his own weakness, he learned what human weakness was. In seeing his own strength, he grasped the nature of human strength. He kept cutting, no matter how painful, until he exposed truth. And when he wrote, he had all the glory of that knowledge giving fire to everything he said.

And, for the first time, I understood. His work hit me in the gut because his work encompassed the truth of mankind. This was it, I realized. This was why I loved his writing above all others. There were points of style, of course. I always have admired the way he manages to cap his paragraphs with the punchiest, most spot-on sentences that just perfectly conclude the point. But by and large his writing is unadorned, without flourish. He is not a writer of poetical device. He tells you exactly, straightforwardly, what he means to tell you. And in that, his plainspoken words were given gravitas and elegance by the perfection with which he reflected the human condition. That was the power, that was the beauty of all of Lewis’s varied work. His understanding of the human soul felt more real to me than that of any writer I’d ever read. I felt its realness in my bones, and my own view grew and changed through its influence.

That, I believe, is the key— to communicate the truth of such ethereal things, you must do the hard work of coming to grips with them. Perhaps no one can teach understanding of the self, or of humanity. But Lewis taught me how to go about seeking them. And the more I develop it, the more real, the more true, and the more powerful my work will become. By pouring it into my writing, perhaps my work will be able to touch others the way Lewis’s work touched me.

More than any other author, Lewis has shaped the writer, the Christian, and the person I am. Someday I hope I will write with the same significance, the same power to move as his did, and encourage someone else to try and capture their truth.

Jack never approved of journaling

I have always been bemused by C.S. Lewis's oft-mentioned dislike of the practice of journaling. Despite so frequently denigrating it, he actually did it quite often, and some of his most powerful self-reflective works (A Grief Observed, for example) were technically composed by journaling. But seemed to view it as a sort of self-indulgence, a practice that encouraged excessive focus on the self.

I think he was so sensitive toward anything that so encouraged because he already recognized a strong tendency towards it in himself. One of the things I most admire about Lewis and have always worked to emulate was his ruthlessly accurate understanding of his own nature. But the unfortunate companion to the truly self-aware is often some degree of self-absorption. God knows it's certainly dogged me in my own efforts. It takes a great deal of time thinking about you to arrive at real personal understanding, and all that time is necessarily precluded from regard for other things, such as other people, or important efforts, or God. I believe it is in criticism of this that Lewis makes his stance-- he was not about to approve of anything that drove him even further into his failing.

I don't really agree; I think journaling is a very positive thing. I like that it encourages me to produce writing, which in turn improves my writing. I think it helps us work through problems, clarfying thoughts, developing points, and cope with our pain. I also believe that the achievement of true self-awareness is worth some time spent in excessive self-absportion; remembering to attend to the external can always be yet worked towards. And you'll notice that even though Lewis disapproved of the pursuit he did it anyway-- because it helped him clarify, develop, cope. We have some of his powerful personal works because he did it anyway.

But I know what he means. He was so ruthlessly fair, so clear-eyed for both the hard edge against and the compassion for the human plight. He articulated both "Who am I, that it is so wrong that I should suffer?" and "I am such that my suffering does signify." He was so full of that burning contradiction, so strange and yet so critical, of the everything and the nothing of our state, unafraid to at once accept the burden and claim the significance. He kept cutting, no matter how painful, until he exposed truth.

I don't always reach the same conclusions as Lewis. I don't always have the same experiences or viewpoints. But he speaks to me because he cuts himself with all the same blades I do.

Brooding

Throughout my childhood, my mother liked to use a particular quotation from The Chronicles of Narnia, specifically said by Aslan to Lucy about why she should forgive a treacherous friend of hers in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: "She is weak, but she loves you."

Whenever I would get too furious or judgmental about someone in my life for not being as strong or as brave or as good as they should have been, my mom would say that. "She is weak, but she loves you." By this she meant be forgiving, because that person may not have much strength to draw on, but they do love you, and the goodness of loving and caring and meaning well indicates that there's something worthy of love about them.

I still remember all the times she said this to me, and it did make me think. But the older I get, the more and more my response becomes that there is a corollary-- "She is weak, but she loves you." "She loves you, but she is weak."

I don't know if that's right. But I'm coming to believe that if you love someone, you owe it to them to be strong. That doing the hard thing for them is part of loving.

Heh.

Heh. I just realized I wrote "the problem of porn." C.S. Lewis must be rolling in his grave.

Don't want to deal

In Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis talks about how he had always been inclined toward sacrificing all aspects of a state of being, both positive and negative, than having to endure anything negative about that state of being at all. He preferred, for example, abject neglect by others if it meant no mistreatment or interference; he preferred blandness to offensiveness even if it meant nothing of interest; in short, he would give up all possibility of anything positive as long as it meant avoiding a particular negative.

Lately I have been in something akin to that state fairly frequently. I have had no capacity to handle anything troublesome lately. Well, that's not exactly true. I have been technically able to, but when things arise that I will have to handle, it just makes me feel utterly overwhelmed and desirous of doing anything to avoid it. I have just been subsumed into an overall state of "not wanting to deal." I have been avoiding people rather than putting myself into frustrating interactions. The slightest complication to my life has sent me seeking some escape. I'm worried this is why I've been sleeping more, and why I've been wanting so much time alone. Having nothing to deal with means nothing negative to deal with, but at the expense of anything positive.

This worries me because I am concerned of what really important things this will drive me to avoid rather than confront. It also worries me because I'm concerned about what this desire to avoid will drive me to do.

Shame issues

One thing I always admired about C.S. Lewis's personal work is how ruthlessly self-analytical he is. I've alluded in this space before to how he is brutally honest about who he is and what he did wrong and what is wrong with him that he made those mistakes.

I pride myself on being a self-aware person; I'm pretty good at realizing what's really going on with me, and I do a good job not letting me lie to myself. So yes, I, like Lewis, tend to know exactly what my problems, flaws, or shortcomings are. Where we differ is that he can tallk about them, confess them to the world-- when he was selfish, when he was weak, stuff like that. For owning up to those, my shame issues get too much in the way.

I'm not talking about "this thing I screwed up and did wrong." Those I try to be upfront about, the mistakes I make, because there's no better way to seem like a dick than to not own up to when you mess up. What I'm talking about is the internal stuff, the things about me that aren't so admirable. When there is something about me that I feel is qualitatively lacking in myself, sometimes I just get so ashamed of it that I have to pretend that part of me doesn't exist. When I feel selfish, or weak, or not as good as I want to be, I hide it, so no one will know I ever was anything so pathetic.

A lot of the time feeling so ashamed of my baser feelings keeps me from acting on them, which I guess is a good thing. But sometimes it leads to me keeping secret the negative stuff I do. It worries me sometimes. I also wonder how people who don't get so ashamed of themselves deal with these stuff.

Note II on Lewis

One incredibly amusing thing in Surprised by Joy. I have met a number of people who say that they can't fully enjoy a lot of Lewis's work because they were distracted and annoyed by the Christian overtones. Apparently, before his conversion, Lewis was a fan of a lot of Christian authors who at the same time irritated him because he was distracted and annoyed by the Christian overtones. :-)

On a related note, despite being raised Christian and having been exposed to the Narnia books from a very young age, I did not detect the religious significance until it was pointed out to me by a book of commentary on the series. Didn't notice it at all, even in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where it is the most overt. Maybe I was a remarkably slow child. That is possible. In fact, I went to a week-long church camp once with an extremely heavy Narnia theme, and I was completely perplexed as to why it was present at all-- the connection escaped me that completely. The fact that they never bothered to EXPLAIN the connection, probably just taking for granted that it existed and that we quite small children were aware of it, may not have been the best way to deal with the matter for us kiddies. ;-)

Note on Lewis

Another note on Lewis-- he does this thing so well that I have always admired and labored to do myself. He somehow manages to end his paragraphs with the punchiest, most perfect cappers of sentences that just put a feather in the cap of the whole paragraph. I have been highlighting passages here and there, and so often I want to mark the last sentense of a paragraph. Damn, I love that.

Lewis vs. Tolkien

In the process of reading Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis's autobiographical account of his religious journey. In the course of things, I find myself comparing his way of writing to that of J.R.R. Tolkien, who was his close friend and colleague.

As much as I love both authors, I have alwys found Lewis's work to be deeper, more mature, and more profound than Tolkien's. Lewis always seems to have a thoughtfulness and a reflectiveness that his colleagues just doesn't seem to have for me. Tolkien's epics are grand and poetic and powerful, but they never seem to thematically go as deep. But I think it comes from the way the two men think. Tolkien had the disadvantage of having lived comfortably in his beliefs for the entirety of his life; he never had any need to dig or wrestle with anything, and it shows in the way his work just seems to take certain concepts for granted as truths of the universe. Lewis, on the other hand, is much more reflective-- he had to struggle to any surety under the exacting criticism of his own standards. Lewis, if you read any of what I call his personal works, those written about his personal matters, is an intensely self-aware man, and you can tell he came to it only by the stark and ruthless self-examination he enforced in his struggle toward understanding of his life and his philosophy as it related to God and the universe. I think this difference in the two men shows very much so in their writing. It's the reason why I love Lewis, in fact, and the reason I would say I prefer him to Tolkien.

Lewis and "Diary of Jane"

I have just discovered the song "Diary of Jane" by Breaking Benjamin, and I've absolutely fallen in love with it. It's exactly up my alley, hard-edged rock with a story lurking just under the lyrics sung by a coarse-voiced male vocalist. Ahhh, I love it so, and I've listened to it approximately a hundred times since I found it the other day on Pandora.

Went out shopping with my mom. Bought some home stuff I needed, like an oven thermometer and a special cleaner to make my All-Clad beautiful again, but also hit the bookstore. Got a new blank notebook to use for writing down recipes-- I like to write them out in my own words so I know I understand them, and it's nice to be able to take places with me in case I want to cook stuff for people --and a couple of C.S. Lewis books I've been wanting to read forever. I got Surprised by Joy, his autobiography of his coming to Christianity, and A Grief Observed, a collection of essays working through his grief over the death of his wife. I find him such a fascinating man, in addition to being one of my all-time favorite writers, so I'm delighted to have gotten a hold of these. I will probably be posting my reactions to them as and after I read them.