Log Cabin Deep in the Heart of Texas Honeymoon chapter One

After getting married June 28th Josh and I left Longview for Central Texas.  We drove down to about twenty miles south of Austin, off the beaten tracks onto a ranch where we spent a couple of days in a log cabin.  It was built in 1840.  The owner had found it abandoned on some property out in west Texas and brought it back.  He and his wife renovated it.  He added a iron wrought roof, put electricity and air conditioning in it but hid everything so the look is primitive but with all the comforts of our modern time.

His wife filled the house with period furniture and antiques.  All the lights were original oil lamps that were adapted for electricity.

I must admit that the nights were very dark and a little spooky.  We would sit out in a swing in the lawn and see wild hogs running around the house.  Luckily the cabin was surrounded by an old wooden fence.

It was peaceful sitting on the swing at night listening to the night sounds.

Strictly speaking, our log cabin was a bread and breakfast.  We arrived to see the table and refrigerator stocked with all sorts of treats like muffins, cereal, cookies and milk.  The refrigerator is hidden beneath the curtain dress around the sink, in the upper right hand corner of the above photo.

This is the staircase to the second floor.  The above photo shows the door to the stairwell.  Below you can see the stairs which are little more than a ladder nailed to the wall.

The first night we stayed in the upstairs bedroom but it was too inconvenient having to go up and down through the night (something I am prone to do, plus it was scary- was the ax murderer waiting below?)

The following photos are of the bedroom on the second floor.

Downstairs kitchen and living room.

The animals were used to people.  Once we brought oats for the donkeys but they became too aggressive.  It's not fun being chased down the road by donkeys, even if they were little.

 

In walking distance from the cabin was a river.

 

All in all.  The couple of days we stayed there were very peaceful.  Much needed after all the hectic preparations for a wedding.  The rest of our honeymoon was spent in Europe.  I'll show those photos in the future.

Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. C.S. Lewis, a Life by Alister McGrath

I have read a number of books by Alister McGrath and found them all to be highly interesting and intellectually stimulating.  C.S. Lewis is one of my favorite authors so when I saw that McGrath had written a biography of Lewis I put it on my Amazon wish list and got it for my last birthday.

The only other biography I had read of Lewis was his own account of his life.  It is interesting what we have to say about ourselves compared to what others say about us.  Sometimes I wonder how someone would describe me.  Would it be a fair and accurate picture?  I suppose from the other person's viewpoint it would be.

The good thing is that McGrath is a fellow Irishman also from Belfast and he likes C.S. Lewis.  That's important.  He is not   fawning but neither is he sardonic as was one biography I started to read (I didn't get very far.  Who has time for snark?).  One has to wonder why a person would write about someone they so obviously dislike.  Are they trying to get even?

This is not McGrath's problem and he gives us a fair account of who is considered not only one of the greatest children's writers of the twentieth century but also the greatest apologist of that century as well.

As far as chronological facts go, McGrath doesn't offer anything new.  We know where Lewis was born, where he went to school, serving in WWI, his ultimate conversion to Christianity, career at Oxford and ultimately at Cambridge.

What new information he provides  is to me a bit superfluous if not gratuitous.  While Lewis describes his times at boarding school in Dickensian terms, McGrath suggests that much of Lewis' suffering was due to his own inability to socialize.  He exposits that this was Lewis' brother Warnie's view as well as his father's.

He also feels the need to fill in the blanks left by previous biographies concerning Lewis' mysterious relationship with Mrs. Moore.  For those of you that aren't familiar with Lewis' life, when Lewis was in France during WWI he struck up a friendship with a fellow soldier, Paddy Moore.  Lewis promised Moore that if Moore should not survive the war, he would care for his mother.

Lewis fulfilled this promise and Mrs. Moore and her daughter Maureen lived with the young Lewis for several years, until Maureen married and Mrs. Moore died, in fact. 

What has always been in the grey was what Lewis' actual relationship with Mrs. Moore was.  Was it simply maternal?  She was, after all, old enough to be his mother.  Or was it more?  Because of the time and culture, previous biographers such as George Sayers, an old friend of Lewis, delicately ignored the subject. McGrath has no compunction.  He plainly tells us the relationship was a combination of mother/son/ lovers.

I suppose in this day and age, who cares.  Lewis hadn't become a Christian yet anyway, so no hypocrisy there, but are we really better for knowing?

The other part of the book that I really didn't care for was McGrath's account of Lewis' relationship with Joy Davidson.  According to McGrath, Joy was a gold digging shrew that used poor Jack (the name Lewis went by) and he really didn't even marry her because he wanted to, although he discovered he did love her after all in the end.  This vastly differs from Lewis' own description of his relationship with Joy in his autobiography.

And I, for one, don't buy it for one bit.  No other account, including Lewis' own give any reason to think that Lewis was bulldozed into marrying a woman he didn't love.  McGrath definitely comes across as having an ax to grind against Joy.

But according to McGrath, Lewis got the dates of his conversion wrong as well, something that he spends way too much paper on explaining.  I couldn't care less when Lewis became saved, I'm just glad he did.

Other than the "new insights" to Lewis conversion and adultery, McGrath didn't have much to offer in the way of new facts so a good chunk of the middle of the book is involved in analysis of Lewis' books, primarily the Narnia Chronicles.  Since I love these books I enjoyed hearing a fellow devotee talk about why he loves them as well.

All in all, I don't know how valuable this biography will be considered in the scheme of things.  I don't get any of Lewis' joy that his own biography (aptly titled "Surprised by Joy") is suffused with.

On that topic, however, one thing McGrath does talk about that I had forgotten when I read Lewis' autobiography is what lead Lewis to Christ.  It was exactly that: joy.  When Lewis read the books and stories, even myths and legends by followers of Jesus Christ, there was an ever present joy that beckoned him and filled him with longing.  It was that joy that ultimately drew him to Christ. 

McGrath states:
The poets George Herbert and Thomas Traherne did not persuade Lewis to believe in God: rather, they led him to think that such a belief offered a rich and robust vision of human life..(pg. 134)

McGrath writes of other writers of the time period that experienced the same thing:  Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and T.S. Eliot all converted to Christianity. 

I appreciated what Graham Greene said about Virginia Woolf especially since I find her writing bloated with arrogance.

Graham Greene criticized modernist writers such as Virgina Woolf and E.M. Forster for creating characters who 'wandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin."...to lose sight of the 'religious  sense' as they had so clearly done, was also to lose any 'sense of the importance of the human act." (pg. 133)

 How very true.  Virginia Woolf must have also arrived at that conclusion since she ended her life by filling her pockets with rocks and jumping off a bridge.

In conclusion, this Lewis biography has a lot of merit and I'm glad I read it, but don't let it be the only one you read.  George Sayers, a close friend of Lewis wrote a highly recommended biography which is in my TBR pile.  I also recommend what Lewis has to say about his own life in Surprised by Joy.  Joy is what radiates throughout his autobiography, something that is a little lacking in this latest biography. 













The Guardian review of McGrath's book

Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages by Jacques Le Goff

One of my life long interests has been the Middle Ages.  I love the myth, legend, art, music and history of that time period.  I'm especially interested in how our civilization developed over the approximate thousand year time span that we now label the Medieval Age.

Jacques le Goff is a prominent French researcher in not only the history but the sociology of this time period.  He has written many books about Western Medieval culture.  This particular book deals with what the title says:  How was the concept of time, work and culture developed.

The book is divided into four sections:  Time and Labor; Labor and Value Systems; High Culture and Popular Culture; and Toward a Historical Anthropology.

In Time and Culture le Goff discusses the invention of our modern concept of time.  It never occurred to me that people counted time any differently.  He notes that at first, laborers worked according to the sun but only worked half days.  It was the laborers of the land that insisted on working longer hours so they could receive greater pay.  

Time was at first measured according to the Church.  Clerics regarded time according to Biblical texts and church tradition.  Therefore all time is God's time.  The day was divided up according to the different hours of the church as well as days, weeks and months in that every day had its own particular time in the Church Year where a particular mass was celebrated.  Different masses sung different psalms according to what time of the day or week or month of the year.  

The rise of merchants redefined time in many respects but I don't have time to go into it here.  But this leads us to the next point of this section:  work.  The church held some jobs in honor but some in contempt.  The laborer was at first held in contempt in the early middle ages although this changed by the time of the high middle ages.   The merchant class likewise changed attitudes towards honorable and dishonorable work.  At first it was considered sinful to be usurers which is why Jews held that occupation for hundreds of years.  This made Jews vulnerable to backlash and persecution when times became unstable and people's minds were easily directed to make scapegoats of the people to whom they owed money.  The Bible also speaks of being no man's debter hmmm...

At any rate this whole division goes into much greater detail than I'm able about the rise of labor and merchant classes, the development of time, its origins in the church and later within the merchant community.

The third section describes the development of universities and trades and professions.  Certain people were expected to go to universities, primarily clergy which is only natural considering that universities were developed within the church with the primary objective of training clergy.  This later expanded to include people who attended trade schools and artisans.  Those particular schools were eventually absorbed into the university system.

Still, these schools were primarily schools of theology and exegetical training.  Indeed, back then church, learning, and trade were not separated.  Secular university systems did not exist and every subject, math, science, language arts etc.. was viewed through the lens of Scripture which was considered the crowning science.

The final chapter tells us how  the Public Authorities outside the church gained influence in the Universities during the Renaissance.

The third section is very interesting to me as a musician because it traces the development of high and popular culture in folklore traditions and music. High culture has its roots in religious music and literature while popular culture are those tales and songs people told each other at home and around the fire.

The final chapter was thought provoking because it described the development of symbolic rituals.  Even how the hand shake and greeting with a kiss came about, what it meant and how each person performed them according to their station.  Medieval Christianity was rife with rites and symbols so naturally these became a part of the culture as a whole.  

A lord would take both hands of a vassal in his hands while the vassal always pressed his hands together as in prayer to the Lord.  Le Goff maintains that this, coming from inside church tradition was not a symbol of obeisance as a servant but of a son.  He asserts that the relationship between feudal lords and the people under their authority was not impersonal but seen by both parties as familial.  Just as Christians upon baptism became members of the Christian family, when serfs or villagers ritually show their deference to the knight who promises to protect them, they are publicly proclaiming fidelity to not just their master, but the head of their family. 

The knight, in turn, kneels before the Pope, acknowledging the head of his family is Christ.  When the King "knights" someone by ritually touching his shoulders with a sword he is making the same statement.

This book is far more involved than what I've written.  The most I can hope is to whet someone's appetite to read Le Goff's books for him or herself.