The Letters of C.S. Lewis

 On December 27th, I finally finished the third volume of The Letters of C.S. Lewis (Walter Hooper, ed.). I bought the Kindle versions in January 2023, so I've had a yearlong journey in this work alone. I'm going to have to write another blog about the rest of the year with Lewis, but I also set myself to read all of Lewis's book-length literary criticism that I haven't read, so I've read through the OHEL volume, The Personal Heresy, A Preface to Paradise Lost, The Discarded Image (again), An Experiment in Criticism (again), and am finishing up Arthurian Torso and Studies in Words. Earlier I'd also read The Allegory of Love and Spenser's Images of Life.

But back to the letters: I feel as though I have immersed myself in a sprawling autobiography. Since I've spent the last year, off and on, reading through the volumes, I have, I believe, a sense of the more personal Lewis behind the published persona. That's not to say that the letters are not rhetorical, but they are more individualized. Here are some preliminary observations:

1. The early letters point the centrality of Lewis's relationship with Arthur Greeves, a relationship that continued throughout his life. The pre-Christian Lewis was warm and open to Greeves, sometimes in ways that are disturbing. The general warmth of letters to friends throughout his life, however, is prefigured in these early letters.
2. He seems (from a contemporary American perspective) to be unfailingly polite, even to his father (though, given that he was being supported by his father during the period of his higher education while he himself was secretly supporting Mrs. Moore and Maureen with those resources, there is a high degree of rhetorical hypocrisy in those letters, of which he repented later). I may, however, be misreading a kind of crisp "businesslike" tone with his father as polite, when it was actually more distant and disconnected. (In fact, after also immersing myself in English TV and contemporary fantasy over the past year and a half, I've come to realize the high degree of icy politeness in many exchanges is actually aggression. If anyone ever says, "May I have a word?", it's never good.) Very soon after his father's death, Lewis begins to confess his guilty feelings about his treatment of his father, and ultimately writes to correspondents evaluating his behavior as instances of sinfulness.
3. The recorded correspondence does little to dispel the mystery of his early relationship with Mrs. Moore, nor does it clarify elements of his relationship with Arthur Greeves. [Greeves apparently censored some of Lewis's letters that he (Greeves) gave to Hooper for the first volume]. The letters do make clear, however, that as the 1940s progressed, Lewis wrote publicly about Mrs. Moore as "his mother." In the same way, he often characterizes his brother's troubles in the letters as "illness." Is this prevarication or a strong wish for privacy? By the late 1950s, however, he was beginning to speak publicly about his brother's alcoholism to some correspondents.
4. As Lewis was writing apologetics for publication, he anticipated and rehearsed many of the arguments he would put more formally in published works in his letters to various correspondents, most specifically Dom Bede Griffiths, and occasionally to Owen Barfield (outside of the "Great War" correspondence). His "apologetic" correspondence continues even after he transitions from published apologetics to children's fiction.
5. His long-term warm correspondence with Dorothy L. Sayers, Ruth Pitter, and Sister Penelope belie any real deep misogyny. It is clear that he seems to have had a sense of "gender" as a spiritual category, rather than a social construction; I do remember reading that Sayers had made at least one response to his statements about gender before her death in 1957.
6. He had a significant correspondence with many of the literary figures of his generation, including T.S. Eliot, but also Sayers and even E.R. Eddison, whose fantasy novel, The Worm Ouroboros, he highly praised. In fact, he carried on a relatively lengthy correspondence with Eddison in a stylized version of fifteenth-early sixteenth century English. He corresponded several times with Arthur C. Clarke, not only about science fiction, but about the place and role of science and scientists in modern thought (of course, they strenuously disagreed with each other). When Clarke published Childhood's End in 1953, Lewis highly praised it, both to Clarke personally, and to Joy Davidman (before she became his wife). Clarke's publisher used a passage from one of Lewis's letters to Davidman about the book as part of a blurb in a later edition. It's probably significant that Lewis's earlier fictions were in the genre of science fiction/fantasy, which explains the more frequent correspondence with other writers of science fiction and fantasy.
7. His early correspondence, especially, gives many clues about the kinds of works he did like (medievalist fiction and historical fiction, as well as novels, dominated his earlier reading for pleasure). He also read in a specific way (or for a specific purpose) that foreshadows An Experiment in Criticism.
8. I was, however, completely startled by the literally hundreds of thank you notes he wrote in response to the Americans who donated so much food to him and his circle during the postwar years (1946-the early 1950s). Just a few further observations about these letters and the donations: my impression is that he must have received hundreds, maybe a thousand or more (!) pounds of American food and other items over the years of rationing in Britain; he is conscientious to answer with a thank-you each parcel (which he seems to have kept numbered records of in most cases); these answers were invariably graceful and often quite witty, as he struggled to find fresh ways to communicate his gratitude. There's a noticeable shift in his attitude toward the U.S. in these postwar years. Circa WWI, he and his correspondents are relatively dismissive of Americans and the U.S. After the outpouring of American generosity, he often comments that he would gladly visit America, except that Mrs. Moore needed relatively constant care.
9. I noted a progression in Lewis's attitude towards T.S. Eliot in correspondence between the early post WWI years and his work with Eliot on the Prayer Book revision of the 1950s. I'd been struck when reading the Personal Heresy that Lewis's comments about the "subject" of an author's writing and the relationship between that "subject" and the individual author's life paralleled in many ways Eliot's assertions in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." It is clear that it's literary modernism (the literary movement) and "modernism" (the intellectual movement) that Lewis objected to. What Lewis seems to have objected to most in literary modernism was the lack of poetic form, and the aesthetic unpleasantness of many of its characteristic images.
10. In The Pilgrim's Regress, Lewis had much to say about the reductionism of the Freudian view of the human personality, but he also had several things to say in the letters (not all of them negative) about Jung and archetypes (which he spells "archtypes"). Given Lewis's views on myth, it's not surprising that he might have had some affinities with Freud's erstwhile disciple.
11. Whatever one might say about Joy Davidman's motivations for marrying Lewis, it is clear that from his perspective, they enjoyed an amazing few years of marriage. Lewis mentions their happiness and compatibility in many letters, and in one letter calls this the happiest period of his life.
12. The timetable of Lewis's writing of A Grief Observed was also a revelation. After Davidman's death in mid-July of 1960, it was barely 2 1/2 months later that Lewis showed a draft of the book to Roger Lancelyn Green under pledge of secrecy.
13. It is clear that from about the mid-1950s, Lewis's books, but especially his children's books, began to make significant money. His primary publisher, Jocelyn Gibb, began to collect the multitude of essays Lewis had written for some collection volumes after the success of an American-published collection.
14. From the late 1950s to the early 1960s Lewis gained an understanding and appreciation for some existentialist thinkers (Buber and one French thinker), though he claims to have read little of Kierkegaard and understood less. In the early 1960s, he begins to mention Thomas Merton with appreciation, and is reading him.

This experience has given me a new perspective on Lewis's life, and unsettled my perceptions of his career and motivations for writing. Lewis certainly seems to have made a careful distinction between the kinds of writing he did: poetry, allegory, science fiction, supposal, apologetics, myth, children's fantasy, and literary criticism, but outside of the children's fantasy, which had a definite beginning and and end (that is, the first and last books of the Chronicles of Narnia), he wrote all of the other kinds pretty much throughout his life. He often talked about the genesis of his books in biological terms (he called it "being big with book") and their occasions, and continued to do a kind of pastoral apologetics until the end of his life in his correspondence. It is as though writing was a labor that became completely natural for him. He was also a quick and prodigious writer, judging from the volume of letters, diaries, lectures, books and essays of all kinds that issued from his pen.

Grandpa Does the Arizona Trail: Passage 34

 

On September 21st and 22nd, 2023, Chris and I completed about 12 miles of Passage 34, hiking ten and a half miles from south of Schultz Tank to the Snowbowl Road. The next day, parking at Snowbowl Road, we did around a mile and a quarter out and back northbound on the trail (this second day was a concession to the complications of dropoff and pickup at trail junctions, and previous overenthusiasm during the mountain biking sections.

On the 21st, we parked at the Snowbowl Road and called a taxi (!) to take us to what we thought would be the Schultz Tank Trailhead. [By the way, shout-out to Turquoise Taxi (928-600-2112)!] But it turns out that eastbound Schultz Tank Road in northwest Flagstaff has been closed near its entrance because of forest fire and flooding damage. It also turns out that Little Elden Road, which usually reaches up to the Schultz Tank Trailhead (which I had driven to during my hike of Passage 32), is now closed about two and a half miles below the trailhead. Turquoise took us as far as the closed-road gate on Little Elden Road. This turned what we thought would be a 7 1/2 mile hike into about a 10 1/2 mile hike.

We also needed to find the trail from the road. As can be seen by the route on Route Scout (https://hikearizona.com/map.php?TL=209963), the sharp right angle bend off the road is the place where we left the road and bushwacked to the Arizona Trail. There, we experienced our second instance of Native kindness, when a Native man who was cutting wood for his grandparents (part of the fire clearing program in the national forest) saw us get out of the taxi and stand around puzzled. His hunting mapping app showed where the Arizona Trail was, and confirmed Route Scout. He also encouraged us that the trail was really very close and easy to find. He must have heard my murmured "Ya-ta-he" (I thought that on balance he was probably Dine'), because he came back with two ears of pit-roasted and smoked corn from his family corn field on one of the Hopi Mesas. He said, "These are for your journey." I didn't know the word then, but now I can say to him "kwakwhay" (thank-you). It was an important blessing to receive. The corn was delicious that evening.

The rest of the day went smoothly, though the portion of Passage 32 that I had hiked many years before had been rerouted in some places, mostly up and across burned-over slopes prone to erosion. We climbed on the trail to Schultz Tank, meeting a party of equestrians on one of the slopes. We got to Schultz Tank (below) soon after lunch, seeing some small water troughs first, before seeing the tank itself. Though the roads all seem to be closed, there was some presence of RVs and camps in the area. Signs proclaimed that forest restoration was the reason for the camps in the area.

Once on Passage 34 proper, we often hiked alone, though by midafternoon, we began to be passed by mountain bikers, who seemed to have come up from a number of spur trails in the Flagstaff trail system. We probably were passed by around 8 cyclists, mostly in pairs. The terrain, though rolling, did not have any huge descents or climbs, and the trail itself was clearly marked and not too rocky.

Later in the afternoon, we passed the Flagstaff City Passage (33); soon after that, we ran into the through-hiker that we had met the day before (see my narrative of Passage 35) at Cedar Ranch Trailhead. Now we were hiking in opposite directions, and he gratefully took an apple and a bag of pretzels from us, since he was "flagging" a bit before getting into town. So, in the less than 24 hours since he'd seen us the day before, he had hiked over 25 miles. We wished him good luck and a great time in Flagstaff.

The 22nd was our last day of hiking before leaving for home. Originally, I had planned an 11-mile day on Passage, to Forest Road 417. But our week of experiences, including our shuttling issues on the first part of Passage 34, had convinced me that discretion was the better part of valor in this case, so we contented ourselves with hiking 1 1/4 miles northbound from the Snowbowl road (a 2 1/2 mile round trip). We then headed for home in Mesa.

Grandpa Does the Arizona Trail: Passage 35

Cedar Ranch Trailhead Marker

On September 20, Chris and I left our Grand Canyon National Park campsite, travelling to Flagstaff. On the way back, we scouted the south end of Passage 35 (going north), and glanced at the north end of Passage 34. After the hiking trip of yesterday at the south end of Passage 36, I decided to duct tape the shoes one more time for a little bit of riding on Babbitt Ranch, which was reputed to be some of the easiest riding on the AZT. And it was, at least the 4-mile section that we rode out and back from the Cedar Ranch Trailhead.

The adventure started early: the Cedar Ranch Road is unmarked at the entrance, which also proclaims it a "commercial road with no through access, not for passenger car traffic." (So, probably it does have through access to the 89, and it's well-graded, so passenger cars can easily navigate it.) We stopped for a while to get our bearings. Thanks to the poor road grader who waited for a while for us to go, then started out, back down the road. The Cedar Ranch trailhead is about 7 miles in on this road, past a turnoff to Cedar Ranch itself, and through a cattle gate. Turns out that along the road is all open cattle range.

The south end of Passage
35, from the trailhead.

The north end of Passage
34, from the trailhead,

Unfortunately, I used the "Delete Drive Out" feature in Route Scout on a part of the trail that I mountain biked, the south end of Passage 35. It deleted every element of the trail that was over 5 mph. So I have recreated our mountain bike route of September 20 from the Cedar Ranch trailhead below.

We did about 4 miles out; the marked route shows that the first about three miles were on Cedar Ranch Road, until the turnoff near Babbitt Lake, after which we went about one more mile (until we came to a more rocky downslope). Cedar Ranch Road was well graded, and past the turnoff a little less so, but ultimately very bikeable for beginners. We had relatively little time, some battered gear, and the Arizona Trail mountain biking guide that listed the Russell Tank section (about 10 miles north) as "intermediate." So we turned back at mile 4, making an 8-mile trip. The first of the pleasant surprises happened on our trip out on Cedar Ranch Road--a cattle roundup was going on. We'd seen cattle beyond (north of) the gate that we used to enter Passage 35, and we'd had a couple of anxious moments passing groups of open-range cattle. We'd also seen a parked horse trailer (empty) near the turnoff to Cedar Ranch Road. Now we saw a family group of cattle hands (some just children) slowly driving a herd along the road. From a safe vantage point off the road opposite the cattle drive, we waited for them to pass. On the way back, we saw them as they completed the drive.

The second pleasant surprise happened when we were loading the bikes at the trailhead after the ride: a through-hiker came along behind us and got some water from a cache near the trailhead. Apparently Trail Angels stash water along this part of the route because of the lack of water sources. I didn't get his picture or name, but he was hiking fast, and was ready to climb again into Flagstaff. He had apparently taken about two days to hike south from the Grand Canyon (about 40 miles), and he planned to resupply fully in Flagstaff. (This story has a sequel.)

Once more at the trailhead . . .

Grandpa Does the Arizona Trail: Passage 36

The rim of the Painted Desert

As of October 4, 2023, the passage has not been fully hiked or biked. In September 2023, parts of this passage were mountain biked:

September 18, 2023: After a long day completing Passage 37 from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon the day before, we drove to the Grandview Fire Tower to explore south on Passage 36, doing a 3-mile out and back route (6 miles total) on the trail. Before we hit the trailhead, we visited the Kaibab National Forest Ranger Station in Tusayan. While we were there, a Navajo (Dine') couple, one a hosteen (elder), the other, his wife or daughter. As she filled out their permits to gather firewood, he pointed out various dangerous creatures on the posters: the coral snake (tł'iish) and Gila Monster (tiníle'í). I wanted to say axhe'he'e' (thank you), but I didn't know the word at the time. 

The day was clear, with temperatures in the mid-70s; the ponderosa forest was open and clear, with the trails sometimes rocky and slopes with water bars. The trail would have been moderately easy, except that I had destroyed my shoes the day before on Passage 37. With duct tape they were barely usable, and did not unclip easily (3 falls for that reason alone). There were plenty of wildflowers, and good views of the Painted Desert Rim above Marble Canyon. 

Shoes and duct tape

On our arrival back at the Grandview Fire Tower, we met three through-trail riders on hybrid gravel bikes, fully loaded, who had been traversing the Great Western Trail, which winds through western U.S. states from North to South. This trail accommodates motorized as well as foot traffic, and parallels the Arizona Trail at this point, on nearby dirt roads. One of these riders had also hiked the Arizona Trail, and said that he would hike, rather than ride, the Arizona Trail.

Lunch stop

The link for the triplog of the North section bicycled: https://hikearizona.com/dex2/profile.php?u=146&ID=46#T__209816_______1

Well at Moqui

A ruined Wall

Moqui signage

On September 19, we drove to Moqui Stage Station, the access point to Passages 36 (S) and 35 (N). It's approximately 11 relatively easy miles on a gravel road from Highway 64. Because of the shoe issues, we had determined to hike, rather than mountain bike, the southern section of Passage 36. This was a shame, because after traversing the spur trail from Moqui, the trail followed two-track roads for as far as we went (2 miles out and back, for a total of 4 miles). The AZT bicycling guide had rated the section from Russell Tank to here as rougher mountain biking than the sections we had done, but the section we hiked did not seem to be so. Again, clear weather, temperatures in the high 70s to low 80s, wildflowers abounded. From the southern end of Passage 36, I did hike 1/4 mile farther down the beginning of passage 35.

Quite an anthill!

The link for the trip log of the South section hiked: https://hikearizona.com/x.php?x=209819

Grandpa Does the Arizona Trail: Passage 37

 

South Kaibab starting point

We began at the South Kaibab Trailhead, SOBO on September 17, 2023. Within the National Park, the AZT is not clearly marked until it becomes the Tusayan Connector Trail. The first 6-8 miles are mostly paved, though there is one AZT stretch in the national park that follows a power line maintenance road, rocky and rough. This early stretch gave us the unwarranted hope that we might be able to complete the ride in less than six hours.

One of the Arizona Trail underpasses

At the Tusayan turnoff, the AZT becomes two-track and single track to Grandview Lookout. Though designated "easy in the AZT bicycling guide, the two-track is actually quite rocky and rutted. This meant two things: a generally slower pace, because of having to walk bikes around obstacles (and because of the change in altitude from home), and the destruction of my (admittedly 40-year-old) touring shoes [pictured]. but the woods were open an often beautiful.

So, what we thought would be about a 6-hour tops ride ended up being about an eight-hour trip. Shuttling is an issue, since no shuttles travel between Grandview Point Overlook (near the Grandview Fire Tower). The AZT Trail Angel for this section has said that shuttles might be possible.

Our Lunch Spot outside Tusayan

But at the time, I had not thought about calling on a trail angel since I had had difficulties arranging things with other trail angels in other places, and because I (mistakenly) thought that 10 miles on Highway 64 back to the South Kaibab Trailhead (where we had left the car), would be safe and easily done. Between the shoe destruction, the onset of dusk, the tourist traffic, a lack of bike lights and general exhaustion, I ended up hitching a ride back to the car from a group of tourists at Grandview Point (thank you so much!) The trip, however, was a success, because if Emergency Services don't have to be called, how bad can it be?

Here is my RouteScout track from hikearizona.com: https://hikearizona.com/x.php?x=209797.

Grandview Fire Tower-End of the Passage

The Maricopa Trail--Granite Reef Dam to Usery Mountain

 At long last comes an attempt to finish off one leg of the Maricopa Trail, this time from Granite Reef Dam to Usery Mountain Park. I had hesitated to do this section for a variety of reasons: first, much of it is mountain biking, and though I am a road biker, and use my mountain bike for the canal paths, this would have been the first time in several years that I'd been on single-track, and a decade since my last serious mountain biking. Here is the county map of this leg:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11pM_YsR5eF68XoOSP5vr_tw84vFqUEvf/view?usp=share_link.

Below is my actual route, from a Google Earth map with a GPS track (in blue):

As you can see if you compare the recorded track to the map, I have skipped about a 2-mile section of the Wild Horse Trail. The small tail on the northeast edge of the first loop, before my return to the Bush Highway represents my start on the trail. At the point I turned back, there was a one-way (downhill) sign on the trail that I was attempting to go up. Believing I had made a mistake, I went the other way on the Wild Horse Trail and ended up on the Bush Highway. I took the road up the Usery Pass hill, to the egress of the trail, and followed it west a little over a mile, then turned around, having already done 11 miles to that point. Getting back to the road, I still had about 13 miles to go to get home. I consider that I've now bicycled the route, to the Bulldog Trailhead (the green dot at the bottom right corner of the Google Earth route).

From the Bush Highway, the route turns off onto the Saguaro trail, which climbs to the Granite Ridge Trail. The Saguaro sections are moderately difficult to difficult, as is the section marked in the wilderness as "Twisted Sister." The Granite Ridge section is nice, moderate cycling. There are great views of Red Mountain on this route, and during my ride, the wildflowers were out.

My ride was a bit of a clown show--I biffed twice on easy sections, collected assorted bruises and one cut, and got both slightly bewildered and lost. I walked significant portions of the first single-track section.

The Wild Horse Trail going west, however, was generally easily rideable. A 10-minute video with views and commentary can be found here: https://youtu.be/VQ27vXvz5g4.

The Fibonacci Moons Project

 

This project was conceived just after I had finished the "Month of Moons" project, about the time I was teaching HUM 201HN, a Grand Canyon University course on intersections between the arts, humanities, and sciences. The main student project in this course was to present a project that described some kind of intersection between art and science, using some artistic medium.

The scientific concept I was trying to describe was the Fibonacci sequence, which is connected to the Golden Ratio. It happens that the Fibonacci sequence, in which succeeding numbers are the sum of the two previous numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .), describes a spiral which can be seen in many natural structures (do a Google Images search on the Fibonacci sequence, and you'll see what I mean).

I'd intended to finish this project in a month (since I only needed 14 images), but in practice, it took me over a year.

I had several issues:

1. The lens I was using (the M.Zuiko 14-150mm f4.0-5.6) proved difficult to focus in the dark. Since it didn't have a scale on the manual focus ring, I attempted to focus manually on the moon using the magnifying viewfinder, as suggested by sources. That method sometimes did not produce focused images. So, I used auto-focus whenever I could, but the autofocus was constrained by the position of the moon in the frame (if the moon were too close to the edge of the frame, it was impossible to get the AF to target the area). I didn't understand the magnitude of this problem until I began the compositing process.
2. To get the images to composite correctly (using the Olympus Workspace feature), I shot at two focal lengths (150mm and 100mm), so that I could resize in Workspace. That issue, plus the limit on the number of photos that could be composited in Workspace, limited my options unacceptably.
3. A few days per month, even in Arizona, were cloudy, plus, using my ephemeris program to plot the position of the moon in the sky sometimes made me miss the optimum dark time for shooting. Therefore, even the initial phase of the project took more than a month.

I discovered these issues in full during the compositing process, which I unwisely left until after the shooting process. Because of that, I spent a couple of months compositing in Workspace, then reshooting the out-of-focus images. Over the next several months, I continued to have problems 1 and 3 during the reshoots.

I finally was able to composite a complete image in GIMP, using the RAW files generated by my shooting process. Using GIMP gave me more control over image enlargement and placement. So, the end result is not optimal--I'd prefer to have the phases of the moon show more consistently throughout the spiral, and I would like to shoot these images in sequential order as well. So, let's call this project a first draft.