The title of C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength comes from a line by Sir David Lyndsay describing the biblical Tower of Babel. It thus sets Babel and, by consequence, the call of Abram as a kind of illuminating flambeau by which we can enter the story. This is, in other words, a story about the dream of Babel and all of the ways in which ‘Babel’ (in all its permutations) twists the real hope of humanity:
Read moreC.S. Lewis and the care of the body
When Elwin Ransom finds himself alone on the strange world of ‘Malacandra’ in C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, he is running from wicked men, from monstrous beasts in the water, and from elongated ogrish creatures called ‘sorns’.
Amid all the fear, the nervous running, the panting breaths, something marvelous unfolds: a renewed affection, a love lost long ago, for his own body. He begins to feel “a strange affection towards himself” so much so that he has to check “himself on the point of saying, ‘We’ll stick to one another’” (49).
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