Wednesday, November 16, 2011

On foot, but not pedestrian ...

... The Ghost Writer | Books and Culture. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Some sixty years earlier, C. S. Lewis had asked a church congregation, "Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spells that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years." Lewis and Sinclair don't have a great deal in common: the evil enchanters with whom the older man contended (Victorian skeptics, literary modernists, Freudians) bear little resemblance to Sinclair's enemies (city planners and Tory politicians), and where Lewis wished to restore orthodox Christianity Sinclair advocates an older and darker magic. But both rail against what Max Weber called Entzauberung, the disenchantment or de-magicking of the world. Sinclair's walk was a way to rage against the dying of an ancient light, a light given off for millennia by a disturbingly magical city on the banks of the Thames.

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