[b]Philip Pullman
I don’t profess any religion; I don’t think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality.'[/b]
That makes 16% of us. On this planet anyway.
When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife.
That makes 16% of us. On this planet anyway.
All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.
Or, as some insist, “one of us” and the “retards”.
When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed.
Let’s file this one under, “that’s their problem”.
That’s the duty of the old, said the Librarian, to be anxious on the behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.
So, is it still that way?
Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.
Really, this actually works for some.