Lumen Fidei

Pure poetry and intoxication of words

Revisado: 07-21-23

“In pure poetry and the intoxication of words, Shakespeare never rose higher than he rises in this play. But in spite of this fact, the supreme literary merit of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a merit of design. The amazing symmetry, the amazing artistic and moral beauty of that design, can be stated very briefly. The story opens in the sane and common world with the pleasant seriousness of very young lovers and very young friends. Then, as the figures advance into the tangled wood of young troubles and stolen happiness, a change and bewilderment begins to fall on them. They lose their way and their wits for they are in the heart of fairyland. Their words, their hungers, their very figures grow more and more dim and fantastic, like dreams within dreams, in the supernatural mist of Puck.

Then the dream-fumes begin to clear, and characters and spectators begin to awaken together to the noise of horns and dogs and the clean and bracing morning. Theseus, the incarnation of a happy and generous rationalism, expounds in hackneyed and superb lines the sane view of such psychic experiences, pointing out with a reverent and sympathetic skepticism that all these fairies and spells are themselves but the emanations, the unconscious masterpieces, of man himself.

The whole company falls back into a splendid human laughter. There is a rush for banqueting and private theatricals, and over all these things ripples one of those frivolous and inspired conversations in which every good saying seems to die in giving birth to another. If ever the son of a man in his wanderings was at home and drinking by the fireside, he is at home in the house of Theseus. All the dreams have been forgotten, as a melancholy dream remembered throughout the morning might be forgotten in the human certainty of any other triumphant evening party; and so the play seems naturally ended. It began on the earth and it ends on the earth. Thus to round off the whole midsummer night’s dream in an eclipse of daylight is an effect of genius.

But of this comedy, as I have said, the mark is that genius goes beyond itself; and one touch is added which makes the play colossal. Theseus and his train retire with a crashing finale, full of humor and wisdom and things set right, and silence falls on the house. Then there comes a faint sound of little feet, and for a moment, as it were, the elves look into the house, asking which is the reality. “Suppose we are the realities and they the shadows.” If that ending were acted properly any modern man would feel shaken to his marrow if he had to walk home from the theatre through a country lane. A Midsummer Night’s Dream presents the question of whether the life of waking, or the life of the vision, is the real life, the sine qua non of man.”

“Gravity easily oppresses and complicates problems whereas lightheartedness  simplifies the complex and applies a magical gentleness that Shakespeare compares to the play of the fairies at night that perform their favors in the silence of sleep with no one hearing or seeing them. The problem that daytime Athens with all its business and busyness cannot solve, the nighttime world of the forests with its mirth and revels resolves in the most mysterious and hidden of ways. The king of the fairies’ love juice (from the flower love-in-idleness) that quietly anoints the eyelids of the sleeping lovers in the forest proves more miraculous than all the threats and warnings issued by the authorities of Athens invoking the letter of the law and threatening confinement to a nunnery or death by execution if Hermia does not marry Demetrius to please her father.” — G.K. Chesterton

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Excellent scholarship unveiling hidden history

Revisado: 07-03-23

Clare Asquith unveils a history of the oppressed, gives voice to the voiceless. Elizabeth I and even James I operated a police state and systematic oppression of terror and propaganda. The iron fist of the Cecils’s use of terror, torture, agent provocateurs could not suppress the Catholic genius of Shakespeare

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Glorious Tale of Memorable Personages

Revisado: 06-27-23

The Wheel of Time, with its 14 books and prequel, pulses with exquisite characterization and detailed portraiture of distinct cultures. Chapter after chapter, the reader encounters secret inner thoughts of a panoply of protagonists and antagonists. The inner sanctum of these personal dramas is so well portrayed that feelings of friendship, correlation and antipathy infuse the plot with immersive accompaniment. The reader seems to have actually met these characters and is enriched by knowing their stories unveiled.

The culmination of the drama as the end of the Third Age is presented in A Memory of Light is a fond farewell to friends who have risen victorious in the battle against the Shadow.

Among Jordan’s elements of inspiration such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and others, Jesus Christ seems to me to be a central driving influence. The Messiah’s total self-giving in fulfillment of prophecies, being wounded in the side, Vía Dolorosa accompanied by a strong woman who goes all the way to the place of execution with him, resurrection that used the lethal instrument meant to destroy him as the very means by which evil is defeated all echo the eucatastrophe theme in Tolkien and the Gospels.

Of course Jordan’s reincarnation theme is opposed to Christianity’s linear view of history. Souls hopping in and out of different bodies contradicts the essential relationship of body to soul manifest by Christ bearing in his resurrected body the wounds suffered in his passion and death. Polygamy opposed to monogamy, killing enemies by violence instead of atoning for enemy’s sins by self-sacrificial non violence and other non-Christian themes in the WOT do not dissuade from the radiant portrayal of love enduring even unto death resulting in new life as dawn shines upon flowers in Shayol Ghul!

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Sanderson’s Tribute to Jordan

Revisado: 08-27-22

In the Towers of Midnight, Brandon Sanderson has offered a tribute of honor to the genius of Robert Jordan by fidelity to characterization and drama present throughout the Wheel of Time.

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