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To Defeat The Darkness Out There, You Must Defeat The Darkness in Yourself~NARNIA

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C.S. Lewis was born in 1898 and brought up in a very strict, religious household. While he was quite young, his mother died of cancer but the "stiff upper lip" in favour at the time meant he wasn't allowed to grieve. He became an Oxford don and led a sheltered life. He seriously questioned his religious beliefs and finally left the church. The death of his mother is reflected in "The Magician's Nephew". When an American fan Joy Gresham, came to visit him, they found they enjoyed each others company and she stayed. She was dying of cancer and he was afraid to express his emotions until she convinced him that it was OK to "allow" himself to love her even though it would shortly lead to heartbreak when she died. This was a great writer who dared to examine his emotions and beliefs and record them for the rest of us. Most famous for his childrens book (The Narnian Chronicles) he also wrote a very interesting Science Fiction Trilogy and some of the most intriguing Christian literature. He finally resolved his crisis of faith after tearing apart and fully examining the Christian (and other) religion and re-embraced Christianity.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Steve Crook <steve@brainstorm.co.uk>
Member of the Oxford literary circle the 'Inklings' along with writers J.R.R. Tolkien, Jeremy Dyson, Charles Williams, Nevill Coghill, and Owen Barfield. Another member of the Inkings was the writer Roger Lancelyn Green who wrote books for children. His best known book was his version of the King Arthur legends called 'King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table'.

As a child he never liked his birth names, Clive Staples. When his dog Jacksie got run down, he announced that he would always be known by the name of his dead dog. It developed from "Jacksie" to "Jack" over the years. Many of his fans refer to him as "Jack Lewis.".

Sci-fi master Arthur C. Clarke regards Lewis' two books "Out of the Silent Planet" and "Perelandra" as "two of the very few works of space fiction that can be classed as literature."

As with what happened to J.K. Rowling with her Harry Potter series, "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", the first book of C.S. Lewis's seven-book series "The Chronicles of Narnia", suffered an alteration made by American publishers. The book features a wolf named Maugrim, whose name was changed to Fenris Ulf in the American publication. The sixth book of the series is entitled "The Magician's Nephew" and tells how the Land of Narnia was created and discovered by Professor Digory Kirke when he was a boy.

He based Ransom, the main character in two of the works in his Perlandra trilogy, after his friend J.R.R. Tolkien.

Joined the Somerset Light Infantry, a regiment of the British Army, in World War I.

When he married Joy Gresham, she had already been married to and divorced from her first husband, Bill Gresham. Lewis adopted the Greshams' two sons, David and Douglas, and made them the heirs to his estate, including the royalties to the Narnia books.

For many years, the Narnia books were read in the same order in which they were written and published: 1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) 2. Prince Caspian (1951) 3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) 4. The Silver Chair (1953) 5. The Horse and His Boy (1954) 6. The Magician's Nephew (1955) 7. The Last Battle (1956)

In recent years, the books' publishers have reordered them so that the stories take place in a more chronological order: 1. The Magician's Nephew 2. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe 3. The Horse and His Boy 4. Prince Caspian 5. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader 6. The Silver Chair 7. The Last Battle

The "correct" order in which one should read The Chronicals of Narnia is a subject of fierce debate, with both orders having their defenders and attackers.

C.S. Lewis wrote 'The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe' for his Goddaughter, Lucy.

He allegedly declined British knighthood for his services to literature.

In the Narnia Chronicles, Lewis often uses relevant words from foreign languages to name important characters. For instance, "aslan" is the Turkish word for "lion," and the French word "jadis" means "of old" (in his first Narnia book, "The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe"). Lewis says that the White Witch, whose name is later revealed to be Jadis, uses the "Old Magic," but Aslan's magic is even older.

The head of his boarding school was a cruel tyrant who was later committed to an insane asylum. As a result, bad teachers and poor schools are frequently mentioned in his books.

He was home-schooled until the age of ten. His mother taught him French and Latin and his governess taught him all other subjects.

Died a week before his 65th birthday.

In "Moral Crusader" mode, was a proponent of carbolic-based aversion therapy and worse.

Cited Scottish fantasy writer George MacDonald as his greatest influence.

He cited Scottish fantasy author George MacDonald as his greatest inspiration.

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

[Written on his wife's tombstone] Here the whole world (stars, water, air, And field, and forest, as they were Reflected in a single mind) Like cast off clothes was left behind In ashes yet with hope that she, Re-born from holy poverty, In Lenten lands, hereafter may Resume them on her Easter Day.

In arguing against Him, you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.

Christ died for men precisely because they were not worth it; to make them worth it

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg - or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. - from Mere Christianity

Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument, then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out 'allegories' to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way. It all began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [a character in The Pilgrim's Progress] represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, 'What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?' This is not allegory at all.

I'm more Welsh than anything, and for more than anything else in my ancestry I'm grateful that on my father's side I'm descended from a practical Welsh farmer. To that link with the soil I owe whatever measure of physical energy and stability I have. Without it I should have turned into a hopeless neurotic.

Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities. But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own.

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by an unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to produce her...It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

What you see and hear depends on where you are standing, and on what kind of person you are.

When the whole World is running towards the edge of a cliff, he who runs in the opposite direction seems to have lost his mind.

For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no woman can rival.

Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover; no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity.

For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back; sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides.

In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself. . . . After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison.

And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman.

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career.

There are two mistakes to make with devils. One is to ignore them. The other is to take too much interest in them.

As the law stands I cannot cut down a tree in my own garden with my own axe in order to make a chair.

There are no ordinary people.. it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.

The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be "undemocratic." These differences between pupils - for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences - must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time. Let, them, for example, make mud pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have - I believe the English already use the phrase - "parity of esteem." An even more drastic scheme is not possible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma - Beelzebub, what a useful word! - by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.

What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence - moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how "democracy" (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them "tyrants" then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, "democracy." But now "democracy" can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.

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C.S. Lewis was born in 1898 and brought up in a very strict, religious household. While he was quite young, his mother died of cancer but the "stiff upper lip" in favour at the time meant he wasn't allowed to grieve. He became an Oxford don and led a sheltered life.