Les trois infos du jour valent le détour !
- Y'aurait-il une polémique Octavia Butler ? Son éditeur américain veut rééditer un livre qu'elle ne voulait pas voir ressortir.
- Bon, Narnia sera en retard ! Rendez-vous dans l'autre monde en 2027... Dommage...
- On a un chouette roman de science-fiction à vous présenter.
Tout ça, c'est sur le site Actusf.com.
#sciencefiction #sciencefictionfan #sciencefictionbook #sciencefictionbooktok #OctaviaButler #Narnia #narniatok #CSLewis #gretagerwigfilm
Narnia de Greta Gerwig est repoussé à 2027 !
Mais cette fois, on a une date...
Les infos : https://buff.ly/9IVfS5J
Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew will be with us in 2027. Details here https://www.liveforfilm.com/2026/05/04/greta-gerwigs-narnia-the-magicians-nephew-will-be-with-us-in-2027/
#CSLewis #Narnia #GretaGerwig #TheMagiciansNephew #Aslan #film #Netflix #TheLionTheWitchandTheWardrobe #fantasy #MerylStreep #DanielCraig
And the Beat Down Goes On
“. . . the terror of the night
or the arrow that flies by day
or the pestilence that stalks in darkness
or the destruction that wastes at noonday.” Psalm 91
Fires, floods and extreme weather will imperil a third of all life on land in the next 60 years.
Nobel Physicist Predicts END DATE For Modern Civilization: And it’s quite soon…
The New York Times’s Resident Catastrophist Delivers Another Subscription to the End of the World
You wake up in a news cycle that never sleeps. With a cup of coffee, you read what ‘doomcasters’ are saying about end-of-life scenarios appearing on the horizon. Now you are fully awake and wondering what to do with these high alert headlines? Do you let existential crisis into your life?
You sip your coffee and remember that not long ago the world was subjected to pandemic hysteria. Coronavirus, the “global crisis of unprecedented reach and proportion,” started making headlines at the beginning of 2020.
You recall the WHO declaring the coronavirus a “public health emergency of international concern.” And the headlines declaring surges in COVID-19 cases attributed to the Omicron variant, a “tripledemic” – COVID combined with flu and RSV, and of overwhelmed hospitals and healthcare systems and dancing nurses.
How could you forget that Biden imposed OSHA vaccination and testing emergency standards on your business or the reality-warping restrictive policies involving mandated lockdowns, masking, social distancing, fines, and vaccines, or the CDC predicting people will die?
You pour yourself another cup of coffee and look out the kitchen window. You see the couple next store – Vivian and Zoe – walking their dog Baxter. The other day, when you took the garbage can to the curb, the apoplectic twosome accosted you with “Democracy is threatened by the likes of you extremists, fascists, racists, homophobe Christian nationalists!” and “Trump is Hitler!” They saw you going to church last Sunday.
You drink your coffee troubled that Viv and Zoe had been beaten down by another media existential crisis campaign, akin to the rollout of the COVID-19 marketing campaign that told us to worry about it, and how to worry about it.
Under the spell of the “Democracy is threatened” campaign, Viv and Zoe were in a state of emotional panic. And that had them beat down on the closest person who didn’t share their views or the views of the commercial-sponsored media. The media’s inordinate influence has you very concerned about the collective fear and confusion its campaigns were causing to psyches.
The beat down goes on . . . in our heads.
~~~
How shall we then live in the context of existential dread?
Day after day imagination is battered with dire predictions– the end of this and that unless we do this and that. The steady beat of amplified headlines overwhelms one’s patience, strength, and soul.
Climate change, pandemics, wars, “Democracy!” AI Could Make Humans Irrelevant!
How do we respond to headlines telling us that we are done for? Should we let fear and helplessness dominate our lives? Can we live in terms of “accepting disharmony from the outset and defying it”? This last way of going forward is the directive C.S. Lewis prescribes in his essay “On Living in an Atomic Age.”
Published in post-war 1948 and at the beginning of the atomic age, the essay provides a reality-check perspective and presents a scenario of how to live in life-ending times.
The following is an excerpt from the opening of Lewis’ short essay. During COVID the excerpt was passed around on the internet, with “atomic” replaced with “coronavirus.” Certainly, the essay can be applied to any dire life-threatening circumstances.
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors — anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
The full essay, in the document below, contains questions and positions Lewis maintains, such as
Are we “accepting disharmony from the outset and defying it?”
Do we “hold up our own human standards against the idiocy of the universe?”
Are we the product of blind physical forces and therefore unable to provide answers to questions of a fatalist existence?
“But suppose we really are spirits? Suppose we are not the offspring of Nature…?”
“We must go back to a much earlier view.”
“We must simply accept it that we are spirits, free and rational beings, at present inhabiting an irrational universe, and must draw the conclusion that we are not derived from it.”
“If there is no straight line elsewhere, how did we discover that Nature’s line is crooked?”
“Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs.”
cslewis-living-in-an-atomic-ageDownloadhttps://www.matthewaglaser.com/living-in-an-atomic-age
“On Living in an Atomic Age” (first published 1948) by C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) From: Present Concerns: Essays by C.S. Lewis (edited by Walter Hooper; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), pages 73–80
Born a few years after the above essay was published, I became well aware of ‘doomcasting’ headlines. I recalled some of the headlines in my January 2025 post Surface Readings.
The post began with the words of poet W H Auden – “Now is the age of anxiety” and my own take on things: “Impending doom has been in the news during my entire lifetime.” I wrote about the headlines and pronouncements of those anxious times which included the book The Late great Planet Earth based on the modern and heretical notion of dispensationalism.
~~~
Imagination Reset
Taking in the spirit of the times, imaginations are exposed to the negation of life, nihilism, and dire predictions often made for political ends that use fear to move power into the hands of the few.
Taking in the digital tabloid times is the “WHAAM!” of a Roy Lichtenstein Ben-Day dots painting. Imagination is amped up and ready to pop with a Pow!
What happens to our imaginations when we are constantly confronted with crisis? And how do we live with dire predictions?
With the 24/7/365 news cycle, it’s little wonder that “News Avoidance” is becoming a common way to deal with the constant specter of troubling things, as Thaddeus G. McCotter writes in I Didn’t Read the News Today, Oh Boy: Embracing the ‘News Avoidance’ Pandemic
“If you live today, you breath in nihilism … it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.” ― Flannery O’Connor
What we shouldn’t avoid are resources such as poetry, art, classical literature and music to help us cope with and see beyond the terrors of the modern age. We need the signal of those who came before and dealt with all kinds of things and not the clamoring noise of influencers.
Poet Wallace Stevens, in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” writes that poetry, as it interacts with reality and the imagination, can shape our perspective and provide meaning and comfort in a world that often feels overwhelming and harsh.
Wallace emphasizes the role of imagination in countering the beat down of life. If you are a Christian, you already know that the poetry of the Psalms does just that, e.g., Psalm 91.
In the video below, Dr. Jason Baxter, author of The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis discusses his book, Why Literature Still Matters.
https://youtu.be/L5VtDvfBQAY?si=S0xg-JHozTMXn-e9
Why Literature Still Matters: An Interview with Dr. Jason Baxter | Classical Home Education
~~~
If you need a quick antidote to climate hysteria, Itxu Díaz provides his take on the news of impending doom: Climate Change Scientists Set a Date for the Arrival of Hell on Earth: the Year 2085.
~~~
Naomi Wolf with Outspoken: “I’m here tonight to talk about a huge news story that broke in the last couple of days. It could be thread that unravels the whole COVID virus/vaccine perpetrator issue.
“A criminal syndicate, essentially.
“Even just this initial gesture is so transformational. It breaks the spell of, “No one can be held accountable, no one can be investigated from the untouchable third rail COVID vaccine rollout, COVID virus rollout.””
“The Shocking Story of NIH Secretly Funding COVID”
#Apocalypse #CSLewis #climateChange #COVID19 #death #Democracy #journalism #media #nuclearWar #pandemics
Jack Lewis trifled with Maenad energy, in Prince Caspian. Like any naïve evangelical convert, high on the feeling of being the Second Coming—of St. Paul that is, that's the sidestep towards false humility in the #Christian extremist's pose, they pretend to be Jesus's bestest buddy instead of claiming to be on level terms with the Incarnation—C. S. Lewis must have felt that his conversion was like invincible plate armor against any temptation, especially any temptation as ancient and distant as that of the wild, transformative energies of the great Dionysos. Lewis could feel superior to Dionysos, and that was a catastrophic error.
He tried to pretend that his shaky Jesus allegory in a lion costume had rendered Dionysos harmless. Not forbidden, not defeated, not merely subordinated or conquered by the Christian's God! No, #CSLewis had the conceit to think he could depict Dionysos as trivial, someone who could traipse through #Narnia and perform a parlour-trick (ooh look, there's Flowey winking amid one of the Lord Bromius's vines, Flowey does get round =) and then vanish back into the background.
"Oh there goes Bacchus! Gosh he looks so girly, tee-hee! Thank Jesus that Jesus I mean Aslan is standing right next to me so I feel safe 🥰"
Christianity and water, indeed! Lewis was capable of trivializing even water into a mere diluent. He trivializes a river-god with equal facility as he prettifies the great and terrible Dionysos, or Father Christmas (whom Lewis loved to imitate.)
Among my many addictions...I was addicted to that man's intellectual pablum. It was filling and tasted strongly...like Turkish Delight, which Dorothy Sayers deploys to much more incisive literary effect. But she was playing with much massier symbols and powers than Jack Lewis could handle. Sayers diminished Lewis and the Inklings, and it was evil of them. In comparison to Sayers's achievements the Inklings look like a foolish boys' club, the high-class counterpart to the deliberately ridiculous academic community of Bracton which Lewis puts across in That Hideous Strength.
Lewis was pissing in his own pool, so to speak—he was making a career out of his academic resentments, smuggled here and there into his writings in various thin disguises. He wasn't merely critiquing his own academic community but attacking it, lampooning it with hamfisted allegory in The Pilgrim's Regress, and daring to suggest that atheistic college dons might conspire to deliver the whole world over to be devoured by powerful alien devils. And yet Lewis also had the cheek to feel superior to Sayers, and to the very idea that women belonged in British letters at all. He was contemptibly sexist and we all know it, and no I do NOT respect the argument that he was a man of his time. There were better men than Jack Lewis already. Lewis knew he was naughty and wrong.
When are we to be rid of his ghost, his pop-culture revenant? When do Christians finally accept that Clive Staples Lewis was a hack?
Leer. C. S. Lewis
Los que estamos habituados a la buena lectura no solemos tener conciencia de la enorme ampliación de nuestro ser que nos ha deparado el contacto con los escritores. Es algo que comprendemos mejor cuando hablamos con un amigo que no sabe leer de ese modo. Puede estar lleno de bondad y de sentido común, pero vive en un mundo muy limitado, en el que nosotros nos sentiríamos ahogados. La persona que se contenta con ser sólo ella misma, y por tanto, con ser menos persona, está encerrada en una cárcel. Siento que mis ojos no me bastan; necesito ver también por los de los demás. La realidad, incluso vista a través de muchos ojos, no me basta; necesito ver lo que otros han inventado. Tampoco me bastarían los ojos de toda la humanidad; lamento que los animales no puedan escribir libros. Me agradaría muchísimo saber qué aspecto tienen las cosas para un ratón o una abeja; y más aún percibir el mundo olfativo de un perro, tan cargado de datos y emociones. La experiencia literaria cura la herida de la individualidad, sin socavar sus privilegios. Hay emociones colectivas que también curan esa herida, pero destruyen los privilegios. En ellas nuestra identidad personal se funde con la de los demás y retrocedemos hasta el nivel de la sub-individualidad. En cambio, cuando leo gran literatura me convierto en mil personas diferentes sin dejar de ser yo mismo. Como el cielo nocturno en el poema griego veo con una miríada de ojos, pero sigo siendo yo el que ve. Aquí, como en el acto religioso, en el amor, en la acción moral y en el conocimiento, me trasciendo a mí mismo y en ninguna otra actividad logro ser más yo.
C. S. Lewis
(La experiencia de leer)
#CSLewis
Very excited to share this episode of the podcast. This time we are discussing C.S. Lewis's Perelandra, one of the shortest, long books you'll ever read. Some tangents that are featured include Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster in space and The Little Mermaid:
We also have a new thumbnail done by the amazing Andrew Mosher, who we had as a guest once!
His art: https://www.andrewmosherart.com/
This episode: https://zencastr.com/z/TiZit5DO
World Book Day 2026: Hilariously Worse Covers For Great Books From Pride & Prejudice To The Metamorphosis
Hence I was drawn to Christianity out of loneliness and the need for a substitute family, but my mind needed persuading before I could act on the feelings stirring in my heart. And that's where Christian apologetic writers such as #CSLewis and Chesterton and (crucially) Dorothy Sayers came into play: their writings convinced me generally that it was possible for an intellectual and educated person to talk sensible and persuasively about their beliefs—in marked contrast to all the examples of Christianity I'd gotten from U.S. society and media—and specifically they got me thinking seriously about my sins.
I'd come to feel before I started reading such work that I was a bad person, selfish and cowardly and lazy. Christian authors' writings gave me something I hadn't yet gotten in life: an intellectual framework for regarding my own failings and resentments.
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