by Guest » January 13th, 2005, 4:51 pm
[quote="Stanley Anderson"]I couldn’t resist a smile at the following passage: “As far as food was concerned, he was rewarded. Some fruit like bilberries could be gathered in handfuls on the upper slopes, and the wooded valley abounded in a kind of oval nut.
{MONICA}
I think it rather odd that Lewis gives so much page to fruit and the enjoyment of it when, according to Paxton, he, himself didn't much like either fruit or vegetables. (Lewis would have perhaps been a healthier and longer-lived specimen if he had actually consumed them. :-) Who knows? Conjecture. But this is very like speculative discussions about heaven that suggest the 'fruit of the tree of life with a new crop every month' might taste like our earthly appetites for cheese, or toast or a bit of bacon.
[STANLEY]
Old-timers here may recall my admittedly theologically uncertain, but intellectually held idea about humor and the Fall. The following passage makes me wonder about a further extension of that idea (Ransom has just eaten another fruit of the floating islands): [i]“It was none of the fruits he had tasted before. It was better than any of them. Well might the Lady say of her world that the fruit you ate at any moment was, at that moment, the best.” I suddenly wonder if even the “ability” or sense that one thing is “better” than another – ie the concept of quantitative comparison (strange, this idea coming from a mathematics major, eh:-), might not be another of the results of the fall. And I even have vague intimations of this concept being somehow connected with the idea of humour. But that involves a long discussion better as a separate thread perhaps.
The faculty of rating and ranking and comparison as a result of the fall? Very interesting. I wonder how the idea of the 'elders' in heaven, or the idea of 'the greatest in the kingdom of heaven' , sort of a ranking system falls in line there....
Monica