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Barfield, alas, could not support himself by sitting around and thinking about the nature of reality and reading poetry. He moved to London and became a lawyer. Lewis became a client.

Law wasn't something he particularly wanted to do. He wrote a book (This Ever Diverse Pair) that divided Owen the Man and Owen the Lawyer into two people, calling his lawyer alter ego 'Burden.' He wrestles with him, sometimes literally.

In one chapter he recounts (with changed names, of course) the time he had to get Lewis out of a pickle.

Early on, Lewis got in the habit of living off of his teaching salary and having his publisher anonymously send his royalties to other people. If there was a student who couldn't pay his tuition, a widow who was broke, etc...

Barfield recounts how frustrating it was to have Lewis as a client. Lewis not only didn't understand numbers and money, he didn't care. And it never occurred to him that he had to pay taxes on royalties that he never saw.

Thankfully, after one particular royalty check, it occurred to Barfield to inquire about the whole thing. He scrambled to fix it.

He managed to set up a trust fund so it wouldn't happen again.

Lewis dedicated The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to Owen's daughter Lucy.

Barfield is called the first and the last Inkling. He lived to be 99.

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Lewis was a rather sensitive lad, but was scarred by some early experiences. His father's emotional ups and downs, which became even worse after his mother died, made him distrust emotion itself.

Then life at his first boarding school only made things worse.

In another way too Oldie’s school presently repeated my home experience. Oldie’s wife died; and in term time. He reacted to bereavement by becoming more violent than before. You will remember that I had already learned to fear and hate emotion; here was a fresh reason to do so.

Then came the first world war and all its horrors. A division had formed. The pure pleasure that came from escaping into the world of literature and imagination, and this grim, dark reality. And never the twain shall mix.

The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.

Into this picture came a dude named Owen Barfield.

Barfield was a budding philosopher, poet, and language nerd. He became entranced by the idea that you could go back through time and trace the development of human consciousness through the changing meaning of words. That the experience you get in reading some poetry is your consciousness literally changing, slipping back into an older form, a memory if you will.

His writing is often way over my head, but you can give it a try. His classic work is probably Poetic Diction, which he dedicated to Lewis. Barfield influenced Tolkien as well.

Lewis and Barfield had long arguments about the nature of imagination, truth, and reality. They called it The Great War. (I have attempted to read those letters and it might as well be jibberish to me, but hey.)

Barfield:

If someone put a pistol to my head and asked me what was Lewis's relationship to imagination and gave me sixty seconds to answer him, I would have to say that he was in love with it. He liked it so much and valued it so much as an experience of the human soul that he did not want its purity tampered with in any way. If you tried to say it had anything to do with truth, the discovery of truth, then it would not be imagination. That's what the Great War is about, whether imagination is a vehicle for truth or whether it is simply a highly desirable and pleasurable experience of the human soul.

Slowly Barfield began to convince Lewis that he did not need to divorce reality from his imagination and emotions.

Later in life, Barfield wrote a short novel called Night Operation. It's been called science fiction. Really it's barely-veiled biography of the beginning of three young philosophers' intellectual journey. In this story, Lewis is represented by Jak. Barfield is Jon.

Jon discovered in the next few moments, as he had never quite discovered before, though he had sometimes suspected it, that there were two Jaks... Jon had prepared himself for an even longer silence. But Jak hardly hesitated at all. In the last few months he had been more in step with Jon than Jon realized. In fact he had gone a little way ahead. He had been smelling the same smell even more pungently. But he had said nothing, because he was getting used to having strong feelings and accepting them…

The basic plot is that their civilization went underground into the sewers years ago and these three decide to climb to the Aboveground and see it for themselves.

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via Jenna 7: Memetic Transbian on FB

(reposted with permission)

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Deep thoughts....

Captain Janeway has an evil (aka horny) clone sneaking around on Voyager and nobody has any idea. She's naughty and flirtatious and is hitting on everyone she runs into. They all think she's just overworked. She ends up with quite a few notches on her bedpost by the time she's discovered, at which point she makes a pass at real Janeway just for kicks.

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'Who is she to be making these decisions for all of us?'

Classic set-up for a payoff.

She kinda had a point since Janeway was making a decision for another crew, not just hers. But Chakotay had already made up his mind.

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At Friday-night “hen party“ Martha Ruddy and Fredna Parker jig around to music. When not dancing, girls sprawl on floor talking, singing, knitting and nibbling endlessly at pretzels.

Nina Leen, Life, Dec 11, 1944

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Con sonido! 🔈🔉🔊

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I need like 500 hours of Janeway walking around with her hands on her hips. I'd watch every second of it. And a ton more footage of her in that tanktop. Or the regular undershirt. Or the jacket undone in the front showing more of the undershirt. She's ruining me.

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me when people try to explain a blorbo i just cannot be asked to care about:

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The Palm Beach Post, Florida, November 30, 1942

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How it started -

We have a visitor (U.S.A.)... who talks from morning till night... I can hardly think or breathe. Yours (what is left of) Jack ... As for who is going to do the talking - Joy has the extraordinary delusion that I do most of it. Actually, against you and her I should have no chance.

How it's going -

I cannot even see her face distinctly in my imagination... But her voice is still vivid. The remembered voice — that can turn me at any moment to a whimpering child.

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T'POL - STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE S4E17 Bound

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Hi everyone, happy threshold day 🎉

I did a pottery course in december and of course I had to make something Salamander related 😁

Enjoy this lizard baby cup, I am very proud of this 😁😁

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I will write in this book what no one who has happiness would dare to write. I will accuse the gods, especially the god who lives on the Grey Mountain. That is, I will tell all he has done to me from the beginning, as if I were making my complaint of him before a judge. But there is no judge between gods and men, and the god of the mountain will not answer me. Terrors and plagues are not an answer.

female awesome meme << favourite female character growth arc >> Queen Orual (Til We Have Faces)

@booksociety‘s Of Gods and Tales event: Til We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis