Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Voyage to Arcturus

I reread David Linsey's Voyage to Arcturus because something I was reading said it was great literature and loved by C.S. Lewis. After 38 years all I could remember was a three-legged lamb that spun as it walked (was it a guide?) and a voyager whose perceptions kept changing, and shapes moving in some medium. Since it was a philosophical treatise as well, I understood almost none of it then  I can remember when my husband and his friends would discuss philosophy at the Lutheran student center near the U of Washington in Seattle, and I would look from one to the other and wonder how they knew what they were saying. I certainly had no idea what they were saying. If you are going to talk about, say, desoxydyhydrosiltransferase, I'm on it, but abstract philosophy is over my head.
Okay, so I read it again with the difficulty that I fell asleep every other page or so. I had the electronic reader Kindle set up so it would fall down when I fell asleep and that would wake me up so I could start again. I was a more patient reader back in the 70s. Right now my husband and I are watching the old Outer Limits television series in black and white. We cannot believe how slooooow it is. Yet when we watched it as children we did not perceive it as slow. Anyway, David will spend two paragraphs describing the appearance of someone when the appearance has no relevance at all etc. plus I cannot follow what seem to be random statements that compose the dialogue. Once I believe they were discussing Stoicism. I wish he could have been clearer the way Lewis was in Pilgrim's Regress which was also a journey through philosophies. And the end of it all was: life hurts. Not a conclusion to throw confetti for.

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