Into the Wardrobe

Yeah you're not meant to inhale cigar smoke .. though I don't quite see the point otherwise ;). My ex used to smoke them sometimes and i'd have the odd puff. It wasn't horrible but I could never quite see the attraction :).

Yes I think it would have done Lewis good to have had a daughter, even a step daughter. I suspect that his contact with women might have been fairly limited and limited to a certain 'type' of woman at that .. female undergraduates and maybe the wives of colleagues.

Jo: about cigar smoke inhaling: I discovered on the night I smoked the cigar, that a lot of the people smoking them, were also not inhaling. I thought that was pretty funny. "We smoked but we didn't inhale." The military is aggressively stamping out smoking in the military, but cigar smoking is on the rise and seems to be the thing to do in Afghanistan and Iraq. I don't yet know why.

Esther: I don't mean the fear in a bad way, but if you have Till We Have Faces you can look near the beginning of the story. There is a passage in which, the father has once again brutally hurt Orual with something he's said or done, I can't remember exactly, and the Fox explains that the father is not actually so bad as Orual assumes. He explains that it's fear of women that makes him that way. I think this was Mr. Lewis being really honest.

Overwelming fear was too strong a word I think [and I'm modifying my observations as I go], but I do think Mr. Lewis feared Woman, Ungit, the Feminine, the Other, because he did not understand her and because she is so other, and because he did not have a mother or daughters that could introduce him to her. I'm afraid, that from personal experience, I don't believe that girlfriends/wives can do this, in the same way mothers and daughters do. That's why it always frustrates me when people, say, "He was married. He learned to appreciate women from Joy." I say, "No, that is not true. He learned to appreciate Joy." Those are two different things.

And about Joy herself. I think it shows Mr. Lewis's greatness, that he was able to embrace some of the things I think he disliked most: a pushy American divorced female.

Mr. Lewis's life shows me that God has a very interesting sense of humor.

Lewis: These are all the things I dislike the most. [hands God a list]

God: Oh yeah? I'm sending all those things wrapped up in one person and you will fall madly in love with her.

Lewis: Thanks Cupid. :/

God: Whaa......? :shocked: Ohhh, I thought you said something else.

[yes, even Mr. Lewis and God are sometimes forced to use emoticons]

Check this out!! I typed into the search engine: "woman the feminine ungit."

This is what showed up!

Chris, yeah, i felt that too when Mother Theresa died. Although in that instance I remember feeling that it was a bad thing that the money that the public might otherwise have put into her charitable work was instead donated to some hideous Diana memorial. I've always been interested to know .. in what order did Lewis, Huxley and Kennedy die?

Jo, JFK was declared dead at 1:00 p.m. Dallas time, CSL at 5:30 p.m. your time, and Aldous Huxley at 5:20 p.m. California time.

If I figured it right, the order would be CSL, JFK, AH.

No, wait. Maybe it's JFK, CSL, AH. Is Dallas four or five hours behind GB?