Lewis, Chesterton and Cervantes
I have always loved the quote from Silver Chair when Puddleglum confronts the witch saying, “I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.” I think this strikes something in me, similar to the way that, I understand, many people view the Arthurian legends and the notion of chivalry. Even if all those valiant knights didn’t do all the things they are said to have done, didn’t exemplify the ideals that we hold them to, isn’t it nice to still strive for them as if they had?
On reading Don Quixote, we encounter this to an extreme. Don Quixote lives in a made up world that he considers vastly superior to the one those around him seem to live in. His made up world elevate inns to castles and wenches to ladies. On the one hand, I can’t help thinking about how much of a donkey Quixote makes of himself, and how many times he ends up making matters much worse. One only has to look at the example of the lad Andres, who would have only gotten a whipping, but after Quixote’s involvement was apparently hospitalized from the beating he received. Andres ends up calling down curses upon all the knights-errant that have ever been born. On the other hand, it seems that this “sickness” of Don Quixotes was what gave him hope and drove him to attempt good deeds.
Of course Don Quixote is a, purposefully, extreme example and in addition his view of the world around him seems to truthfully be at odds with reality. He doesn’t see things in “real world” vs. “idealized”, but rather cannot seem to fathom the plain reality that the man on a horse is in fact a barber and therefore carrying a barber’s basin, not a magical helmet, even when confronted with the truth. So if Don Quixote is the farcical expression of Puddleglum’s preference to live like a Narnian even if there is no Narnia, what would a real world, practical example of this be?
I can’t help but thinking that Puddleglum's motto is at the back of much of the sentiment in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy where he alludes to the nursery influence of fairy tales as a philosophy and ethic in his life. But if fairy tales and fantasy are going to impact your philosophy, ethics, and in short your ethos, what is the impact to be? Surely there could be many answers to this in each personal life. However, drawing from the lives of Lewis, Tolkien, Macdonald, Chesterton and all those Inklings and influencers of Inklings, how would you say that the ethics and lessons of Mythopoeia influenced their daily real-world lives?