S6E7 – OSP 5+6 – “Interstellar”

Ransom becomes accustomed to life among the stars, but is shocked to discover more about the nefarious plans of his abductors.

S6E7: “Interstellar” (Download)

Clips

Show Notes

Introduction

Drop-In

• Kathy Keller

Quote-of-the-week

He had not known how much it affected him till now—now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 5)

Chit-Chat

• Matt
  • Matt refers to A Compass for Deep Heaven edited by Diana Glyer. Matt will interview her in S6E6.
• David
  • Recently recorded an episode on The Inklings Variety Hour podcast
• Andrew
  • Recently recorded an episode on the That’ll Preach podcast
    • The Secret Message of Till We Have Faces with Andrew Lazo
  • For his 6th Wedding Anniversary, Andrew and his wife watched the preimere for the latest season of All Creatures Great and Small.

Episode Movie Title

Toast

• Drinks
  • Andrew was drinking Caol Ila 12 Yr
  • David was drinking Dunkel Weizen from Hibernia Brewing Co (Eau Claire)
  • Matt was drinking Ardbeg
• Foreign language “cheers”
  • “Kippis!” (Finish)
• Patreon toast
  • Lori Green

Recap

During a relaxing walking trip, Ransom stumbled across an old school mate, Devine, and his colleague Weston. He quickly found out they had ulterior motives and was drugged and abducted.

He woke up in a spaceship and has been slowly trying to piece together where he is going and why was he abducted.

Thus far we’ve learned Devine is very financially driven and Weston is driven by scientific idealism (both of which Lewis doesn’t like). We have gotten a glimpse of how they use it to rationalize bad behavior but we are only going to see it get worse…

The story so far…

Discussion

1. “Trying to get answers”

But when Ransom asked him [Devine] what more, he would lapse into satire and make ironical remarks about the white man’s burden and the blessings of civilization.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 5)

• Aeneas in The Aenead
• The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly
• “The White Man’s Burden” by Kipling’s Hymn

2. “Heavenly Living”

It is hard for a man to brood on the future when he is feeling so extremely well as Ransom now felt. There was an endless night on one side of the ship and an endless day on the other side: each was marvelous and he moved from the one to the other at his will, delighted. In the nights, which he could create by turning the handle of a door, he lay for hours in contemplation of the skylight. The Earth’s disk was nowhere to be seen; the stars, thick as daisies on an uncut lawn, reigned perpetually with no cloud, no moon, no sunrise to dispute their sway. There were planets of unbelievable majesty, and constellations undreamed of: there were celestial sapphires, rubies, emeralds and pin-pricks of burning gold…

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 5)

…they were receiving, he said, many rays that never penetrated the terrestrial atmosphere… A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 5)

• St. Thomas Aquinas’ (real) remedies for sorrow

But the days—that is, the hours spent in the sunward hemisphere of their microcosm—were the best of all. Often he rose after only a few hours’ sleep to return, drawn by an irresistible attraction, to the regions of light.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 5)

We do not disparage silver by distinguishing it from gold… the Divine Love does not substitute itself for the natural – as if we had to throw away our silver to make room for the gold

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapters 4 & 6)

Stretched naked on his bed, a second Danae (what is this?) he found it night by night more difficult to disbelieve in astrology: almost he felt, wholly he imagined, “sweet influence” pouring or even stabbing into his surrendered body

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 5)

• Danae was a Greek mythological figure whose father imprisoned her in a brass tower after an oracle predicted that her son would kill him. Zeus then came to Danae as a rain of gold and they conceived Perseus.
• “Sweet influence” alludes to the Medieval idea that the planets influence us. It’s a reference to Paradise Lost (which itself alludes to Job 38:31):

“…the grey Dawn, and the Pleiades, before him danced, Shedding sweet influence.”

John Milton (1608-1674), Paradise Lost VII.373–375

• The word “passion” comes from the Latin passio(n- ) from pati ‘suffer’.

Now the very name Space seemed blasphemous… He felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come?

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 5)

3. “Life onboard”

… in order to anticipate a tendency which Weston showed to make him a servant…  He preferred to work as a volunteer rather than in admitted slavery.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 5)

 Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ; not in the way of eye-service, as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart,

Ephesians 6:5-6

4. “An overheard conversation”

• Essay: Will we lose God in outer space?

When the time comes for cleaning the place up we’ll save one or two for you, and you can keep them as pets or vivisect them or sleep with them or all three—whichever way it takes you

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 5)

 “A dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman. A superb creature.”

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (Chapter 6)

• Mumbo Jumbo is a West African word often cited by historians and etymologists as deriving from the Mandinka word “Maamajomboo”, which refers to a masked male dancer who takes part in religious ceremonies. In the 18th century Mumbo Jumbo referred to a West African god. Oxford English Dictionary says that “In its figurative sense, Mumbo Jumbo is an object of senseless veneration or a meaningless ritual.”

5. “A new dawn”

But death could be faced, and rational fear of death could be mastered. It was only the irrational, the biological, horror of monsters that was the real difficulty: and this he faced and came to terms with as well as he could while he lay in the sunlight after breakfast

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 6)

Let him regard them as his crosses: let him forget that, since they are incompatible, they cannot all happen to him, and let him try to practise fortitude and patience to them all in advance. 

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #6)

In that moment Ransom made a decision. He could face death, but not the sorns. He must escape when they got to Malacandra, if there were any possibility. Starvation, or even to be chased by sorns, would be better than being handed over. If escape were impossible, then it must be suicide. Ransom was a pious man. He hoped he would be forgiven. It was no more in his power, he thought, to decide otherwise than to grow a new limb. Without hesitation he stole back into the galley and secured the sharpest knife: henceforward he determined never to be parted from it… He even reflected that the knife could pierce other flesh as well as his own

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapters 5 & 6)

If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 4)

6. “The descent”

…he saw the planets—the ‘earths’ he called them in his thought—as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven—excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapters 6)

Suddenly the lights of the Universe seemed to be turned down. As if some demon had rubbed the heaven’s face with a dirty sponge, the splendour in which they had lived for so long blenched to a pallid, cheerless and pitiable grey.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapters 6)

Devine, a flask of spirits ever in his hand, flung out strange blasphemies and coprologies and cursed Weston for bringing them.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapters 6)

Wrap-Up

Concluding thoughts

• “Nearness of approach” and “Nearness by likeness” are references to a term in The Four Loves.

Question-of-the-week

How are you finding the beautiful language of the Heavens? Is it stirring positive feelings toward a creator or too unrelatable?

Question-of-the-week

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