'THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE THE ADVENTURE BEGINS'

I’m reading the book “Braiding Sweetgrass” and in this one chapter the author is talking about how in her cultural language, Potawatomi, there are more verbs than in English, and they are, to Western ears, very odd verb constructions. “To be a bay” or “to be a hill.” But she points out that this kind of language acknowledges a “being” to the various aspects of the natural world we tend to see more as objects.

Now, I know she’s comparing Indigenous American and Western/European worldviews, but I can’t help noticing a harmony between her description of the world as a “democracy of species” and Lewis and Tolkien’s conception of nature. We all know how much Tolkien was concerned with the natural world, how much personhood he saw in trees and water and mountains. But the quote that jumped to my mind reading this chapter is in one of the Narnia books when Eustace gives the scientific definition of a star (a ball of flaming gas) and is met with the reply, “…that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”

I realize he’s still using “it” but since the person correcting Eustace is an actual star, I think we can let this one slide.

I don’t know where this thought wants to land, but something something about people who are really spiritually in tune arriving, from different cultures and traditions, at the same sorts of conclusions about beauty, life, and our responsibility to our world.

They are all different... but that doesn't really make it better.

One is my dad's copy, and one is my grandma's old copy; I have her full set, and several of them are held together with rubber bands because she read them so much (I had no choice with this obsession, she literally taught a college level narnia class and got me hooked young). So, like... both of these are fine, because one's not mine and one is sentimental and more of an object than a book at this point.

Then one is my set from childhood, and one is the set we bought when we moved and all our stuff was in storage for six months, and I packed my Narnia books, no idea why, don't actually remember doing that but one morning I woke up with the urge to read lww, realized I didn't have a copy, so obviously I bought a new boxed set. I kept both because I've annotated both, so obviously I can't get rid of them.

Then there are the last three...

One is an omnibus edition (which I definitely had during the above mentioned move and which also got packed in that move, so maybe I packed this, forgot, and then packed the original boxed set thinking I still had the omnibus?) and I have no idea where this came from.

The next is the edition with the movie tie in cover, because at one point during high school I had a phase and was collecting Narnia books like pokemon. This one survived the recent round of book pruning somehow (I had at least thirteen copies of lww, all different and all bought during the good old days when paperbacks at goodwill cost a single dollar and I totally don't mourn this on a daily basis, I had grand plans of displaying them on the wall somehow but never got around to actually doing that and realized I never would, so they had to go).

The last is apart of that same phase, and it's apart of my fifth full set of Narnia, and it's the edition pictured below, and it's just... it's so pretty to me, and I am weak, so it survived the recent round of pruning.