Last night I finished That Hideous Strength. I expected it to be about artificial intelligence; that’s how it was billed to me by more than one person. And on that front, it did not disappoint. What I didn’t expect was the preeminent theme of marriage, which began and ended the story.

*For those who have never read That Hideous Strength, there may be mild spoilers ahead, mostly regarding character arcs, not major plot points.*

Jane and Mark, the two main characters who are married to each other, spend very little time in the book together as events take them on divergent journeys. This works well for the plot, since their respective adventures bring the reader into the inner circle of the two opposing forces of the whole story.

What annoyed me, I’ll admit, is when another main character focused on Jane’s apparently wrong attitudes toward Mark. (That annoyed Jane as well.) I tried to ignore what I took to be the slightly antiquated assumptions on wifehood that C. S. Lewis, still unmarried at the time he published THS, held. Get on with the sci-fi stuff, the supernatural stuff, the action, my brain said. Leave Jane’s attitude toward her loser husband alone.

Color me—and Jane—humbled.

Vice Queen

Over the course of the story, Jane realizes (with resistance, at first) that she had been too jealous for her own “freedom” to give herself fully to love and family.

Even more slowly, Mark realizes he has always been self-focused and self-serving, obsessed with his image, never able to rest in who he is. He made everyone a means to his own ends and broke his moral compass by constantly trying to fit in. He had done the same with Jane. He had used her and taken her for granted.

Both Jane and Mark expressed self-worship of a kind, and by the end, they’re both humbled and ready to serve, to play the part they owe reality and their marriage.

Gratified as I was that Jane didn’t get the short end of the stick after all and that Mark got his own realizations as well, I still wondered…why end this fascinating, creepy, enthralling sci-fi/supernatural thriller on this note of marriage? Not that I don’t love marriage in general and appreciate an artful romantic streak in a story…but surely this wasn’t the point of this story?

Journaling always helps. And as I journaled and thought, I realized that Jane and Mark’s root sin, though expressed slightly differently, was the same sin expressed by the N.I.C.E. (those are the bad guys). It was the same sin expressed at Babel. It is the queen of vices, after all.

It is pride. And it is the point.

Pride is the Point

At Babel, at Belbury (where the N.I.C.E. was headquartered), and in Mark and Jane’s lives, pride fooled people into thinking they could rebuild themselves on their own terms. In that way, pride is the undoing of the natural world and the natural order God has given us—from belief in the supernatural to organic life to affection to sex itself. Pride is replacing all those “outdated” things with something we think we can control.

For example, here is Professor Filostrato of That Hideous Strength, saying what many are essentially saying today:

We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life … we must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn how to make our brains live with less and less body … Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.

Just for comparison, here are a couple quotes from real-life, modern day folks:

“I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud.” — Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO

“Sex is for fun…embryo screening is for babies.” — Noor Siddiqui, CEO of Orchid

The AI Connection

Finally getting the point about pride, I recalled a quote from Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine that has stuck with me since I read it last fall: “We seek, openly now, to become the gods we always wanted to be, using technology as the force which will get us there.”

We want life and reality on our own terms. It’s not that scientific “progress”—whether in Lewis’s fictionalized England or in real life today—brings about this human desire to be like God, or to be gods ourselves. That desire has always been there from the moment Eve reached for the forbidden fruit.

Now as then, we want a life free of the moral order inherent in the universe, free of the dependence inherent in human relationships. Ironically, when we achieve this man-made “freedom,” we are trapped in man-made hells, as Jane and Mark and many other characters in That Hideous Strength discover through varying degrees of violence and redemption.

I believe large language models (LLMs) play into this selfish, prideful desire of ours, often without people even realizing it. They do this by deceptively building trust, all the time pulling humans away from the real interactions and relationships we need, and the kind of thought life and even struggle required to truly gain understanding. They convince us we don’t need the other people or the mental struggle. They deceive us into thinking we can “hack” life and gain knowledge or companionship on our own terms without the mess of friction.

Heck, it was happening before LLMs. Technology holds us mesmerized with all its capabilities, which become our capabilities, as long as we stay attached (enslaved?) to the “tool.” Meanwhile, the human race is dying. See: a new paper suggesting the ubiquity of the iPhone may have played a significant role in driving down fertility rates.

It seems the technologies we’ve developed in the name of progress are actually causing (or contributing to) regress, pulling us away from the things that make us human. But like Frost, an appropriately named character in THS, many people remain too stubborn in their pride to realize just how inhuman they’ve become.

Incarnating That Ghost

I loved Cecil Dimble’s quote toward the end of the book:

Fighting for that “ghost” or soul in human communities is not just the domain of dazzling planets and spiritual beings. The battle for the ghost of the people must be fought by us in the places from which we often think we want liberation—in stable homes, in faithful marriages, in family loyalty, in friendships that actually demand something from you, in dusty pubs and little gardens and natural life.

There’s a scene early on in the book where Mark and a colleague scout Cure Hardy, an idyllic village destined for destruction. It is one of my favorite scenes because Mark’s all-but-forgotten sensibilities can’t help spilling over and revealing the value of such places, despite his efforts to squash those sensibilities. They stand in stark contrast to his colleague, who has successfully squashed his own sensibilities.

First, it was the countryside of the remote village itself:

“How nice it is!” said Mark to himself next morning as the car left the main road at Duke’s Eaton and began descending the bumpy little lane into the long valley where Cure Hardy lay. … Every little copse was black and bristling as a hairbrush, and when the car stopped in Cure Hardy itself the silence that followed the turning off of the engine was filled with the noise of rooks that seemed to be calling “Wake! Wake!”

“Bloody awful noise those birds make,” said Cosser.

Then, the place in the village where ordinary people congregate to talk, relate, and be human:

In the Two Bells it was very warm and dark, for the window was small. Two labourers (no doubt recalcitrant and backward) were sitting with earthenware mugs at their elbows, munching very thick sandwiches, and a third was standing up at the counter conducting a conversation with the landlord.

“No beer for me, thanks,” said Cosser, “and we don’t want to muck about here too long. What were you saying?”

“I was saying that on a fine morning there is something rather attractive about a place like this, in spite of all its obvious absurdities.”

“Yes, it is a fine morning. Makes a real difference to one’s health, a bit of sunlight.”

“I was thinking of the place.”

“You mean this?” said Cosser glancing around the room. “I should have thought it was just the sort of thing we wanted to get rid of. No sunlight, no ventilation. Haven’t much use for alcohol myself…but if people have got to have their stimulants, I’d like to see them administered in a more hygienic way.”

“I don’t know that the stimulant is quite the whole point,” said Mark, looking at his beer. The whole scene was reminding him of drinks and talks long ago—of laughter and arguments in undergraduate days. Somehow one had made friends more easily then.

Rebelling Against the Rebellion

Back to the theme of marriage, which ties the bow at the end of the book and hopefully to this late-night reflection. I think marriage ties the bow because it is that ultimate human relationship, the one which the Bible says represents the most sacrificial kind of love we can imagine. It’s the very relationship that, when it splinters and fails, sends whole families and societies and civilizations into decay. I think there is a literal reason Lewis focuses on it.

But symbolically in the book, I think it also represents God’s created, natural order that our pride kicks and screams against. Which is why, as I shelve the third novel in Lewis’s 1940s space trilogy, my primary takeaway is that rejoicing in nature, reveling in the creation which God called good, not ever imagining oneself above the inefficiently sacrificial relationships that make us human, is itself a rebellion against “that hideous strength.”

What does it mean to be haunted?

As I write this on Halloween, I know that people will visit haunted houses tonight, dressing up as ghosts and pretending to haunt their friends, or in some morbid obsession with the supernatural realm and dark spiritual forces, maybe even visit places reported to be haunted “for real.”

But another definition of haunt is to “be persistently in the mind of someone;” additionally, “be persistently and disturbingly present.”

Art haunts. It can haunt in such a way that it is persistently in your mind, even disturbingly so. I’m not talking about horror or grotesqueness. Haunting art pricks your soul like a tiny splinter gets caught beneath your cloths against your skin, causing nagging irritation you can’t quite forget. It takes you some place deep within your own person, to some memory or emotion or longing that you might not even be able to define. Because of the way it resonates with you, or bothers you, it stays with you.

Haunting.

This is the power of art—stories, paintings, music. These things have the power to force us to stop and acknowledge some part of us that lies hidden beneath the surface of routine. They arrest our thoughts and expose our fears or our pain and give us the opportunity to reckon with it all.

For Christians, this kind of haunting gives us the opportunity to compare the worldview portrayed with the truth of God, to bring whatever fears or traumas that are unearthed to him.

Some people want to put away the stories or artwork that haunts them, because they don’t want to face what it has discovered—or resurrected—within. They would rather that undefined longing or unfamiliar emotion or unburied truth about themselves stay six feet in the ground. I encourage you, though, to surround yourself with the things that truly haunt you. Again, I’m not talking about haunting in the grotesque sense. But what stories make you think? What paintings make you pause? What music brings a tear to your eye for a reason you can’t name?

What if you named it? What if you addressed it? What if you allowed yourself to dig deep within and deal with the longing, the truth, the fear, the pain, the sadness that has been evoked?

Maybe we wouldn’t feel so haunted anymore.

Here are a few things that haunt me in the best sense with no explanation.

Woman at the Window (1654) by Jacob Vrel

The Underworld, The Underworld Saga, Epic (Official Concept Album) by Jorge Rivera-Herrans

(to fully appreciate this song, it needs to be listened to in the context of all the preceding Epic sagas (a musical adaption of The Odyssey).The Underworld, The Underworld Saga, Epic (Official Concept Album) by Jorge Rivera-Herrans

(to fully appreciate this song, it needs to be listened to in the context of all the preceding Epic sagas (a musical adaption of The Odyssey).

Moby Dick, Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale”

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour, and at the same time the concrete of all colours; it is for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows - a colourless, all-colour atheism from which we shrink?

The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Series One

Life, Poem V

Glee! The great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.

Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie souls, —
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals!

How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, “But the forty?
Did they come back no more?”

Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller’s eye;
And the children no further question,
And only the waves reply.

Life, Poem VIII

A wounded deer leaps highest,
I’ve heard the hunter tell;
‘T is but the ecstasy of death,
And then the brake is still.

The smitten rock that gushes,
The trampled steel that springs;
A cheek is always redder
Just where the hectic stings!

Mirth is the mail of anguish,
In which it cautions arm,
Lest anybody spy the blood
And “You’re hurt” exclaim!

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

And suddenly it became clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him suddenly was vanishing all at once—from two sides, ten sides, all sides. He felt sorry for them, he had to do something to keep from hurting them. To deliver them and himself from this suffering. “How good and how simple!” he though. “And the pain?” he asked himself. “Where has it gone? Now, then, pain, where are you?”

He waited for it attentively.

“Ah, there it is. Well, what of it? Let it be.”

“And death? Where is it?”

He searched for his accustomed fear of death and could not find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear because there was no death.

Instead of death there was light.

“So that’s it!” he exclaimed. “What bliss!”

All of this happened in a single moment, but the significance of that moment was lasting. For those present, his agony continued for another two hours. Something rattled in his chest; his emaciated body twitched. Then the rattling and wheezing gradually diminished.

“It is all over,” said someone standing beside him.

He heard these words and repeated them in his soul.

“Death is over,” he said to himself. “There is no more death.”

He drew in a breath, broke off in the middle of it, stretched himself out, and died.

Last August my husband and I were on a cruise.

Usually when I travel, I pack “comfort books,” knowing that I likely won’t have time to read. They’re to have on hand just in case. (What’s worse than realizing you’ve stumbled upon the perfect time and place to read a book, but you don’t have one?!) This trip, thankfully, provided ample reading time. And so on the top deck surrounded by the rhythm of the ocean and steel drums, I pondered Moby Dick’s Chapter 37, “Sunset.”

Like many readers of Herman Melville’s great work, I haven’t actually read the whole of Moby Dick all the way through. Usually one or two chapters in a sitting provides more than enough to scratch one’s head at…like Ahab’s mournful reflection of sunsets having lost their appeal.

Yonder, by the ever brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun — slow dived from noon, — goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. …

Oh! time was as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise!

The captain’s lament precedes Ishmael’s own rumination later in Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Like Ahab, Ishmael suspects that “low” pleasures like sunsets and color are just a distraction from the terrible reality, of which the wise are aware:

And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues — every stately or lovely emblazoning — the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnelhouse within and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge — pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him.

A Worldview of Wonder

Over the course of our cruise, my husband and I were like young Ahab. Spurred by sunrises and soothed by sunsets. The kind of people who, unlike Paris Geller in Gilmore Girls, “get happy looking at a sunset.”

In fact, we made a point to get up every morning at 6:00 a.m. and rush to the top deck to marvel at the sunrise, and made our nightly rounds on the top deck again to see sunset colors give way to moonlight reflections.

And as I stood on the decks, watching the clouds, the horizon, the sun, the moon, and the unfathomable waves around and beneath us, I couldn’t help but wonder. As a Christian, I couldn’t help but praise God for the beauty he’d created and give thanks for my opportunity to enjoy it.

I guess that’s the difference between me and Ahab or Ishmael, between the Christian worldview and the worldview on the Pequod. The more I learn about reality the more I marvel at it, because I believe the further you go into what’s real the more beautiful life gets.

The opposite view is bleak, but ubiquitous. It makes time on earth shallow, because it requires that the things here only be enjoyed on a surface level in order to avoid existential dread. You can’t dive into too many layers of anything (like I discussed in a previous blog post) because you won’t like what you find. In fact, you might find nothing. Keep it shallow.

The Christian worldview invites us into infinite depths of experience. Happiness is deeper because it’s just the tip of an iceberg of joy. Pain is more poignant because we know that it’s a violation of what’s right—not just chance. But even pain can produce fruitful hope of the reality to come. Beauty is more alluring because the more you explore it, the more you see, knowing all the time it’s only a foggy-mirror reflection of the real stuff.

Enjoying Beauty Freely

On the drive to and from Galveston, we had time for another book: C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces (Wanda McCaddon’s narration is fantastic). Psyche’s explanation of longing is what it’s like for a Christian to know that the broken beauty we behold in this life is only a taste of the truth:

It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine … Do you remember? The color and the smell, and looking across at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. … The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from.

I believe that Ahab, Ishmael, and Paris Geller were all wrong. It’s not “low” or naive to get happy looking at a sunset; it’s an acknowledgement of truth. There is a place where all the beauty came from, and there is more. When we accept this, we can wonder at the imperfect beauty of this world with freedom, whether by enjoying an ocean view or a good book. Or both.

“What are veins?”

I turned my wrist over, exposing the blue veins branching up like trees from forearm to palm. In a very non-scientific and probably half-true way, I tried my best to explain the function of veins to my oldest.

But my six-year-old already grasped the concept better than me.

“Oh,” he said. “Veins are like roots in our bodies!” He bounded off to play.

I’ve been thinking about his understanding—my revelation—all week.

The Memories Stories Hold

A few days later, I asked my husband what book he was going to read next. (He’s currently on the last book of the Throne of Glass series, and I understand the emotional slump that can come after finishing a big series. It’s important to have a game plan!)

He said he was thinking about something Western. I grabbed a collector’s edition of 3 Louis L’Amour novels off the teal bookcase in our bedroom, an edition I once found on my Paw Paw’s office shelf.

After my grandparents died, we looked through their house. Multiple times. It feels both irreverent and comforting to rifle through the material things of loved ones who’ve relinquished earth for eternity.

Ultimately, I’ve been glad of the the items that moved from their house to ours, like my Nan’s original painting of an old barn framed by storm clouds. Like the mug that sat in my Paw Paw’s office for years and now holds my coffee. And the brown leather book that sits in our room.

Blood and Roots

When I opened that book the other night, I rediscovered the small photo one of them had, once upon a time, tucked inside the pages. The old snapshot preserved young smiles, a literal representation of the way loved ones live on in the stories they pass down.

Like the blood in our veins, their stories determine the person we become. The true stories of their lives, the myths they immortalize, and the fiction they treasure enough to share…they all form us.

The stories my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents gave me intentionally make up my DNA just as much as the genes they gave by accident.

They’re my roots.

P.S. Save Their Stories

I’m eternally grateful for my writing teacher, Mrs. Blalock, who introduced me and many other homeschooled students to the concept of books like the Foxfire Series. In the same vein, we released two editions of the Bois d’ Arc Magazine, collections of stories from the senior citizens in our north Texas region. That experience afforded the opportunity to hear stories from so many fascinating people, including several members of my own family who can’t tell their stories anymore.

Today, I’m thankful that my dad serves as our family scribe. He didn’t need a class in middle school to teach him the importance of preserving memories, anecdotes, and special moments. For his whole life, he’s collected these treasures, and is now compiling them into a volume so our own family doesn’t forget its roots.

Have you saved any family stories?

Originally published on my personal website, libertymcartor.com, last August. I’m in the process of moving my blogging efforts over here, including some favorite past entries like this one.

Stories are worth making time for. But for years I didn’t make time.

I believed there were more important things to do than write stories others may never read. Instead of reading stories, I thought I should probably do something serious and responsible like wash the dishes or fold the laundry.

The problem isn’t that, in some seasons, we have less time for creative pursuits. That’s reality. The problem is thinking creative pursuits are not important. Not “real” work. To borrow a term from the Covid pandemic, non-essential.

Despite being born a natural lover of stories (writing them, reading them, obsessing over them), I bought into this wrong thinking for a long time. The truth of the issue has dawned on me slowly, gently, overtime, like a very gradual sunrise. (No apologies for the somewhat saccharine simile—nor the alliteration. This is my creative corner, ok?)

Why I Write Creatively (In This Season)

Back in January of 2020, I had been pouring my heart out to God (for me, that means writing in a prayer journal) about all the things I wanted to do with my life. Among other things, I knew I wanted to grow creatively…somehow. Did that mean writing books? Getting a master’s degree? Studying to become a professional editor? After pouring all that out, I wrote this:

Here’s what’s coming to mind:

1. Regardless of what I have to show for it, I was born to write. It will always been part of who I am and what I do.

2. I love stories. Telling them. Reading them. Helping others tell their stories.

3. I need to finish my book.

   • There is literally nothing to lose.

   • If I’m meant to be an author, I’ll never know it if I don’t finish.

   • If I’m meant to be an editor, I’ll need the experience.

   • If I’m meant to get a master’s in creative writing or something, I’ll need it for my portfolio.

Keep in mind this was written over four years before I would actually finish drafting the book in question, or take seriously the pursuit of writing fiction—so like I said, g r a d u a l sunrise.

This year, 2024, I’ve begun earnestly prioritizing my love of writing stories. I still don’t know where, exactly, it will lead. But when I doubt or start to knock that creative time off my priority list for the day, I remember what I believe God impressed on my heart four years ago. And I would encourage you to remember it too.

If you feel you were born to do it, then do it. You may not know where God is leading you right now. You may not understand “why.” But do what you were made to do, and trust him with the outcome.

Why I Read (And Make My Kids Read)

I grew up a voracious reader because I enjoyed it (and as a kid, time was easy to come by). But the real importance of not just reading, but reading good literature intentionally and well, has also dawned on me gradually over time.

My views on the why were especially sharpened during the last couple of years, while I had the privilege to teach literature part-time. That opportunity (among many other wonderful things)…

• Gave me an excuse (and a duty!) to read several amazing classics (some repeats for me, some I’d never actually read before, or not in a very long time, and not thoroughly).

• Reminded me how much stories have been a part of the human experience since the beginning of time—both reflecting and shaping our worldviews, and empowering us to connect with generations both past and future.

• Forced me to articulate to students why reading (and writing) good and true stories matters.

• Allowed me to witness in real-time how minds are molded, challenged, and sharpened by great stories.

There’s nothing like talking to kids about something to force you to really refine and articulate what you believe about it!

That experience helped solidify that I wanted to keep exploring great literature for myself; there is so much I have to learn! And it made me all the more certain that I want to raise my own children to be people who love to read and know how to read stories well.

L. J.’s Corner

This new corner of my website is part of me making time for stories—writing them, reading them, thinking about them. I hope you will interact, if you want, with your own thoughts, ideas, and questions. Because perhaps the only thing better than enjoying a good story is getting to enjoy it with someone else.

Why L. J.’s Corner? “L. J.” because it’s a childhood nickname of mine and the name on my “writergram” account (I’d love if you joined me there). “Corner” because you can typically find me reading while curled up in a cozy corner of our couch. Alliterations, am I right? Just so fun.