Carrying the Weight of Glory Together 📙
Selections | "The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings"
Welcome to Selections. Where we slide a book off the shelf or a record from the stack, and talk about it. I’ve got something just for you.
I’m going to do my best to spare you, patient readers, from a rhapsodic testament to the princely glories of an imagined Oxford long since passed into golden memory. I’ve already written it, for one thing. But in the open source spirit of my age, I feel compelled to use these Selections as a map of sorts, a document of my own intellectual wanderings and influences. Perhaps no single work written in the twenty-first century that has quite the same lasting influence on me as the Zaleskis’ thoughtful chronicling of Oxford’s famous midcentury literary reading group. More than a quadruple biography, The Fellowship is an inspiration. It draws in sympathetic colors the checkered journeys of four remarkable literary luminaries, then invites the reader to join their storied company by scrawling his or her own mark into the pages of history. And if in discussing it we veer into well-trampled themes that I’ve often addressed in these letters, then at least you’ll know where I’ve been getting all of my ideas.
They listened to the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, heard the horns of Elfland, and made designs on the culture that our own age is only beginning fully to appreciate. They were philologists and philomyths: lovers of logos (the ordering power of words) and mythos (the regenerative power of story), with a nostalgia for things medieval and archaic and a distrust of technological innovation that never decayed into the merely antiquarian. Out of the texts they studied and the tales they read, they forged new ways to convey old themes—sin and salvation, despair and hope, friendship and loss, fate and free will—in a time of war, environmental degradation, and social change.
~Philip and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship
We’ll avoid simply recounting the events of the book, which traces the early lives of the four most notable members of the Inklings as well as their intertwining and reactions against each other. Instead, I want to give you a small taste of the spirit and savor that these four very different men gave to their life’s work. A few uniting aspects fused them together into an unlikely set, provided the sparks and sometimes the painful explosions that propelled their artistic production. It would be tempting to elevate these men into demigods of the written word, but they would have sharply disagreed. And the very things that made them great prove to be a simple path that we are free to tread. As part of our ongoing project to apply the exciting and volatile concepts of the web3 revolution to new arenas, consider for a moment the Inklings as a proto-DAO, a headless freeform working group drawn together by a desire to build culture. We will see that the most powerful tools wielded by these unique creators were not the advantages afforded them by their unique setting, but rather the simplest human technologies.
The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.
~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Study of the Inklings reveals first their deeply normal abnormalities. Tolkien, Lewis, Williams and Barfield were broken people, limping through middle age plagued by the physical and mental scars of combat in the Great War. Further, they shared the deeply banal cares of their world. Reading Lewis’ collected letters, for example, is primarily a winding path through a saga of university administrative duties, blocked drains, budget woes and relational agonies. Then a breathtaking insight into the life of faith or the writer’s craft will leap out, a tiny gemstone in a setting of complaint. Although tempting to idolize them, stubbornly their lives will not allow hagiography upon actual study. These were men of troubled marriages, Tolkien’s alone being a happy fairytale, Lewis a close runner up with a tragically short union late in life to a divorcee under circumstances so muddled they confused and bothered his closest friends. Williams and Barfield alienated their spouses with obsessive passions for esoterica and, on Williams’ part, lifelong quasi-sexual relationships with younger adoring fans. They were men with feet of clay. In many ways, it was awareness of their own mortality and failures, the ugliness of the world that drove them on. Knowing their private pain and the shabby quality (to their mind) of their artistic milieu, they sought to revive a fading glimpse of beauty. Romantics all, they chased that light relentlessly.
The famous saying 'God is love', it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, not that the meaning of love ought to have something of the otherness and terror of God.
~Charles Williams, He Came Down from Heaven
If pain forged these men, then God defined them. They shared almost nothing denominationally or in practice, with the three Anglicans (Lewis, Barfield and Williams) sharply differing in the day to day expression of their faith. You can split them up any number of ways: orthodox (Tolkien’s stolid Catholicism and Lewis’ “Merely Christian” lay Anglicanism) vs. unorthodox (Barfield’s passion for Anthroposophy and Williams’ delves into white magic). Public and argumentative (Lewis and Barfield’s deep friendship was primarily carried on through a passionate argument they called “The Great War”) vs. private and personal (Tolkien preferred privacy in most things, and Williams mystic pursuits were well out of the mainstream). But the central uniting factor in these four artists’ lives, according to their own self-descriptions, was their individual visions of the face of God. Although they came to Christianity at different times in their lives and through different “doors in the hall” as Lewis would characterize it, they shared an intense commitment to the metaphysical reality of the faith. This was for them not a lifestyle affectation or a symbolic structure, but a fundamental disturbance in their personal firmament that had left them irreparably altered.
Like mariners in a philosophical sea, their body of corporate work was a joyous howl and outstretched finger stabbing towards a lighthouse-fire gleaming in the distance. The single answer for them to the travails of the birthing postmodern age, to their personal demons and artistic dreams, was the Gospel of Jesus Christ and their encounters with Him. This permeated their daily existence to the extent that they seemed unable to talk or write about anything unless it was drenched in Christian meaning. To them, God invaded their world until nothing remained unbeautified by His redemptive touch. As an artistic DAO, their work orbited a constant grasping towards giving words to the spiritual realities they had experienced. Without any real coordination, their works responded and interacted with each other because they were always talking about the same thing, whether in writing or on rambling walks and over pints.
And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language'- this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?
~ Owen Barfield
This is all well and good, for Oxford professors. Can we really be expected to engage in the same project of community-driven literary and artistic production? In this economy? With these phone-addled brains and content-“educated” public forums? You already know my answer, of course. Look again at the lives of these four and you’ll discover that their primary mode of creation was personal assemblage of learning into constellations of connected thoughts, each connection a new way of pointing to the Truth and Beauty that had captivated them. And how did they assemble this learning? For the most part, through lifelong autodidactic reading. The Inklings inhaled books, tearing massive eclectic swathes through the assembled canons of Western and Eastern literature, wolfing down modern and popular works even when they disliked certain tastes. Their interior lives were overflowing with the best imaginative and thoughtful work of all humankind. When they sat down to describe and invite others into their world, their words resounded. They had something to say. And more than that, it was something new and meaningful precisely because it was the distilled liquor of ancient truth fermenting in their imaginations. They avoided the Scylla and Charybdis of formless abstract innovation and stilted repackaging of form by adding the alchemy of personal experience. The centrality of experience crystalized in Lewis’ transports of “Northernness” or “Joy,” Barfield’s drive to define the experience of consciousness, Tolkien’s tinkering with constructed languages and cultures, and even Williams’ experimentation with Rosicrucianism and obsession with romantic love. Simple reading and knowing wasn’t enough, they must participate. They saw their work as joining in a literary chorus that extended into antiquity. They hoped to serve as intellectual bridges so that generations following could cross back in time and drink from the deep wells they had found.
That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. This love (essentially) ignores not only our physical bodies but that whole embodiment which consists of our family, job, past and connections. At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague, or subordinate. Not among our Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
~ C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
And now the lynchpin that pulled the entire grand movement together, the element that in my inexperience most DAOs and other web3 conclaves deeply lack. The Inklings’ “secret” was a commitment to personal friendship and loving artistic combat as a way of life. There was a reason they met in a local watering hole, and not the sets of personal rooms some of them had access to in college. It seems that they genuinely enjoyed company and fun and would have found another excuse to gather if they hadn’t had such a constant supply of drafts to read. In fact, the various members seem to have been lifelong participants in all manner of clubs, societies and collections of like-minded individuals. Despite the atmosphere of gloom and despair, the wartime suffering, the private struggles, these were convivial and joyful people. If the Inklings existed today they would be a Discord-less DAO whose only activities were meetups. PubDAO would be a place for readers, writers and learners who wanted to share what they had discovered with each other, but perhaps more importantly who were genuinely interested in and trusted each other. For all the talk of trustlessness in decentralized organizations, if anything trust is the central primitive that we need to embrace if we are going to build groups as powerful as the Inklings. The members trusted one another to not let them off the artistic hook, to push one another to expose the true greatness that they believed of each other. Despite personal hurts, often inflicted on each other, these friends persisted. They bore one another’s burdens. They knew intimately the pain of being a herald, of speaking a message too wondrous to ever truly express. And so they kept close to one another. Reminding each other that the struggle was worth it.
Of course I have nothing to criticize in this work, because in a large sense it is a pattern that I have been haltingly attempting to follow since I was aware of the Inklings’ existence. The reason why The Fellowship is a powerful book is because it reminds you that creative fellowship is still achievable, if you are willing to take the risks and experience the vulnerability that is required. You have to come with good intentions, willing to give to others more than you take for yourself, willing to be exposed as the fraud you are so that you can be built up again. It’s a bit of a fearful thing, but it’s also a lifelong endeavor. In fact, the Inklings would have kindly advised you that this kind of community is one of the chief things humans were created to do. Then they would have given you a few more book recommendations, and loudly demanded that you finish your latest draft.