Sunday, May 11, 2008

Narnia


Today I finished reading C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, the entire 7 books in the collection. They were amazing!! I read them in chronological order, from the first book that describes the creation of Narnia to the last book that describes the end of Narnia. My favorite thing by far about the books was the symbolism to the gospel and Christ found everywhere! For example, The first book talks about a boy searching for a fruit that makes you immortal and Aslan (the Christ figure of the book) creates Narnia by "breathing life" into animals and plants and trees. The second book, (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe which is an awesome movie by the way) has Aslan sacrificing himself to the White Witch for the sins of a boy, and then coming back to life. The last book describes the characters as coming to Aslan's country and eating of a fruit that "if you had once eaten that fruit, all the nicest things in this world would taste like medicine after it. But I can't describe it. You can't find out what it is like unless you can get to that country and taste it for yourself".

I really love reading books that help me understand the gospel more. Even if they are not written by LDS authors (although I am sure many of us want to claim C.S. Lewis as one of our own) they help add more to my understanding and make me think about gospel principles more often then I normally would throughout the day. This is, I think, my absolute favorite passage from the last book (The Last Battle) referring to death:

"And as he spoke [Aslan], He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of a real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

1 comment:

Claudia said...

I'm on Book 4 and I am really enjoying the time I am spending reading these books. I really love C.S. Lewis' writing style. The movies are just like the book!