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dolorosa_12This weekend has been calm, relaxing, and wintry. Yesterday's skies were clear and blue, and it was a real pleasure to walk out to the gym for my two hours of classes, watched through the windows by myriad cats as they observed me make my way through the freezing air. After lunch, Matthias and I assembled the growhouse we bought for germinating this year's vegetables. All things being equal, I'm hoping to start with tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, and some herbs by the end of the month.
In the evening, we went out for a meal at this place — a former stately home that's now a boutique hotel and events venue, just slightly out of town near the village of Stuntney. It's not reachable by public transport, and the last time we ate there we got taxis back and forth, but this time around we decided to try walking. It's not the most picturesque walk: you walk along a paved footpath next to a main road for about half the trip, then you have the option of continuing along the main road with no footpath (i.e. walking on the verge), or going slightly out of the way into Stuntney village, walking the length of the village and then rejoining the main road when the village ends. We went with the latter (the idea of walking along the verge of a main road in the dark did not appeal), and the whole thing took just under an hour. It was definitely a good way to work up an appetite! It was lovely to sit in the bar next to an open fire, drinking champagne, before moving into the restaurant for the meal, which was fairly solid gastropub-type food, in a conservatory with views back across the fens to the cathedral, and a woman singing covers of various pop songs. The whole experience was so warming and cosy.
It was meant to start raining and snowing at 1am, but in actual fact this only really arrived in the light of the morning — drenching me when I ducked out to the bakery to pick up pastries for breakfast. We had deliberately planned to spend the whole of Sunday indoors, and the advent first of heavy rain, and then of snow, confirmed the wisdom of this decision! The snow was intense: fat flakes that danced through the air, and settled all over the trees, roofs, and ground. It lasted for a couple of hours, although it's all well on the way to melting now, and turning to slush. While it lasted, it was a beautiful backdrop to some slow yoga, watching the Olympics, and lots of reading.
You may recall that a few weeks back, I was asking for recommendations of fairytale/mythology/folktale retellings, and this week is when I've made proper efforts to start with some of the books you recommended. This somehow worked out as being two very different Eros/Cupid and Psyche retellings: The Sharpest Thorn (Victoria Audley) and Till We Have Faces (C.S. Lewis), both doing very different things with the myth, both doing them well.
The Sharpest Thorn is probably the more straightforward of the two retellings, and really digs into the element of family cruelty — both Psyche's human family, and the divine family of the Greek gods — which runs through the tale. It's a book about love which emphasises that enduring cruelty for the sake of family bonds is not worth it, that family 'love' which finds sole expression as a series of impossible demands is no love at all, and that the relationships and connections people find outside the family can sometimes be a lifeline, and reaching for that lifeline and not letting go is a way to find and save oneself.
As for the Lewis, I went into this with some trepidation that I'd tried to overcome due to my general trust in the taste of the people who'd recommended it. I last read Lewis more than twenty years ago, when I was assigned That Hideous Strength to read for a university class during my undergrad degree, and felt the book's misogyny with an almost physical force. It remains one of only two books that made me so angry that I literally hurled them at the wall, and I had determined then to never, ever read another C.S. Lewis book again.
I genuinely cannot reconcile the writing of women (from a woman's first-person perspective, even) in Till We Have Faces with the seething, misogynistic contempt of That Hideous Strength. It's almost as if the books are written by two entirely different people. This retelling tells the story of Cupid and Psyche from the point of view of one of Psyche's sisters (who, in the original versions of the tale, out of jealousy of their sister's material circumstances, convince her to break her divine husband's taboo on viewing him, sparking Psyche's exile, misery, and ill-treatment), and what it's really concerned with is the gulf between the human and the divine, and how the former are only able to perceive the latter dimly, through darkness. I'm not doing it full justice with that description — really, it's something that has to be read to experience fully — but I'm just in awe, really. It's one of the few works of fiction that really conveys the yawning gulf between mortal and immortal ways of being, seeing, and experiencing existence. Per Lewis, ordinary human beings are for the most part so incapable of understanding the divine that they fill in this chasm with darkness, with symbols, with metaphor, and with monstrosity. What an incredible book (although I couldn't help rolling my eyes indulgently at the whole Golden Bough of it all — oh mid-twentieth-century authors with interest in comparative religion, never change).
In the time since I've started this post, the snow has now melted fully, and that silvery snowlit quality in the sky has been replaced by soggy grey. The afternoon is, I suppose, somewhat running away from me. This cosy conclusion to the weekend, however, holds nothing more complicated than some slow-cooking Iranian food for dinner, cups of smoky tea, and a fire in the wood-burning stove. It's been a good two days all around.
In the evening, we went out for a meal at this place — a former stately home that's now a boutique hotel and events venue, just slightly out of town near the village of Stuntney. It's not reachable by public transport, and the last time we ate there we got taxis back and forth, but this time around we decided to try walking. It's not the most picturesque walk: you walk along a paved footpath next to a main road for about half the trip, then you have the option of continuing along the main road with no footpath (i.e. walking on the verge), or going slightly out of the way into Stuntney village, walking the length of the village and then rejoining the main road when the village ends. We went with the latter (the idea of walking along the verge of a main road in the dark did not appeal), and the whole thing took just under an hour. It was definitely a good way to work up an appetite! It was lovely to sit in the bar next to an open fire, drinking champagne, before moving into the restaurant for the meal, which was fairly solid gastropub-type food, in a conservatory with views back across the fens to the cathedral, and a woman singing covers of various pop songs. The whole experience was so warming and cosy.
It was meant to start raining and snowing at 1am, but in actual fact this only really arrived in the light of the morning — drenching me when I ducked out to the bakery to pick up pastries for breakfast. We had deliberately planned to spend the whole of Sunday indoors, and the advent first of heavy rain, and then of snow, confirmed the wisdom of this decision! The snow was intense: fat flakes that danced through the air, and settled all over the trees, roofs, and ground. It lasted for a couple of hours, although it's all well on the way to melting now, and turning to slush. While it lasted, it was a beautiful backdrop to some slow yoga, watching the Olympics, and lots of reading.
You may recall that a few weeks back, I was asking for recommendations of fairytale/mythology/folktale retellings, and this week is when I've made proper efforts to start with some of the books you recommended. This somehow worked out as being two very different Eros/Cupid and Psyche retellings: The Sharpest Thorn (Victoria Audley) and Till We Have Faces (C.S. Lewis), both doing very different things with the myth, both doing them well.
The Sharpest Thorn is probably the more straightforward of the two retellings, and really digs into the element of family cruelty — both Psyche's human family, and the divine family of the Greek gods — which runs through the tale. It's a book about love which emphasises that enduring cruelty for the sake of family bonds is not worth it, that family 'love' which finds sole expression as a series of impossible demands is no love at all, and that the relationships and connections people find outside the family can sometimes be a lifeline, and reaching for that lifeline and not letting go is a way to find and save oneself.
As for the Lewis, I went into this with some trepidation that I'd tried to overcome due to my general trust in the taste of the people who'd recommended it. I last read Lewis more than twenty years ago, when I was assigned That Hideous Strength to read for a university class during my undergrad degree, and felt the book's misogyny with an almost physical force. It remains one of only two books that made me so angry that I literally hurled them at the wall, and I had determined then to never, ever read another C.S. Lewis book again.
I genuinely cannot reconcile the writing of women (from a woman's first-person perspective, even) in Till We Have Faces with the seething, misogynistic contempt of That Hideous Strength. It's almost as if the books are written by two entirely different people. This retelling tells the story of Cupid and Psyche from the point of view of one of Psyche's sisters (who, in the original versions of the tale, out of jealousy of their sister's material circumstances, convince her to break her divine husband's taboo on viewing him, sparking Psyche's exile, misery, and ill-treatment), and what it's really concerned with is the gulf between the human and the divine, and how the former are only able to perceive the latter dimly, through darkness. I'm not doing it full justice with that description — really, it's something that has to be read to experience fully — but I'm just in awe, really. It's one of the few works of fiction that really conveys the yawning gulf between mortal and immortal ways of being, seeing, and experiencing existence. Per Lewis, ordinary human beings are for the most part so incapable of understanding the divine that they fill in this chasm with darkness, with symbols, with metaphor, and with monstrosity. What an incredible book (although I couldn't help rolling my eyes indulgently at the whole Golden Bough of it all — oh mid-twentieth-century authors with interest in comparative religion, never change).
In the time since I've started this post, the snow has now melted fully, and that silvery snowlit quality in the sky has been replaced by soggy grey. The afternoon is, I suppose, somewhat running away from me. This cosy conclusion to the weekend, however, holds nothing more complicated than some slow-cooking Iranian food for dinner, cups of smoky tea, and a fire in the wood-burning stove. It's been a good two days all around.
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Date: 2026-02-15 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-15 03:50 pm (UTC)Face is staggeringly good.
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Date: 2026-02-15 03:06 pm (UTC)RIGHT?????
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Date: 2026-02-15 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-15 03:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-15 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-15 08:34 pm (UTC)I have read a whole lot of Lewis and generally find his works to be about four parts “heck yeah!” to one part “what the heck?!” I do think he tends to be weird about gender overall, and will sometimes identify a way in which people differ but ascribe it to gender when I don’t think it’s related - for example, in The Screwtape Letters, he writes that “up to a certain point, fatigue makes women talk more and men talk less,” and while I do agree that fatigue makes some people (e.g., me) talk more while others (e.g., my mother) talk less, I don’t think it has much to do with gender.
I haven’t yet read That Hideous Strength - I liked (but did not love) Out of the Silent Planet, but haven’t read the rest of the Space Trilogy, though I do intend to - and now have some trepidation about it!
I do wonder if some of the difference between Lewis’s attitude in the two books has a biographical explanation. I have read that Lewis took inspiration for the character of Orual from Joy Davidman, whom he would later marry; That Hideous Strength was published several years before he even met her. It would not surprise me if forming a close personal relationship with a woman he viewed entirely as his intellectual equal affected Lewis’s views on women and gender more broadly.
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Date: 2026-02-15 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-15 11:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 05:04 am (UTC)