Reviews of Lilith, The Man Who Was Thursday

Wordsmith and I had read these books in the past, and both found them to be quite different from what we recalled. Perhaps that's owing to their dreamlike qualities.

It's a genre I don't find tremendously appealing, but the books are very readable. There's enough in them to grasp hold of, to keep you from feeling that just anything can happen, as in the dreams we remember upon waking. The Man Who Was Thursday, by GK Chesterton, is subtitled "A Nightmare," but it hadn't seemed so "wild" the first time I read it. What I remembered was its suspense and intelligence. This time through I noticed more its humor.

My strongest impression of Lilith, (George MacDonald) from the first reading was the delight I felt in the Little Ones, a feeling shared with the narrator. They had awakened in him a protective, nurturing feeling, and that was something to which I could relate. But I had completely forgotten everything about the ending. More about forgettable endings later.

So, it's good to read things more than once, years separated, because you bring to them a different sensibility and you might learn more of what the author had in mind. For instance, as a young person when I read Lilith, I would not have been keyed in to all the epistemological and existential questions that the book asks and answers (Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I? How do I know what's real? What should I do? What happens when you die?). It's not that I wanted to learn the answers this time around, but that I could recognize them and see what MacDonald was trying to do.

A few important thoughts we took away from it:

Vane, the narrator, wants to be the hero in his own story. That's a fair assumption for a main character, but it's not to be the case here. He eventually learns the folly (vanity) of it.

At the beginning of the story, he's told that doing something -- seemingly any decisive deed -- will turn the strange world in which he finds himself into his home. He imagines himself capable of knowing what to do and bringing it to pass, but errs by resisting what is asked of him -- obedience, belief, dying.

He, like every one of us, thinks dying is what you do at the end of life, but it's really the beginning -- here and in the world MacDonald creates. Time and again Vane is implored to lay himself down -- die to self -- but it's so hard. Proper dying is surrender to the Maker's will, not to self-loathing or despair.

A few important quotes from Lilith:

When one says to the great Thinker:--'Here is one of thy thoughts: I am thinking it now! that is a prayer--a word to the big heart from one of its own little hearts.'

[T]o understand is not more wonderful than to love.

In this world never trust a person who has once deceived you. Above all, never do anything such a one may ask you to do.

You lost your chance [to love the Little Ones], Mr. Vane! You speculated about them instead of helping them.

One of the sentences I highlighted in TMWWT is, "Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity." Maybe that's Chesterton's point, although I liked it better when I read it as a straight suspense thriller. The levity kind of ruined it for me. I can't decide what Chesterton means. Is he saying that anarchists are ridiculous, or that people who worry about them are ridiculous? I guess both could be true.

Wordsmith and I spent more time discussing Occupy Wall Street than the book, and there could be lessons here for them and us:

You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would be from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

. . . When duty and religion are really destroyed, it will be by the rich.

What I really couldn't understand was the ending. I didn't remember it at all. In fact, all that really stuck with me was the tension of the early chapters. (It was as though I'd stopped reading altogether.) The culmination affirms a biblical worldview, but is stranger than Lilith even though everything happens in "the real world." It calls into question what is real. My last highlight:

Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal.