Phantastes (George MacDonald)

Anodos, a 21-year-old, investigates his late father's desk looking for his effects and planning to assume the role of head of house. An encounter there will lead him to Fairy Land, where he will have bizarre encounters and adventures (involving vast forests, knights, living trees, faeries, and things brought to life from stone) over the next 21 days (that seem to him to be 21 years) that will change him forever. Indeed, it helps him "begin the duties of my new position, somewhat instructed, I hoped, by the adventures that had befallen me in Fairy Land. Could I translate the experiences of my travels there, into common life? That was the question."

George MacDonald played a large role in C.S. Lewis's life, and so I read this with great anticipation. He is clearly a gifted author; I found his prose (and poetry, infused throughout) to be either hauntingly beautiful and profound or confusing and hard to follow. Great messages, certainly, but my feeble mind couldn't always follow. He looks at a few themes: beauty and brokenness, longing, striving, failing, reflection and art's value, and (ultimately) true love. Select quotes follow.

"How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?"

"As in all the sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy."

". . . art rescues nature from the weary and sated regards of our senses, and the degrading injustice of our anxious everyday life, and, appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is, and as she represents hereself to the ey of the child, whose every-day life, fearless and unambitious, meets the true import of the wonder-teeming world around him, and rejoices therein without questioning."

"But words are vain; reject them all—

They utter but a feeble part:

Hear thou the depths from which they call,

The voiceless longings of my heart."

"Then first I knew the delight of being lowly; of saying to myself, "I am what I am, nothing more.""

"All a man has to do, is to better what he can. And if he will settle it with himself, that even renown and success are in themselves of no great value, and be content to be defeated, if so be that the fault is not his; and so go to his work with a cool brain and a strong will, he will get it done; and fare none the worse in the end, that he was not burdened with provision and precaution." 

"If I cannot be noble myself, I will be a servant to his nobleness."

"I knew now, that is is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another . . ."

"Be thy heart a well of love, my child,

Flowing, and free, and sure;

For a cistern of love, though undefiled, 

Keeps not the spirit pure."

Rating: B