At the Back of the North Wind

 C.S. Lewis famously wrote to his goddaughter, "...some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again..." in the dedication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. 

I cannot say for certain if I would have ever begun to read fairy tales again were it not for having children of my own, and trying to read to them and with them as much as possible. In any case, it was because of said children that I picked up At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald during the past school year, and found to my own great surprise that it was exactly the book I needed to be reading to myself.

Every so often (quite often, actually) I had to place a slip of paper here or there at a passage I wanted to come back to later and muse over or copy down into my notebook of quotes. Here I am now in my forties and contemplating the problem of evil in those ways perhaps common to the so-called "mid-life crisis" I seem to be having, and George MacDonald had things to say to me that met me in my deep uncertainties. 

It is an interesting experience to read a story like At the Back of the North Wind as an adult, because while there will always be a part of me that experiences, for example, the Narnia books (or others in a similar vein I first read as a child) as nostalgia as well as all the other things they are, I never read this particular work of MacDonald as a child and so I experienced it only in the here and now of reading it.

My children experienced it in their own ways, and to my curiosity I overheard a conversation between a few of them in which one was claiming quite adamantly that Diamond died at the end of the book, and another was equally adamant that he was most certainly not dead but had only gone "to the back of the North Wind." Somehow I felt that that was all exactly as it should have been; it reminded me a bit of something I've been told about children within the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd program: When small children in this space first recognize themselves in those sheep the Good Shepherd loves and cares for, and tell other children, those who have not yet understood the relationship that way for themselves tend to pooh-pooh the little sheep-friend making this grandiose claim: "No, silly, they're sheep, not people!" But the child who knows, well, knows.

I have long held an affinity for MacDonald despite having read far too few of his works (I admit with shame). I knew enough of him to know he had posited things I too ponder -- for one, a sort of dispensation from God to all that some might call "universalism"; certainly at the very least he became adamantly disinclined towards the Calvinism that surrounded him and perhaps that accounts for a large portion of my affinity, for I too find that doctrine loathsome. Further, it seems to me that MacDonald reacted with a nearly violent abhorrence to the theology of penal substitutionary atonement, and this is another area in which I find myself naturally drawn to his writings. ("The thing gets worse and worse. I declare my utter and absolute repudiation of the idea in any form whatever." - Unspoken Sermons, Justice)

I thought I would write out here a few passages from At the Back of the North Wind that struck me for various reasons. In particular I think I read the longer, almost Socratic bit of back-and-forth questioning, three times to myself in one evening after the girls went to bed. Perhaps these sentences will speak to someone else in reading them here, and you'll go and read the whole book and find it as thought-provoking as I did. I said to the girls several times during the course of the book, "Oh, this is the book I'll come back to and read again someday when I'm old!"

And of course, if I do, then it'll be altogether different passages that strike a chord with me in that future day, because isn't that always the way of it? I'll look back at this blog post and wonder, "Why did I jot down those passages?" and I'll find an altogether different bit that I love the most. But, here you have it - the parts that I'm pondering at the age of forty-one.

"But you're kinder to me, dear North Wind. Why shouldn't you be as kind to her as you are to me?" 

"There are reasons, Diamond. Everybody can't be done to all the same. Everybody is not ready for the same thing."
"But I don't see why I should be kinder used than she."
"Do you think nothing's to be done but what you can see, Diamond, you silly!"

* * *

"... he was dimly angry with himself, he did not know why. It was that he had struck his wife. He had forgotten it, but was miserable about it, notwithstanding. And this misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond, speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. On Mount Sinai, it was thunder; in the cabman's heart it was misery; in the soul of St. John it was perfect blessedness." 

* * *

"Her voice was like the bass of a deep organ, without the groan in it; like the most delicate of violin tones without the wail in it... it was like all of them and neither of them - all of them without their faults... after all, it was more like his mother's voice than anything else in the world." 

* * *

"Here you are taking care of a poor little boy with one arm, and there you are sinking a ship with the other. It can't be like you." 

"Ah, but which is me? I can't be two me's, you know."

"No. Nobody can be two me's."

"Well, which me is me?"

"Now I must think. There looks to be two."

"Yes. That's the very point. --You can't be knowing the thing you don't know, can you?"

"No."

"Which me do you know?"

"The kindest, goodest, best me in the world," answered Diamond, clinging to North Wind.

"Why am I good to you?"

"I don't know."

"Have you ever done anything for me?"

"No."

"Then I must be good to you because I choose to be good to you."

"Yes."

"Why should I choose?"

"Because --because--because you like."

"Why should I like to be good to you?"

"I don't know, except it be because it's good to be good to me."

"That's just it; I am good to you because I like to be good."

"Then why shouldn't you be good to other people as well as to me?"

"That's just what I don't know. Why shouldn't I?"

"I don't know either. Then why shouldn't you?"

"Because I am."

"There it is again," said Diamond. "I don't see that you are. It looks quite the other thing."

"Well, but listen to me, Diamond. You know the one me, you say, and that is good."

"Yes."

"Do you know the other me as well?"

"No. I can't. I shouldn't like to."

"There it is. You don't know the other me. You are sure of one of them?"

"Yes."

"And you are sure there can't be two me's?"

"Yes."

"Then the me you don't know must be the same as the me you do know --else there would be two me's?"

"Yes."

"Then the other me you don't know must be as kind as the me you do know?"

"Yes."

"Besides, I tell you that it is so only it doesn't look like it. That I confess freely. Have you anything more to object?"

"No, no, dear North Wind; I am quite satisfied."

* * *

"I love you, and you must love me, else how did I come to love you?"

* * *

For myself, I cannot yet say that I am "quite satisfied" in all my questions like little Diamond, but I do believe that MacDonald's book brought me closer to that place than I had been in quite some time, and at the same time, left in me the best sort of unsatisfied longing -- to read more of his writings!