A Road Less Travelled

Lately I’ve been reading through my Heralds of Valdemar books. Valdemar is a little world created by an author named Mercedes Lackey and the Heralds are these folks with special Gifts who go around the countryside dispensing justice and protecting the people and stuffs like that. But what makes the Heralds really cool is the Companions. A person becomes a Herald by being Chosen by a Companion. The Companions are these beings who are like angels or some such in horse shape. A Companion will go find someone who is supposed to be a Herald and when the Companion chooses a Herald a link is formed between them. Most times they will be able to talk to each other in their minds. What one knows can easily be projected into the other’s mind. There is a link between their minds or maybe it would be better to say there is a link between their souls.

Mercedes Lackey is not the first who came up with this link. Years ago an author named Anne MacCaffery created the Dragonriders of Pern. The Dragonriders have a similar link with their dragons as the Heralds have with their Companions. If you hurt the rider his dragon will feel pain and the same the other way around. When a rider dies his dragon will suicide and when a dragon dies it leaves his rider broken.

  Whenever I start reader any of these books I have a hard time putting them down. The plots are interesting and I enjoy watching the characters, but a goodly part of what is so attractive about these books to me is the bond between Herald and Companion, between Dragonman and dragon. There is something about a creature other than you who can get inside your head and who knows you and yet still loves you. And there is something about this other creature having the ability to travel great distances fairly easily, but that is a minor point. There is something about someone other than me being knowing what I am thinking without me having to fumble for words.

It is a common daydream of mine that one day I wake up with someone else riding around in my head. This other person would see my day and know what I was thinking and maybe this person would come to understand me a little bit better. Of course I wouldn’t know the other person was there. If I knew it would ruin everything. I’ve had this daydream for a long while now and the person who hitches a ride in my head has changed over the years. But it’s always someone I felt I could never express myself to or someone I had fumbled my words when I was last talking to him about something important. And if this other person could just walk around a day watching everything I was thinking about then he would understand. Or more often, then she would understand and maybe we could actually be friends. But it never happened.

So I’m reading this book and there’s this kid with a whole heap of trouble and woe and then he gets Chosen. His troubles don’t just vanish and his woes are still there. But now there is someone else in his head. There is his Companion who will go through all these woes with him and she will never leave him and she understands. That is a big deal. She gets it. He doesn’t have to finish his sentences and he doesn’t have to explain himself very much. She gets it. Oh, wouldn’t that be great? To have someone other than you understand. Maybe this would be the only person who understands including you, but it would be someone. And you wouldn’t ever be lonely. There would always be someone to talk to and there would always be someone there even if you were all alone in a room. Wouldn’t that be great?

Sometimes it gets lonely in my head. And sometimes I can be in a room full of people who are being pleasant to me and I can still feel lonely. In a different book and world entirely a character commented that humans really were very lonely people. He wasn’t human so this was an outsiders opinion. He said that we humans have to rely on words to express our thoughts to each other and how very lonely that was. I think I agree with him. I just spent I don’t know how long sitting at this computer in this uncomfortable chair and I’m not sure I have actually expressed what I wanted to say. And there’s lots more I want to say, but I know the words aren’t where I want them to be. So for now I’ll stop. When my words come back maybe I’ll finish this thought. Or maybe this thought will have to go to the room where all my thoughts I haven’t been able to finish or communicate to others are. It’s getting kinda crowded in there.  

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One of my all time favorite authors is aman by the name of Lloyd Alexander. He wrote a series that is up on the list of books I grew up with and regard as staples in any literary diet. I read everything I could find that Lloyd Alexander had written except for a book called The Kestrel. I have memories of various people discussing Lloyd Alexander and remarking on how fun his books were. Except for The Kestrel, they would say. Yes, the others would agree, except for The Kestrel. So the last time I was at the library and I saw The Kestrel I got it out. I wanted to see what everyone meant. And you know, they were right.

Often times there is conflict in Lloyd Alexander’s book. Sometimes even war. But it is portrayed almost as a child’s version of war. His books are written for young people and his wars are a young perspective of war. There is always this sense that this is a bad thing, but he never goes into much detail and the questions he asks are not about the war itself. Except for The Kestrel. It is a book that asks brutally hard questions about warfare and honor and I am ashamed to say I don’t have the answers. There were times in the book I thought “That’s wrong”, but then I would hear a character explain it and it almost made sense. I would think “They shouldn’t do that”, but then I would wonder what they should have done instead. I started asking the same questions Lloyd Alexander asked, but I don’t have any answers. I don’t think he does either. So for now I’m pondering, but I wonder if there are any clear answers. The most I have right now is “War is an ugly thing and it always will be.”

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  Last night I had a hankering to go out and do something.  So I called Raquel and said, “I feel like going out and doing something. You wanna come?” At ths point I had an idea of something to do. It struck me as being the height of lame while also fun. I thought, we could go to the library. Yes, yes, I know. Such wildness in today’s youth. But see the libraries around here, while otherwise falling far short of my good opinion of libraries, do have such a thing as a book sale room. An entire room devoted to selling the books they don’t want anymore. And, what’s more, they stock this room on Tuesdays. Yesterday was Tuesday. So Raquel and I mosied on down to the library to peruse.

I bought my very first Mrs. Pollifax book. I’ve never read any Mrs. Pollifax, but I know enough to find the concept amusing. I bought a copy of Crime and Punishment and my very own copy of the Womanly Art of Breastfeeding. I picked up two Misty books for Arianna. And then Raquel and I looked  through the kid’s book. I will admit I found myself in a rather sentimental mood. Lucky for me Raquel’s mood was even more so. And so we’re looking at kid’s books and Raquel would read through one and say, “Oh, that’s sad!” So of course I had to read through it and it was sad. Then she found a book and she said, “Oh, the blue kangaroo.” And I read through it and I too was happy for the blue kangaroo. I bought a book about a wise man making a fool out of his king with a chessboard. I bought a book about button soup. I bought a book about a little girl sailing on her own ship called the Maggi B. And I got a Martha book. Martha books are awesome. See there’s this dog named Martha and when she eats vegetable soup the letters go into her brain instead of her head. So she can talk, see? Martha books are fun.

So that’s a record of our wild book buying spree. I felt like such a geek to think this was cool, but I’m sitting here writing about it and I still think it was cool. I guess I should just enjoying my geekiness.

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I just read The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. For some reason I felt a great kinship with the main character. Yes, toward the end there are some annoying bits mostly in how the romantic interest is handled. No, the ending is quite as satisfying as the rest of the book. But overall I did enjoy it a lot. For one thing the heroine has a nasty cough for part of the book. I can see at once that this is the most natural thing in the world, and so very applicable to my life. Except that she got her cough from accidentally breathing in dragon flame while killing a dragon. It seems so much more heroic than the usual kind of cough which requires cleaning up after children who cough so hard they vomit and pausing from that to have a coughing fit myself. I suppose there could be something honorable about the second scenario as well. Right. Thanks anyway, but I’ll take the dragon fighting cough. Or would I? I realized for the first time that I’m nineteen and I have money in the bank. I could be anywhere I wanted to be right now. But I’m here and I don’t plan to leave. There’s a whole lot more to that than just the surface desicion to stick around for now. It comes to down to authority and submission and community–and yet on top of all that I just don’t want to be anywhere else right now. If I really wanted to be somewhere else I already would be. This comes as something of a shock to me. I’m here voluntarily coughing and cleaning up vomit. And somehow, this is actually a comforting thought.

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(I read this after I wrote it and it didn’t really come out how I wanted. I wonder if it is more honest than what I had in mind. “Questions.” “I don’t have answers.”) Last night I rewatched The Last Samurai and I finished the last Louis L’Amour book about the Sacketts I have in the house (the horror, the horror). I closed the book and thought about honor. Why do I like the Sacketts? Because they are honorable men in a day with no honor. They are men who live honestly outside the law. I then asked myself why I like The Last Samurai so very much. Because it is about a man pursuing honor when it will cost him all he has, I answered myself. Hmm, I said, Maybe these two things are connected. Honor. To many of us it is just a word. It is a throwback to a time when things were simpler. Or at least when things were more violent. It is easy to see honor when everyone lives by the sword or the gun. We’ve violence in our day, but not violence nice people are involved in. The violence is contained to *those* people and *those* places. We have a different need for honor than the samurai or the gunslinger. I don’t think I could put it into words without making it sound truly boring. Honor is something I would like someone to see in me, but what does honor look like in my life? What must I pursue to pursue honor? A Sackett would never shoot a man in the back unless he was provoked. Okay, I won’t shoot a man in the back unless it was a matter of self-defense. That doesn’t make me honorable. A samurai was wholly devoted to his liege lord. If his lord asked for his death a samurai would gladly take his own life. Okay, if God ever asked me to kill myself I would. That doesn’t make me honorable. There is more to honor that just the trappings. But what does honor look like for me? Anything I can think just sound boring. In the old West and in the old Japan honor was a matter of life or death. Death feels so very distant to us here in America. And ours deaths will probably be very impersonal. A car accident, a bee sting, old age, disease. These are some of the deaths we have to look forward to. Where is the honor in those deaths? What does honor look like for us? A samurai wanted above all things to be loyal to his lord and to have a good death. What does a good death look like for a Christian? I have all these questions and very few answers that don’t sound pat and dull. Or maybe I’m looking for the wrong thing. Am I looking for something exciting? Do I think any values I hold to in the life I lead will look boring and plain? What do I want? What answers am I looking for? Do I know the answers and I just don’t want to say them because they sound blase? What does honor look like for me?

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I just finished reading two books by Louis L’Amour and I am a fourth of the way through a third and, let me tell you, they are fine reading. I never thought I would enjoy Louis L’Amour. He was always filed under “Books that people read and like, but I would never enjoy”. They were filed under books my grandfather read and he and I didn’t like the same sorts of books. I assumed we never would. But now I am begrudging the time it is taking me to write this blog post because I could be finding out what happens to Kin Sackett in the West Indies. Does he find the girl who was captured by slavers? Is he able to bring the evil bad men to justice? What happens next? I am hooked in a way I never expected from a western. I does help that I have come to understand westerns in the last few months. They are about honor and honesty. They are about humanity. The hero in a western almost always lives outside the law. He lives on the edge of civilization. And on the edge there are three ways to go. You could lose your humanity and become savage. This was the part the Indians play in many westerns. You could become lawless and oppress the town for your own gain. These are the evil bad men. You could keep your honor and live honestly. This is the hero who rides in, fixes the problem, and rides out again. This is the man who tends to attract men to himself who will follow where he leads. In the first route there is no humanity and in the second there is no honor. In the third there is pain and struggle and honor and friendship. Seth wrote about the difference between Babylon 5 and Firefly, my two most favorite SF shows. Firefly is really a western, though. They live on the edge and must decide who they will be. I have decided I would much rather live in the Firefly universe than Babylon 5. I have decided I would much rather live in a western than a political and military world. On Firefly they became a family. If you’re going to live on the outside it is hard to do it alone. You need a community and those communities become so close it’s a thing of beauty. There is the understanding that we stand or fall together. On Babylon 5 to survive and win the war against darkness you have to suspect people. They are dishonest times and sometimes dishonesty is needed so secrets won’t escape. Even your closest friends could be, and have been, manipulated. You must be suspicious. I hate being suspicious. But God hasn’t granted me the Firefly world. In His wisdom and grace He has given me the Babylon 5 universe. Suspicion, dishonesty, secrets. But in His love and mercy He has given me a Firefly community.

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Dorothy Sayers is one of my favorite mystery writers–mostly because of her characters. When I found out that someone had finished one of her unfinished manuscripts I was torn between “Yay, now I can find out what happened to Peter and Harriet and Bunter!” and “Oh, dear. I hope they didn’t ruin it.”. With some trepidation I began to read. The beginning was good, but of course that was what Sayers actually wrote. Then some alarm in my head told me the style had changed ever so slightly. I wasn’t sure though, so I kept reading. I got to the end of the book and I still wasn’t sure. Overall, parts of the book were clearly an attempt to fake Sayers’ style, but it was a very good fake and I enjoyed it immensely. I also found some quotable lines just begging to be posted on a blog.

This one should be required reading for all Christian novelists–

Peter to Harriet: “I suppose clever people can get their visions of justice from Dostoyevsky, but there aren’t enough of them to make a climate of opinion. Ordinary people in large numbers read what you write…. If they thought they were being preached at they would stop up their ears. If they thought you were bent on improving their minds they would probably never pick up a book. But you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world we should all try to live in.”

This one because Claude sounds like me; I love writing dialogue–

Harriet to Peter on an unlikely alibi: “You know, Peter, Claude is rather wet, but he’s not stupid. Furthermore, he is a playwright.” “So if he were to invent an entire scene…” “It would hang together properly. It would be more believable than life. And it would have some dialogue in it; he likes dialogue.”

This one because Harriet doesn’t sound like me–

Peter to Harriet: “…you are unmasked all the time. You face the world as what you are, come what will. It is that which made me love you at first sight all these years since. It is that which I admire in you, and which I cannot manage for myself…You have unmasked me,” he said, “and loved me all the same.”

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