What Cheer, Netop?

I’m a fan of A.R. Moxon’s The Reframe, which often gets me thinking differently about things than my default, or reminds me what’s foundational about an issue. Sometimes when I’ve spent a little too much time doomscrolling down Internet rabbit holes, it’s helpful to help myself to a shift in perspective.

A Reframe essay from the end of August reminded me yet again of an incident in C.S. Lewis’s novel The Last Battle, the last of his Chronicles of Narnia series. I mentioned this same incident in a post almost five years ago (which I put on Wordpress but not here), it being a moment from that novel that stuck with me through growing from adolescence into adulthood and leaving my cradle Catholicism behind me. (Unlike some, I was always aware that Lewis was telling a Christian allegory, and did not have the experience of discovering this later and feeling, in some cases, disappointed or betrayed. That’s what weekly CCD classes for five years gets you, I guess.)

That’s not what I’m thinking about right now, though.

No, what I’m thinking about is how stories like that, and how they were situated in the culture in which I grew up, more than suggested that while there’s a big battle to be fought, at a certain point it’ll be won. Permanently, irrevocably. And how this all too easily in my mind plugged into the idea that the time I now live in is automatically more enlightened, more progressive in its thinking (not necessarily politically but in terms of things like declining bigotry and discrimination) than in the past. This latter notion is often used to explain away, if not excuse, the kinds of opinions that are supposed to be consigned to the dustbin of history by pointing out that the people who held them are long dead. “[X] was a man of his time,” you’ll hear people say.

What’s funny is that no one ever says this about, say, the American abolitionists of the nineteenth century. The “men of their time” were never more enlightened, more equity-minded, or more forward-thinking than people of today, apparently.

This is obviously false—there are plenty of counterexamples from just the last week—and it also indicates that there is no final battle.

In The Last Battle, the world of Narnia ends, and the characters who readers have followed through the preceding seven books—most of them—get to go to heaven. But the ending that seems more fitting to me is that of The High King, the end of Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain.

There, after the obligatory dark lord has been defeated and peace restored to the land, the heroes of the story prepare to depart from Prydain. In addition, all magic and enchantment will be passing out of the world. It’s a bit like Lord of the Rings, with an important exception: Taran, our main character and an aggressively ordinary dude, is offered the chance to leave for paradise with everyone else. And he turns it down.

He turns it down specifically because there’s work still to do. And that’s a good thing, his mentor says, because in defeating the dark lord they defeated only the enchantments of evil. “That was the easiest of your tasks, only a beginning, not an ending. Do you believe evil itself to be so quickly overcome? Not so long as men still hate and slay each other, when greed and anger goad them.”

I liked the Narnia books as a kid, but I liked the Prydain books more. Though they were full of magic and monsters, they seemed more like what life was really like. Taran fucks up a lot, spends an entire book trying (and mostly failing) to find his vocation, and at the end it turns out that his work has only just begun.

I’ve been joking lately about speedrunning the worst of the 1980s and 1990s, as all the crap that I was fighting back then resurges. I’m a lot older now, and I’m tired.

But there is no last battle, only the next one.