Episode 348: “Lilith” by George MacDonald, Ch. 6-16
This week Angelina and Addison are back on The Literary Life podcast to continue their discussion series on George MacDonald’s Lilith. Today’s episode will cover chapters 6-16. They open the conversation with some thoughts on the disorientation we experience when reading MacDonald in general and Lilith in particular. In comparing this work to episodic medieval romances, they give some advice on how to orient yourself as you read this story. Addison shares what it means that the images in this book are “un-displaced.” After many preliminary thoughts, Angelina and Addison start moving through the chapters and talking about the major images and symbols we see throughout this section of the book.
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Previous Episodes Mentioned:
Commonplace Quotes:
Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.
Okakura Kakuzo, from The Book of Tea
Poets fulfill for us that ancient scripture saying: “We look, not at things which are seen and temporal, but at things which are not seen and eternal.”
The poet is forever pressing onward through the superficial, the things that show, to the significant, the permanent, the universal truth behind the facts. He is forever ignoring the mere outward shell, giving us instead the inner spirit. For this very reason the poet’s pictured truth is “deeper than science and truer than history.”
Sir Philip Sydney, from A Defense of Poesy
Acquainted With the Night
by Robert Frost
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
Poem reprinted here for educational purposes only.
Book List:
Amazon affiliate links below
Lilith by George MacDonald
George MacDonald: An Anthology by C. S. Lewis
The Literary Products of the Lewis Carrol George MacDonald Friendship by John Docherty
Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Wings and the Child by Edith Nesbit
A Dish of Orts by George MacDonald
The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis
The Faerie Queene, Book 2 by Edmund Spenser
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