George shakes his head. “Mr. Kirkpatrick is the professor. He is. I know he is.” George grins the great smile of a child whose confidence far outweighs his knowledge.
“I don’t know, George. It’s possible, but Mr. Kirkpatrick was married, lived in a town, and wasn’t much for flights of fancy. To me, the professor in the book reminds me more of Mr. Lewis than anyone else.”
George perks up. “Maybe.” He stares off and then back at me. “Sometimes you leave things out of your story,” he says. “What else did Mr. Lewis say about his tutor?”
“He told me he wrote a poem about him. He told me that he was indebted to him and would be for all of his life because that man taught him about logic.”
“Is that why his tutor was an atheist—because of logic?”
“He never really said. I think maybe that’s part of it.”
“But Mr. Lewis isn’t an atheist. Not one bit.”
“He was once. I don’t think we’ve gotten to the part of the story where he isn’t.”
“And all those books he reads . . .”
“He’s read so many books, George. There’s certainly no way I can list all of them. But he told me that Phantastes is the one that baptized his imagination.”
“If I grew to be old,” George said, “I would read as many books as Mr. Lewis. I know I would.”
Despite the roaring fire, I almost shiver. It isn’t that I always think about how George will not grow old, but at a time like this, I have no decent reply but a hug.
Thirteen
Surprised by Enchantment
After returning to Oxford, I walk through the trodden snow, thinking of how many stories Mr. Lewis has read and how few novels I’ve actually read. Even the ones I have read are because I’ve been told to read them or because they helped me understand mathematics. What if I read a book that made me fall in love so hard and so fast that I would search for more of its kind?
It seems implausible.
Honestly, those kinds of books, the fairy tales and Mr. Lewis’s book about the lion, stir me up inside and make me feel things that bring tears. And I do not want to cry. I want to be strong and good for George. The last thing I need is to get sentimental and squishy. Something—I’m not sure what—in Mr. Lewis’s Narnia story makes me weepy.
In many ways, Mr. Lewis and I are opposites. He abhors algebra. I adore it. To me, the world makes much more sense as a sum or a string of numbers. I can feel them. I understand their language.
George feels the same as Mr. Lewis. The truly heartbreaking thing is that he won’t live nearly long enough to read all the books Mr. Lewis has read. Life is unfair; it’s not the story I would write for myself or for my family or the world.
I mope along High Street, then head toward my rooms at Somerville when I stop mid-step. A chill of something other than the weather runs along my arms and heart as I pause in front of the Bodleian Library. It radiates. Warm light spills from its windows onto the icy sidewalks. Christmas lights have been strung unevenly along the pathways and seem to lead me toward the door. Bicycles are parked on bike racks and a few have tumbled into each other. The Bodleian’s dome glows. I think this majestic building must hold more books than even Mr. Lewis could ever read.
People come from around the world to visit this library, and here it is on my walking path every single day, a reliably quiet place to study when the residence halls are too loud. It holds manuscripts as old as can be found and a copy of every book that matters, or so they say. I’ve heard that within are secret tunnels and leather-bound treasures.
This whole town emerged unscathed from the war because the evil man Adolf Hitler wanted to preserve it for himself. What if a bomb had hit this beautiful library?
I stand outside, gazing up at the Bodleian, taking note of its charms in a way I haven’t before so I can catalog a full description for George; I want to tell him about this place he can’t visit.
The midafternoon sun sits like an egg yolk in a sea of clear blue, faded in winter hues. Students rush into and out of the building, little clouds coming from their mouths or cigarettes or both. They climb onto bikes and rush past me as if I don’t stand there at all.
Everything seems to be moving quickly: the world, the days, Mr. Lewis’s stories. I step toward the library door. I walk inside and look about more carefully than I usually do. I want to paint this scene with words George will appreciate. Dark wood surrounds me. In the alcoves, sunlight falls like yellow dust. Stacks of books smell of aged paper and hushed voices sound as if they might know secrets. The furniture is so old and so solid I wonder if it has been there for all time.
I wander until I find myself at a wooden circulation desk, asking a woman in tortoiseshell glasses and bright red lipstick for a copy of George MacDonald’s Phantastes.
“Mr. MacDonald has an entire section on the second floor.” She smiles at me as if she’s waited all day for just this question. “Do you love fairy tales?” she asks.
“I’m not sure yet.”
“You haven’t read his work?” Her smile lifts higher and her round cheeks rise with it, and I realize that for some reason the thought of me reading MacDonald for the first time thrills her. What were these stories?
“No, ma’am. I haven’t read anything of his. Or any fairy tales at all, to be honest.”
She walks around from behind the desk and turns to another woman with black hair pulled into a tight bun. “Sylvia, I will be right back.” She turns to me. “I’m Miss Collins. Come with me.”
“I can find it, I’m sure.”
She looks over her shoulder, ignores my comment, and motions for me to follow.
“It’s for my brother,” I say. “I think he’ll like it. He loves The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe so I thought . . .”
“I do believe you should read it first,” she says.
I don’t understand why I can’t tell her the book is for me. Ashamed of fairy tales?
I follow her up the winding staircase and through the labyrinth of books until we stand in front of a section far, far away from the physics, math, and sciences area. She pulls Phantastes from the shelf and hands it to me, then walks away with a smile of satisfaction, as if her job for the day is done.
I look at the cover, a thick maroon leather binding with gilt design: Phantastes: A Faerie Romance.
What, if anything, could possibly be inside these pages that would inspire a man to nearly, or actually, change the course of his life? I sit at a desk scarred with scratches where a gooseneck lamp drops a circle of light. I open the book and begin to read.
That’s when it happens, as it has never happened to me before when reading a story: time falls away as if it doesn’t exist at all, as if the cosmos holds still while I read. As if it waits for me to read this story.
And maybe it does.
I look up hours later, and only one other person sits at a desk a few feet over. I’ve read half of Phantastes and within its pages met the Maid of the Alder, who was cold and white and had invited Anodos to her cave, where she gave him tea and lulled him to sleep. Familiar, of course, as Mr. Lewis’s Tumnus and Lucy and another cave, but with a different outcome. Here, there is no wardrobe to walk through, but an oak desk is a portal to another world.