Chapter 5: The Horse and His Australian

But how widespread are these civilisation-threatening theories? To find out, Lewis turns his attention to a second text book, which he refers to as Orbilius. Is Orbilius tainted with the same ideological impurities as King and Ketley?

Oddly enough, he is. Like King and Ketley, he invents a terrible piece of writing, this time on the subject of horses, and tries to show what is so terrible about it. And like King and Ketley, his main complaint (according to Lewis) is that it says things which aren’t factually true. From this, asserts Lewis, his students will infer that all figurative, anthropomorphic writing—indeed any expression of affection towards animals—is unreasonable. This will colour, and indeed blight, the rest of their lives.

Orbilius is actually one EG Biaginni, and the book is imaginatively entitled The Reading and Writing of English. Biaginni is another New Critic and the book comes with an introduction by FR Leavis. 

Here is the passage (again, Lewis does not cite it in full):

The horse is a noble animal, and not the least of man’s dumb friends. Without such a willing servant as the horse, civilisation would not have reached its present stage. The early pioneers of this country can bear witness to what has been said. When they first came here, the prospect was a heart-breaking one indeed. There were no roads, in many places the country was rough and well timbered, developmental material was hard to procure, and above all bush devils, tractors, motor-cars and other mechanical inventions had not yet come to the help of man. In these circumstances the horse was invaluable, and without him Australia would certainly not have become the country it is…  [The Reading and Writing of English, page 5]

It goes on to narrate a preposterous story about a horse which smelled burning in a bone-dry farm in summer, broke out of its paddock, trotted to the verandah, and whinnied until the farmer awoke.

Lewis’s complaint is familiar. Yes, certainly, this passage is sentimental and anthropomorphic: but so are many good pieces of writing about animals. Unless this is pointed out, the reader will assume that a rejection of this piece of writing amounts to a rejection of the whole idea of horses.

He contents himself with explaining that horses are not, secundum litteram, interested in colonial expansion. This piece of information is really all that his pupils get from him. Why the composition before them is bad, when others that lie open to the same charge are good, they do not hear…[Abolition of Man, page 6]

But this is disingenuous: the claim that “this is all his pupils get from him” downright dishonest. Lewis is cherry-picking quotes to such an extent that I found myself wondering if he had read the book before opening fire? 

It is technically true that Biaginni doesn’t put this silly passage alongside a piece of great literature. What he does do is put it alongside a mildly amusing piece of writing: a modest write-up of a horse-riding holiday in the New Forest. The writer and his friend have hired a horse to pull a caravan and the beast won’t go at more than three miles an hour. They decide it must be sick, but when they unharness it, it gallops off in the direction of its owner. 

“By Jove” said my friend “That horse knows more about men than we know about horses”. I could not but agree and have since felt that had that horse the gift of speech his observations on his temporary masters would be exceedingly entertaining. [page 5]

Biaginni says that this piece came from his own diary: and he admits that he wrote the other one himself, making it as bad as he possibly could, to see if students could spot the difference. His comparison of the two texts runs to seven or eight pages, and records what his students said about them:

Passage A (The caravan holiday) 

Pros

• Amusing

• Written from life 

• Says something specific about horses 

• Natural and unaffected style

Cons

• Offhand, colloquial style

• Uses slang

• Makes punctuation errors

• Starts sentences with And

Passage B (“willing servants of colonists”) 

Pros

• Serious subject, dignified style 

• Grammatically correct and well punctuated

• Patriotic and interested in history

Cons

• Stimulates stock feelings

• Says nothing specific about horses

• Self-conscious, superior tone

Biaginni says that it is more important for a passage to be engaging, funny and truthful than for it to be technically correct: complaints about punctuation are fault-finding rather than criticism, a bad habit picked up in school. He says that the first passage is the record of a real event and “does by implication tell us something true about the nature of the horse” and that the writer “for good or ill is himself and describes horses as they are”. On the other hand, the story of the horse that consciously woke up its owner during a fire is obviously “twaddle” and has nothing to do with actual equine behaviour. 

He doesn’t directly introduce the concept of emotive and referential meaning that is so central to the Control of Language: but he talks at some length about the difference between what is said and how it is said. He asks the reader to think about the difference between saying “My father has died” (factual) “My family has suffered a bereavement” (factual, with an appeal for sympathy) and “My father has kicked the bucket” (factual, with an implication of callousness). His complaint about the bad passage is that terms like “noble animal” and “dumb friends” produce feelings without actually saying anything.

(The writer) knows from experience, perhaps, as a skilful advertisement writer does, that these were expressions which would evoke a feeling of approval in uncritical people; they have now been doing this for two generations or more [page 12]

He says that this sort of writing treats the reader like a typewriter—hitting a particular key to get a particular response. This is the same criticism which King and Ketley levelled at the travel agent. The target is not emotion, but stock emotional responses. 

And Lewis is right. Biaginni does mention in passing that the joke passage is factually inaccurate. But Lewis’s claim—that this is all he has to say—is simply untrue. What Biaginni actually writes is: 

The horse you will notice, is spoken of as if he had been a conscious and willing agent in the development of a new country. Is this not completely ridiculous? The normal horse, like the normal man, is mostly concerned with a decently comfortable life and has not a passion for well-doing. Since he is referred to as a dumb animal we must not suppose that he could speak, but if he could talk to himself, it seems far more likely that he would say “I have two greenhorns driving me today so I will take things easy” than he would say “here is a country which wants developing so I will cooperate willingly with my master in an attempt to open it up to civilisation.” [page 10]

Anthropomorphism, then, is a literary device. It can be used well or badly. In the first passage it is apt; the second passage it is not. CS Lewis once complained (not entirely seriously) that he couldn’t see how TS Eliot could possibly think that any evening had ever resembled “a patient etherised upon a table”. He was not, I think, debunking the idea of surgery, or anaesthetic, or evening. 

In a footnote, Lewis concedes that Biaginni, unlike King and Ketley, does put the bad piece of animal-writing alongside a supposedly good piece. The fact that it is a footnote makes me suspicious: had someone who heard the original lectures pointed out that Lewis was taking Biaginni out of context? But Lewis doubles down: he says that Biaginni thinks that the diary entry is better than the “colonial expansion” essay because it is “factually accurate” and for no other reason—which is not the case. 

In his second chapter, Biaginni introduces a third piece of horse-writing. I don’t know if it counts as great literature, but the Rev Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborn is sufficiently well-regarded that Penguin Classics have kept it in print down to the present day. He points to an amusing anecdote about a farmer who owned only one horse and one hen: the two animals appeared to form a friendship. 

The passage contains what seem to be well-observed details:

The fowl would approach the quadruped with notes of complacency, rubbing herself gently against his legs: while the horse would look down with satisfaction, and move with the greatest caution and circumspection, lest he should trample on his diminutive companion. [quoted by Biaginni, page 18-19]

Rev. White says that “an apparent regard seemed to develop between these two sequestered individuals”. Biaginni notes that although the animals are certainly individuals and arguably sequestered, “sequestered individual” has a witty, ironic tinge in this context: we’d normally use the term to describe nuns, or possibly hospital patients. He also points out that Rev. White is conscious of using simile—the hen and the horse have an apparent regard for each other and “seem to console the vacant hours of each other”.

Biaginni’s criteria for the legitimate use of anthropomorphic language is in fact perfectly clear. It needs to be concrete; it needs to be apt; it needs to be specific; it needs to imagine a human motivation for something which real animals actually do; and it needs to be aware that it is writing as if animals were human or imagining what they would say if they could talk. 

We noted in our last chapter that the Tay Bridge Disaster is a very bad poem—on the assumption that McGonogal intended it to be heroic and tragic. If he meant it to be funny, it’s a very good poem indeed. By the same argument it would be very silly to tell a story about an intelligent horse who rescues its owner from a fire—if what you were trying to write was a serious, realistic essay about horses. If you were writing a fairy tale, it would be a perfectly sensible thing to do. No-one complains that cats don’t really request footwear or that swallows can’t really communicate with statues. So is Lewis’s point simply that The Story of the Australian Convict and his Loyal Horse” could have been a perfectly good starting point for Walt Disney; or that Aesop could have made something worthwhile of How the Clever Horse Saved the Foolish Farmer? Is his point that Biaginni’s’ readers might conceivably run away with the impression that far-fetched animal tales are always illegitimate, when in fact they are only illegitimate in certain contexts?

Lewis, in fact, thought there were some quite proscriptive rules about how animals could be treated in literature. It was okay for rabbits to wear tam o’shanters and hedgehogs to do laundry; and it was okay to envisage imaginary worlds where mice carried swords: what you were not allowed to do was have real-world animals in the wrong relationships to each other. When a schoolgirl sent him a fable about woodland animals she had written, he protested that “real small animals would not be friends with an owl, nor would it know more astronomy than they”. Which sounds a lot like a complaint that a story about some field mice asking the wise old owl why the sun had suddenly gone dark was not true secundum litteram.

Many people feel close to domestic animals, and they often pretend that they have more human characteristics than they literally do. Could Lewis be saying that “animals and humans are friends” is a rock-bottom fact about the universe, in the same way that it is irreducibly true that waterfalls are sublime? So “horses were the willing servants of the first colonists” and “By Jove, these beasts seem to know a thing or two!” are two expressions of a single truth? Is the claim that literature always and only expresses fundamental intuitions: “Sex is nice”, “It’s horrid growing old”, “I love Mummy”, “Isn’t God brilliant!”? Talking about those intuitions is outside the critic’s remit. The only difference—the only difference that critics qua critics should be talking about—is the purely formal one. 

 Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears 

Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!

And 

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts

And 

How you died was really rotten

But you will never be forgotten

are three expressions of the same intuition: that it is awfully sad when someone dies. The business of the critic is to demonstrate that Shelly and Shakespeare handle metre and diction better than the pay-per-word newspaper obituary. To talk about anything but meter and diction would be to deny the basic truth that we feel sad when we suffer a bereavement. (Or indeed, when someone we like kicks the bucket.)

I think we can agree that this position would be absurd.

But that leaves me with the uncomfortable alternative thought that Lewis was congenitally unable to be fair to any text tainted with the stench of Leavisism. He disagrees with the principle of “close reading” so vehemently that he starts to see things which just aren’t there. 

One final point.

Seventy Five Prose Pieces by Robert C Rathburn is precisely what it sounds like: yet another collection of texts for students to compare and contrast. Rathburn’s first section is called Discrimination. His first excerpt is Thompson’s commentary on the terrible cruise liner advert. His second is Biaginni’s commentary on the two horse-pieces. 

Anyone who has read Abolition of Man will find it disconcerting to discover these two texts side by side. My first thought was that CS Lewis must have known the anthology but not the sources; but Rathburn was not published until 1960 and I can find no evidence of an earlier edition. I suppose it is possible that Rathburn knew Lewis and wanted to denounce him as an anti-Leavis heretic, but it would be a strange procedure: to critique Lewis, as it were, at arm’s length. I think it has to be written off as a coincidence. 

Rathburn sums up the two passages as follows: 

Biaginni and Thompson stress the desirability of having something to say and saying it simply and unaffectedly. [page 1]

Which rather reminds one of CS Lewis’s own advice to aspiring writers:

The way for a person to develop a style is to know exactly what he wants to say, and to be sure he is saying exactly that.

Well, quite. 

This is the first section of an ongoing critique of C.S Lewis's book The Abolition of Man. (I think that my essays should make sense if you aren't familiar with that tome.) This first section (which runs to six chapters) has already been published in full on my Patreon page, and the second section is being serialised there at present. 

Please consider joining the Patreon if you would like to read them, and to support the writer.

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The Daleks' Master Plan

You can’t watch Daleks’ Master Plan for the first time.

You already know too much about it. The longest, most epic Doctor Who story. The one in which three companions die. The closest the BBC ever came to putting the Dalek comic strip on TV. The episode without the Doctor in it. The Notorious Christmas Episode. Sara Kingdom ages to death. Nicholas Courtney before he was the Brigadier...

We knew it by reputation: but what’s it actually about? We were always a little more vague about that. My childhood Bible, The Making of Doctor Who was unhelpful. “The Doctor’s travels took him to Egypt during the building of the great Pyramid, where he met the Time-Meddling Monk again, then to the planet Kembel, where the Daleks were preparing an invasion of Earth and then to France in 1452.” My other constant companion, the Radio Time Tenth Anniversary Special couldn’t even get the title right.

I knew what Tomb of the Cybermen was about before I saw it. “Silly archaeologists find frozen Cyberpeople and wake them up, egged on by one of those mad scientists who thinks he can make an alliance with them. The Doctor sends them back to sleep.” Daleks’ Master Plan defies that sort of description: “The Daleks form a big alliance to conquer the entire universe and world. They invent an ultimate weapon called the Time Destructor. The Doctor steals the weapon’s power source and...wanders around aimlessly while the allies squabble.”

We’d heard that it was very bleak, ending in a pyrrhic victory. And it certainly does contain two very bleak episodes. In part four two characters who are arguably companions and certainly goodies are killed off; and in part twelve, their replacement is reduced to dust in an actually genuinely disturbing sequence that doesn’t feel like anything else in Who. But the overall tone is pretty light. Bickering baddies, ranty mad villains, vampire triffids, invisible giants and ray-gun wielding spacemen in black uniforms. This is Doctor Who does E.E. “Doc” Smith. More precisely, it’s Doctor Who does Dan Dare.

Some people think that, if we could see Mission to the Unknown (the one-off prologue) through the eyes of a 1965 viewer, we would perceive it as having a vicious twist in its tale. We see two heroic chaps being menaced by evil plants on a jungle planet; we assume that the TARDIS will arrive at some point and the story will get started. But it never comes. That’s the twist. They both die. The terrible surprising message is: the Doctor can fail.

But pretending that it’s 1965 and we’re watching Daleks’ Master Plan on our 405 line TV makes about as much sense as pretending that it’s 1601 and we think Hamlet will marry Ophelia. Everyone knows that Mission to the Unknown is “the Doctor Who story in which the regular cast don’t appear.” And I do mean “everyone”. The Radio Times for Oct 9 1965 is quite clear. “Today’s episode sees no such confrontation [between the Doctor and the Daleks]. In fact the Doctor does not even appear. It is a hint, a warning of things to come.” No first night audience ever existed. No-one ever watched Daleks’ Master Plan for the first time.

What Mission to the Unknown does do is radically change the programme’s viewpoint. We’re no longer looking through the Doctor’s eyes. Stuff happens in the universe, and stuff will carry whether the Doctor is there or not. (The clumsy transition at the end of Galaxy Four underlines this point. “Look at that planet” says Vicki “I wonder what is going on down there?” “Yes, yes, I wonder...” replies the Doctor—and we pan down to Kembel.) This shift of viewpoint is taken for granted in the Nightmare Begins (episode 1 of the story proper). The Doctor, Katerina and Steven are tying up the lose ends of the Myth Makers; a couple of Space Agents with ray-guns and Licences to Kill are following up events in Mission to the Unknown; the Daleks are having their alien council of war; and at one point we cut away to two civil servant on Earth watching a TV interview with soon-to-be-revealed traitor Mavic Chen. We’re outside, looking in at a universe in which the Doctor is just one character. Paths cross; people pursue different objectives; characters come together and separate.

That’s why the story is so hard to sum up. The Doctor doesn’t have a single clear objective. He steals the Taranium Core—the McGuffin which powers the Time Destructor. At one point he mutters that it would probably be a good idea to destroy it (presumably at Mount Doom). There is some talk of needing to get back to earth and warn it about the coming invasion. But a lot of the time the Doctor seems directionless; part of a separate narrative. “I’d forgotten about the Daleks” says Sara Kingdom—quite an odd thing to say in the middle of the longest ever Dalek story.

But in a funny way, this reasserts the basic nature of the Doctor: makes him feel more Doctor-ish than ever before. At the centre, on Kembel, the Daleks are machinating. On the periphery, the Doctor goes from Kembel to Desperus; from the Trafalgar square to Ancient Egypt without any destination in view. He’s a wanderer; and that old ship of his seems to be an aimless thing.

The Daleks’ Master Plan is not a twelve part story. It is barely a story at all. It’s an experiment with the structure of Doctor Who: the programme re-envisaged as soap opera. For the first time it’s a window into something we could call “The Doctor Who Universe.”

The political plot is pretty perfunctory: “thieves fall out” on a universal scale. Mavic Chen, serious Shakespearean villain in the Iago mould, turns out to be more like a comic opera villain in the Mikado mould. It isn’t clear what a Time Destructor does. Destroy Time, I suppose. In that great final scene, it seems to be speeding time up, causing everything exposed to it to age super-quickly. How that fits into the Daleks’ plan we don’t discover. Were they going to hold the universe to ransom? Or was the plan to hide in a bunker, kill everyone else in the universe, and then emerge as the supreme beings? It matters very little. Nor does Terry Nation’s confusion about the difference between “a solar system”, “a galaxy” and “a universe”. The Universe consists of Twelve Galaxies and one of those Galaxies is called The Solar System. I think. But it creates a general impression of a universal war, a context in which the Doctor’s aimlessness occurs. It feels exhilarating even today. It must have been intoxicating if you were the right age in 1965.

This makes it harder to dismiss the digressions and comedy in the middle episode as flaws. They are almost the point. Everyone knows that Feast of Steven went out on Christmas Day. The BBC didn’t want anything scary to go out on the holiday [1] and came up with something Dalek-free. Everyone does not know that the following episode (transmitted seven days later on the first Saturday of 1966) is very nearly as silly—and much funnier. The TARDIS materializes at the Oval Cricket ground, and then at Trafalgar Square on New Year Eve; in between they encounter the Meddling Monk, as played by comedian Peter Butterwoth on an alien planet. The main “jeopardy” is the Monk’s locking the Doctor out of the TARDIS. The Doctor fixes the lock using the magical properties of his ring, which he declines to explain. (“I don’t want to discuss this any more. About turn.”) Completely separately, the Daleks test their Ultimate Weapon and discover that the Doctor has tricked them (by switching a fake McGuffin for the real one.) The Serious Bit (Daleks plotting), the Light Hearted Bit (the Doctor and the Monk on the volcano planet) and the Silly Bit (cricket commentators wondering whether the materialization of a Police Box will stop England making seventy-eight runs in forty-five minutes) exist alongside each other. The idea of the Doctor jumping from the Oval to Tigis to Trafalgar Square to Ancient Egypt catches the idea of the Doctor so perfectly that it hardly matters that he doesn’t do much in each place. [2]

From this point of view, the Meddling Monk stops being curiously irrelevant and becomes indispensable. If the Doctor (in a time machine) is being chased by the Daleks (in a time machine) then of course they are going to run into the only other being in the universe who also has time machine. In a comic book the casual reappearance of a minor character would hardly be worth commenting on. Doctor Who had never worked that way before: it hardly ever did again.

Daleks’ Master Plan works at a conceptual level: we enjoy the idea of it much more than we enjoy the individual episodes. It need never have ended. We could have imagined the Doctor bouncing around that milieu indefinitely: someone would replace Mavic Chen; the Daleks would rise again; some new threat would appear. In fact “Huge Space Soap Opera” turned out to be the wrong answer to the question “What should Doctor Who be?” (The right answer turned out to be the Tenth Planet and the Moonbase.) It was followed by a strange, slow historical story that was hardly a Doctor Who story at all. When the Dalek next appear (in the Power of the Daleks) they have nothing to do with the imperialists we met in this story. Dalek’s Master Plan was an evolutionary dead end.

Unless. Perhaps Master Plan changed the idea of what Doctor Who was in a way that couldn’t quite be unchanged. The founders of Doctor Who fandom, not to mention Mr Douglas Adams, were precisely the Right Age in 1965. What if, once you have seen the Great Big Soap Opera you take it for granted that that is what Doctor Who is from now on? If you “read” the Massacre and the Ark as the next few scenes in the soap opera; the next few windows into the Doctor Who universe? Perhaps Daleks’ Master Plan never finished—because we say it didn’t.

[1]Unless you count Jimmy Savile presenting Top of the Pops 65 and Max Bygraves Meets the Black and White Minstrels.

[2] The Doctor knows about Christmas and positively wants to celebrate it, but has never heard of New Year or cricket. Discuss. 

This article first appeared in The Viewer's Complete Tale by Andrew Rilstone, still available....

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Chapter 4: The Voyage of the Italic

King and Ketley stand accused of teaching young Australians that all value judgements are subjective and insignificant. Based on their remarks about grammar, there appears to be a case to answer. 

The prosecution will now demonstrate what effect their buried assumptions have on their teaching practice. When King and Ketley come to talk about actual texts, do they say the kinds of things you would expect people who disbelieved in values to say? 

Yes, says the accuser, as a matter of fact they do. As an example of bad emotive writing, King and Ketley cite a piece of advertising copy. But they fail to demonstrate why the writing is bad, or to contrast it with a piece of good writing. Instead of showing why the bad emotional writer describes emotions badly, they debunk the emotions themselves—primarily by pointing out that the advert contains statements which are not literally true. 

At which point, the prosecution rests. Those very same debunking techniques could be applied to a lot of very good writing: to any writing which includes a value judgement, in fact. Ketley and King’s theory is thus proved to be pernicious. It remains to be established whether or not it is false: Lewis concedes that a philosophy could be bad for society but nevertheless true. (The corollary, incidentally, is that to preserve society it might be necessary to disseminate a falsehood.) 

But before sentence is passed we need to hear the case for the defence. 

1: King and Ketley do not, in fact, say that the advertisement is a piece of bad writing. As a matter of fact, they draw attention to its skilful  (they say “cunning”) use of vocabulary and rhythmic devices. They present it as an example of how emotional writing can be used to a bad purpose.

2: King and Ketley do not, in fact, say that the emotions roused by the advertisement are contemptible in themselves. Their complaint is that the advertiser is evoking emotions and illegitimately transferring them onto his product.

3: King and Ketley do as a matter of fact, point out that two of the claims made in the advertisement are factually untrue, and that one is only true metaphorically. But this is not the central plank of their criticism. In fact, it is only an aside—a literal parenthesis. 

Here is the advertisement. (Lewis does not quote it in full.) 

Away across the western ocean where Drake of Devon sailed, the Italic will carry you. You too will go adventuring after the treasures of the Indies. In golden hours, in glowing colours, in new fitness of body, and new delight of mind, your treasure will be counted to you. No galleon of Spain ever brought home such great store of good things as you will bring back from your six weeks’ luxurious cruise in this most modern motor vessel. [Control of Language, page 52-53]

If I had to write a critical review of the passage, I would be hard-pushed to say that it is outright bad. The writer understands that Latinate sentence-construction gives English sentences a certain gravitas; partly because Milton used them and partly because delaying the verb creates a slight tension in the sentence.  (“Holding the heavy shopping basket, as fast as his legs could carry him, back to his house he ran” has slightly more punch than “He ran back to his house as fast as his legs could carry him, holding the heavy shopping basket.”) He knows that metrical prose can sound dramatic, but that too much of it sounds silly. He knows about using parallel clauses (“in golden hours/ in glowing colours”) and about saying the same thing twice in different words (“new fitness of body/new delight of mind”). If we had encountered the first sentence in a nautical adventure story it would not strike us as particularly terrible writing:  (“‘Across the Western Ocean where Drake of Devon sailed, the Italic will carry you’ my father said to me as we stood on the dock at Portsmouth.”)

The problem with the text is bathos: that after a perfectly serviceable five-line build up about the romance of sea travel, we are brought clunking down to earth with a line about a holiday on a cruise liner. I was reminded of the occasion when an entire cinema audience groaned because a perfectly good drama about the 1914 Christmas armistice turned out to be an advertisement for chocolate biscuits. If the conclusion had been placed at the beginning (“The Italic is a modern motor vessel which will carry you…”) the effect would have been far less comical. 

As Lewis says, it is very difficult to say why a bad piece of writing is bad. Most of us would say that Dan Brown and JK Rowling were terrible stylists: but millions of people have found their stories compelling and engrossing, so they must be doing something right. Umberto Eco makes the nice point that the Count of Monte Cristo is written in dreadful French; but since it is one of the best adventure stories ever written; and since it wouldn’t work nearly so well as a yarn if the language were  “improved”, the writing must, in fact, be very good indeed. 

Or consider what many believe to be the worst poem ever written: 

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember'd for a very long time…

A newspaper dispatch which said “We are very sorry to report that ninety nine lives were lost on the last Sunday of 1879” wouldn’t strike you as irredeemably dreadful. It’s the tonal changes—from a mock epic invocation to a news dispatch; and the contrast between strong rhymes and prosaic diction that make it legendarily bad. Unless, of course, William McGonogal was doing it deliberately for comic effect, which I am now quite certain that he was. In which case, it is very good writing indeed. 

Ketley and King found the text of the cruise liner advert in another English textbook, Reading and Discrimination by Denys Thompson. Thompson is another of the New Critics: he cites IA Richards in his introduction, and went on to co-author a book with FR Leavis. Reading and Discrimination substantially consists of a series of prose-extracts for students to critique. New Critics naturally like “unseen criticism” because it removes writing from its historical and biographical context and forces the student to attend to the words themselves. The advertisement isn’t one of his extracts: it’s simply used as an illustration in his introductory section about—again—emotional writing. He says that he found it in a Sunday paper, but it illustrates his point so perfectly that I think we can safely assume that he made it up. 

Thompson’s objection to the passage is that it doesn’t say anything. It uses words and phrases to evoke a mood—a mood which the advertiser hopes will be conducive to splurging money on a big holiday. But the passage is devoid of content. 

The professional copywriter of this is not arguing the merits of travel—the sense of what he says is unimportant—so much as playing upon the feelings of his reader, tired by a weeks work in Winter, to induce in him a comforted or receptive frame of mind in which he will be likely to act on the suggestion of a cruise. One notices immediately it’s literary pretension—as if to say this is a special occasion no ordinary work a day affair—and the fact that it employs the romantic feelings and a vocabulary with which most of us have been familiar since we first learned history. The dreamy rhythm of the first two sentences helps to lull the reader and causes him to suspend rational judgement while he abandons himself to the illusion roused by the associations of “Drake” “Devon” “adventure” “treasure” “Galleons” and “Spain”. [Reading and Discrimination, 1934 edition, page 15]

King and Ketley’s critique is much longer than Thompson’s but goes over substantially the same ground. When Thompson says that the sense and meaning of the words is irrelevant, they say: 

Now what exactly has the prospective buyer of a ticket for this pleasure cruise been told? Only that the voyage will be somewhere across the Atlantic Ocean, that the name of the ship is the Italic, that it is a motor not a steam ship, and that the voyage will last six weeks. [Page 53, emphasis in original]

Thompson talks about the advert playing upon the romantic feelings of the reader, which Ketley and King paraphrase as: 

What is the rest of the pother about Drake and the treasure of the Indies, the golden hours and glowing colours, put in for? Merely to rouse in the prospective buyer feelings of romantic excitement and pleasure at the thought of going in the Italic.

Where Thompson talks about suspending rational judgement, Ketley and King are fairly specific about how a rational man chooses his vacation: 

The Englishman or woman who read it and had thirty pounds to spend might probably decide, if he thought about it calmly and unemotionally, that he could get all the pleasure and rest he required by having a holiday at Margate or in the Lake District, and still have fifteen precious pounds over to buy things he needed. 

£30—about £2,500 in today’s money—seems excellent value for a six week cruise; but £15 rather steep for a trip to the Lake District.

But the idea behind the advertisement is that it should rouse a quantity of extremely pleasurable emotion which will make the reader unthinkingly prefer a holiday cruise on the Italic to any other kind of holiday. [Emphasis in original]

None of this is remotely controversial. Every good salesman is told to sell the sizzle rather than the sausage. In 1971, the Coca-Cola company famously and successfully made a short film which evoked the feelings of youth and optimism which were in the air in 1971, and persuaded people that they were somehow connected to their product. Drinking sparkling carbonated fizzy sugar water won’t really make the world a happier place—and certainly not more so than bonding with a stranger over an unbranded soda. But that is not the same as saying that the ideals of youth, peace, and internationalism are in themselves absurd. No-one in their right mind would say “You shouldn’t believe in living in perfect harmony, because it will give you diabetes and rot your teeth.”

King and Ketley are again trying to illustrate the distinction between reference and emotive meaning. “Galleon”, on their terms, doesn’t have a reference: it is there to trigger a feeling that the salesman thinks will make you well-disposed to his product. One could say the same thing about apple trees, honey bees, and snow-white turtle doves.  

What has the reference of “Drake of Devon,” namely, his personality, his clothes, his actions, his appearance, to do with sitting in a liner in the twentieth century? And so with “galleon of Spain,” “treasure,” and so on. The reference of these words is very largely neglected. And the reference of most of the other words, such as “luxurious” “glowing,” “golden,” “adventuring,” “delight,” is extremely vague. [Page 57]

In that sense, they reasonably say, advertisements work like poetry—where, as you may recall, seventy five per cent of the meaning comes from the emotive content. In the previous chapter, they tried to “translate” the Eve of St Agnes into “scientific” prose, so “casement” becomes “window” and “warm gules” becomes “red light”. If you tried out the same experiment on the advertisement, you would swiftly find that when you take out the emotion, there is nothing left at all. (“The ship will take you across the sea. You will have a nice time. You will have a nice time. You will have a very nice time. It is better to have a nice time than to loot precious metals from indigenous populations.”) The political sketch writer Simon Hoggart once said that you could tell when an advert or political speech was claptrap because the opposite statement would be meaningless. (“This government will stand up for lazy single people”; “It’s a pedestrians car: so push it.”)

Thompson lists the words “Drake”, “Devon”, “adventure”, “treasure”, “galleons” and “Spain” as having strong emotional associations. King and Ketley explain, at rather too much length, what they think those emotional associations might be. 

Notice how cunningly the piece is constructed… not  just “across the Atlantic,” but “away  (a word arousing  feelings of escape, perhaps from drudgery or disappointment or ill health) across the western ocean (“west” is connected with many romantic emotions, sunset feelings, Westward Ho! feelings and so on;)“ocean” is connected with feelings of vastness, of escape from the small and the confined), “where Drake of Devon sailed” (the Italic won’t of course sail exactly where Drake sailed, but the words “Drake of Devon” call up romantic feelings with regard to the “free, roistering, spacious,” days of Elizabeth and the gentlemen buccaneers—again feelings of escape from the routine, narrow life of to-day). “You too will go adventuring” (in actual fact, sailing, or rather living, in a modern floating hotel, like the Italic, is hardly an adventure; there is little danger or discomfort or difficulty; but the word “adventure” is connected  with escape feelings, hardy-dardy feelings, hero feelings, all pleasant to experience)….[page 54]

But this is where, according to C.S Lewis, they go a step too far. Instead of putting the terrible advert alongside a decent piece of travel writing, they take it to task for inaccuracy. The ship won’t, as a matter of simple fact, retrace the Golden Hind’s route. But, says Lewis, plenty of good travel writing is guilty of the same offence. 

What they actually do is to point out that the luxurious motor-vessel won’t really sail where Drake did, that the tourists will not have any adventures, that the treasures they bring home will be of a purely metaphorical nature, and that a trip to Margate might provide “all the pleasure and rest” they required. All this is very true: talents inferior to those of Gaius and Titius would have sufficed to discover it. What they have not noticed, or not cared about, is that a very similar treatment could be applied to much good literature which treats the same emotion. [Abolition of Man, page 4]

This is, I submit, a deliberate misreading. 

• The Green Book says that even though the holiday is not really retracing Drake’s steps, the name “Drake” is irrelevantly used because the reader will associate his name with escapism. 

• The Green Book  says that even though the holiday will not really be dangerous or uncomfortable, the word “adventure” is irrelevantly used because the reader will associate it with escapism, and other pleasant feelings. 

• The Green Book says that the word “treasure” is  used metaphorically because the reader will associate it with romance and excitement. 

For Lewis, this amounts to a denunciation of the whole idea of treasure and adventure. But it isn’t. King and Ketley don’t say that it is wrong to associate Francis Drake and Spanish Galleons with Good Queen Bess’s Golden Days. They say that it is wrong to exploit people’s feelings about Good Queen Bess to induce them to buy holidays they can’t afford.

Lewis wished King and Ketley had compared the advert with a good piece of travel writing. But no-one is claiming that the Sunday Paper listing is a piece of bad travel writing. It is, if anything, presented as a good piece of advertising. The correct procedure would have been to contrast it with an advert written by a more honest or honourable travel agent. 

It would be trivially easy to write an advertisement which makes honest use of history: 

“Have you thrilled since boyhood to tales of piracy and derring do along the Spanish Main?Imagine your excitement when you sail through those waters; walk around the ruins of real seventeenth century castles, and visit the wrecks of actual pirate ships…”

Or we could dispense with the sizzle altogether and simply sell the sausage: 

“Our cabins have been highly commended by the Hotel Journal; our chef has worked at some of the top restaurants in Paris; our gym instructor has twice been to the Olympic Games…”

The trouble is, what you end up with in both cases is a demonstrably less effective advertisement than the one we are deconstructing. Salesmen use emotional soft-sell because it works. 

The passages that Lewis suggests King and Ketley might have used for contrast are from Samuel Johnson and William Wordsworth. Both writers say they experienced very strong emotions in particular places. Both say that the feelings may not have been very sensible or very rational; but that they nevertheless had value. They both think that the feelings brought them closer to their Christian God. 

For Johnson, it is visiting the ruins of Iona, which make him think about St Columbia converting the pagan Scots in the fifth century. Some people might think it better to look at the ruins dispassionately, as scientific or archaeological data, but he wouldn’t want to be one of those people: 

 Far from me and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue.  That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona! [Samuel Johnson, “Journey to the Western Islands”]

William Wordsworth is naturally more romantic—more interested in recording the minute qualia of subjective experience. He says that he was in a perfectly ordinary carriage surrounded by perfectly ordinary people, but at the precise moment he entered London (it was more clearly delineated in his day) he felt an emotion that he couldn’t describe, but connected in some way with heaviness. It only took a second; he didn’t attach much significance to it at the time, but he now sees it as the action of God. Like Wordsworth, he admits that other people might not find the emotion very sensible:

Great God!

That aught external to the living mind

Should have such mighty sway, yet so it was:

A weight of ages did at once descend

Upon my heart—no thought embodied, no

Distinct remembrances, but weight and power,

Power growing with the weight. [William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 8]

Now, I think I see what CS Lewis is driving at here. The emotions—about Iona, London or the Spanish Main—are real. And the emotions, like Coleridge’s feeling about the waterfall, are appropriate to the places: they are exactly what a sensitive person ought to feel there, because the place is such as to merit those feelings. Such emotions can be used to sell holidays; they can also be the literal voice of God. If you are going to give your students examples of emotion being put to bad use, you ought to give a counterexample of it being put to good use: otherwise they might get the wrong end of the stick and think that it’s emotions themselves that you have an issue with. If you are going to review a terrible pantomime, tell your reader that there are good pantomimes as well. If you are going to pillory an awful atheist, remind us that some atheists are much less awful.

But this isn’t what he says. Rather he says that King and Ketley’s whole case against the advert is that it uses figurative expressions which aren’t literally true; and since Wordsworth and Johnson also use figurative language, Johnson’s Christianity and Wordsworth’s pantheism could just as easily be debunked. 

What, after all, can the history of early British Christianity, in pure reason, add to the motives for piety as they exist in the eighteenth century? Why should Mr. Wordsworth’s inn be more comfortable or the air of London more healthy because London has existed for a long time? [page 5]

But this is word salad. No-one has mentioned Wordsworth’s inn. You can’t get from “It is misleading to use the romance of English history to sell holidays” to “Wordsworth was wrong to think that the pang of joy which surprised him when he came to London was theologically significant”. If you said that, wouldn’t you also have to say that if Wordsworth truly felt that his emotions of weighty heaviness when he came to London were meaningful, it follows that there is a meaningful analogy between six weeks lolling in a deck chair in the Caribbean and a chest of Spanish doubloons? Lewis thinks it was a Good Thing that the Scottish landscape made Dr Johnson want to be a better Christian: but he would presumably have thought it a Bad Thing if it had been used by an advertiser to persuade him to buy a more expensive brand of porridge. 

Unless…  Could Lewis possibly be arguing that if an Englishman who had read the right books were to sail from modern Cartagena to modern Caracas, he might very well feel thrilled and liberated? And that those feelings would be ordinate and appropriate? And although he is really only on holiday, the dinners and the sightseeing might really feel special because he loves stories of the Spanish Main? That pint of beer I had in the Cavern Club was special to me because I had spent forty years reading about Merseybeat; and that remains true, even though it wasn’t the original Cavern, I hadn’t travelled back to the 1960s, and the guy playing Beatles covers wasn’t much good. 

But that would amount to a defence of the advert. We’d be reduced to saying that the 1935 newspaper was inferior to Wordsworth’s Prelude only insofar as there was a certain inelegance to the prose. And I am not even quite certain about that. I am far from sure that in purely formal terms, I could show that “a weight of ages did at once descend upon my heart” is superior to “ in new fitness of body, and new delight of mind, your treasure will be counted to you.”.

Thompson and King and Ketley have a wider point; and it is not one that Lewis seems to have noticed. We have just seen how easy it is for a salesman to use trigger words to make you suspend rational judgement: but it is just as easy for politicians and newspaper leader-writers to do the same trick. The message is not “emotions associated with places are contrary to reason”. The message is “since it is so easy to use emotions to sell boat trips, be very careful when demagogues use them to sell you dictatorships.”

One last point.

Thompson’s first chapter is a perfectly good introduction to literary criticism, albeit from a clearly Leavisite perspective. He is particularly good on the question of taste. Do we even need to criticise books, he asks: why can’t we just read them? And yes, he says, there are lots of books that you can just read, and enjoy as easily as “oysters and champagne”. But they are not likely to give lasting satisfaction. The more serious writers, that Mr Shakespeare for example, need to be read several times and contemplated; but they repay that additional work. You can’t prove that a book is good or bad with scientific rigour: taste does come into it. Some people might conclude that there is no accounting for taste and therefore no point in discussing literary merit to begin with.

Against this conclusion it must be argued that in the arts there are standards of truth and of value, but they are not hard and fast measures to be automatically applied. This argument will be readily accepted by anyone who holds that religious or philosophic beliefs supply the individual with a scale of values which he must apply for himself, and even those who do not hold any such beliefs must see that in every hour of our waking lives we are making choices on the assumption that one course of action is “better” than another. This is to say,  we are constantly operating a scale of values whether we are conscious of it or not. [page 14]

Ketley and King had definitely read Reading and Discrimination because they quote from it. They can’t radically disagree with it, or they wouldn’t use it. So here is one of the Green Book’s sources, taking it for granted that there is a system of value that all philosophies and religions hold in common and that even people who don’t have a faith tacitly accept. 

Perhaps we should give this scale of values a name. 

Maybe we should call it the Tao? 

This is the first section of an ongoing critique of C.S Lewis's book The Abolition of Man. (I think that my essays should make sense if you aren't familiar with that tome.) This first section (which runs to six chapters) has already been published in full on my Patreon page, and the second section is being serialised there at present. 

Please consider joining the Patreon if you would like to read them, and to support the writer.

www.patreon.com/rilstone

Chapter 3, continued: The Poet, The Tourist and the Waterfall

In his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic, A.J Ayer argued that all philosophical problems were really grammatical misunderstandings. If I say "Dogs are loyal" and "Unicorns are fictitious", you could be deceived into thinking that "dogs" and "unicorns" are entities of the same kind, and that "loyalty" and "fictitiousness" are qualities that they respectively possess. St Anselm very famously made this kind of mistake when he took the question “Does God exist?” to mean “Does entity A, God, possess quality B, existence?”; and to treat it as if it were the same kind of question as “Does entity C, a frog, possess quality D, greeness.”

It seems likely that King and Ketley had been reading Ayer. They warn readers that the phrases “this is brown” and “this is sublime” are grammatically similar, and that this could give rise to a misunderstanding. It is on this point that C.S Lewis’s case against the Control of Language chiefly rests: if this passage doesn’t precipitate the apocalypse, nothing will: 

We must, at this point, clear up a confusion which may already have puzzled you. We construct our sentences, our written or spoken speech, as if this distinction between emotive meaning and reference did not exist. When the man said, "That is sublime," he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall. The form of the sentence is exactly similar to the form of "That is brown," a sentence which does make a remark about the waterfall, about its colour. Actually, when the man said, "That is sublime," he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was, really, "I have feelings associated in my mind with the word “sublime," or, shortly, "I have sublime feelings." There is the same confusion, also, in the sentence, "It was a wonderful, beautiful, fire." And you will find that this confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something; and, actually, we are only saying something about our own feelings. We continually use emotive words, words with emotive meaning, as if they had a definite reference. [The Control of Language, page 19]

Lewis hyper-focuses on the phrase “sublime feelings". Before we have got to the bottom of page 1, he has told us that "the emotions which prompt the projections are the correlatives and therefore almost the opposites of the qualities projected" but that this is a pons asinorum of the subject.

The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration. If “This is sublime” is to be reduced at all to a statement about the speaker's feelings, the proper translation would be “I have humble feelings”. If the view held by Gaius and Titus were consistently applied it would lead to obvious absurdities. It would force them to maintain that “You are contemptible” means “I have contemptible feelings", in fact that “Your feelings are contemptible” means “My feelings are contemptible." [Abolition of Man, page 1]

It is this kind of thing that makes as intelligent a writer as Alistair McGrath warn that Abolition of Man is a difficult book. It's probably forty years since I first read it, and I think I have come to see what Lewis was getting it. Suppose I was invited to a wedding, and suppose one of the other guests was a wheelchair user. Suppose I caught myself thinking “I hope I won’t be seated next to that disabled man at dinner”. I might very well then say to myself  "That is a despicable feeling". But if I wanted to describe the feeling itself, then I would have to say "I have superior feelings" or "I have bigoted feelings" or “I have feelings of irrational revulsion”. “Those are despicable feelings” actually means  "It is despicable that I am having those feelings" or "I despise myself for feeling that way" or, if you insist “I have self-contemptuous feelings”.  

If you showed me a photograph of your new pet, I might very well say “That kitten is cute”. I would not, on Lewis’s terms, be saying “I have cute feelings". I suppose that what I would be having would be maternal or affectionate or patronising feelings. If, on the other hand, I observed a small child presenting their schoolfellow with a Valentine card expressing life-long devotion, I might possibly say that the feelings the child was having were “cute feelings”—meaning that I felt that it was cute that the child felt that way. My own feelings would be those of motherliness or affection (towards what the child was feeling): the child’s feelings would be passionate or devoted or romantic. 

Lewis says that if you translate “This is sublime” into subjective language, it comes out as "I have feelings of veneration" or "I have humble feelings." King and Ketley say that Coleridge was describing  "feelings of awe, deeply felt pleasure, and a kind of profound and calm excitement". Bradley goes with  "astonishment, rapture, awe, even self-abasement”. The difference between the two viewpoints doesn’t seem insurmountable. But it’s the grammatical point which troubles Lewis. 

 Ketley and King's language certainly invites several possible misunderstandings. 

1: "I have feelings associated in my mind with the word sublime”

This could be taken to imply that Coleridge is being vague and inexact—as if he was waving his hands and gesturing towards some inchoate sublime vibes. But on King and Ketley's view all words derive significance from being "associated in the mind" with objects, concepts or feelings. “Associated in my mind” is a technically precise way of saying “represents”, “refers to” or simply “means”. 

2: "We use words with emotive meaning as if they had a definite reference" 

 “Those words don't have a definite reference" could be taken to mean “those words don’t have a clear meaning” or “those words are meaningless”—which again, would imply vagueness or lack of rigour. But “emotive meaning” and “definite reference” are being used in a defined technical sense. The claim is “the two kinds of meaning, referential and emotive, can sometimes be confused.”

3: "Actually we are only saying something about our own feelings" 

We use “only” to indicate that something is not very important: “It is only a minor injury” or  “He is only an amateur”. But we also use it to mean “one thing in particular and not anything else”: “Vegetarians only eat plants”;  “I only smoke on special occasions”; “Only kings live in palaces”. So “We are only talking about our feelings" does not necessarily mean "We are talking about feelings, as opposed to something important.” It might mean “Some words in some context refer solely to feelings and not to anything else as well.”

4 "We appear to be saying something… about something, we are really only saying something about our own feelings."

The opposite of something is “nothing”. King and Ketley don't mean that when we say the fire is wonderful, we are saying nothing. And they don’t mean that when Coleridge said that he was experiencing deep pleasure and awe, he was saying nothing. I think that when they say “something” they may really mean some thing—some physical object rather than some intangible concept. "We appear to be saying something about some thing but we are really only talking about our feelings" means  “Some words appear to refer to an object and also to a feeling, when in fact, they refer to a feeling alone.”

But Lewis isn’t particularly interested in what the text means. He doesn’t care what Ketley and King intended it to mean. What worries him is the way it is likely to be misunderstood. He may, indeed, be deliberately misunderstanding it himself to demonstrate how easy it would be for someone less clever than him to get caught out. (He does that sometimes: addressing theology students on the subject of modernist Biblical criticism, he says directly “Though I may have nothing but misunderstandings to lay before you, you ought to know that such misunderstandings exist.” It is clear from the lecture that he actually understood Bultman very well.) 

His allegation is that a student reading the sentence “We appear to be saying something very important about something; and, actually, we are only saying something about our own feelings” will understand it to mean “All value judgements are subjective and therefore insignificant.”

The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant. It is true that Gaius and Titius have said neither of these things in so many words. They have treated only one particular predicate of value (sublime) as a word descriptive of the speaker's emotions. The pupils are left to do for themselves the work of extending the same treatment to all predicates of value: and no slightest obstacle to such extension is placed in their way. The authors may or may not desire the extension: they may never have given the question five minutes’ serious thought in their lives. I am not concerned with what they desired but with the effect their book will certainly have on the schoolboy's mind. In the same way, they have not said that judgements of value are unimportant. Their words are that we "appear to be saying something very important" when in reality we are "only saying something about our own feelings". No schoolboy will be able to resist the suggestion brought to bear upon him by that word “only”. [page 3] 

An English text book might contain buried assumptions. King and Ketley might be trying to plant the seeds of logical positivism and moral relativism into kids’ heads while teaching them essay technique. Evangelicals used to complain that text books which were meant to be teaching the science of evolution said things like “evolution proves that human beings are really only monkeys” or “evolution teaches that humans are insignificant”: they felt  that religious and philosophical ideas unrelated to science were being smuggled in under the radar.

A co-religionist once told Lewis that it was a Christian critic's job to “lay bare the false values of contemporary culture”. Lewis said this might mean "to expose the falsity of the values of contemporary culture" or alternatively  "to reveal what the values of contemporary culture actually are, and by the way, I personally think those values false”. Lewis agreed that an expert in Lit Crit might be particularly good at revealing what the underlying values of a text actually were; but that he was no more qualified than anyone else to say if they were true values or false values. And it was dishonest to be paid as a professional critic and offer your services as an amateur moralist. On another occasion, he said that what the world needed most was not more books of Christian apologetics, but more good books about science and history and architecture written by people who happened to be Christians: with their Christianity implicit, or, as he put it, latent. 

It is perfectly valid to assert that a text book has latent values or buried assumptions or unexamined premises. But Lewis offers no close reading of the Control of Language. He doesn’t summarise the book’s main argument. If you have only read CS Lewis, you would have no way of knowing that Ketley and King are trying to explain the semantic triangle in the language of fifth formers; or that they believe in the  associative theory of language, or that the distinction between reference and emotive meaning is at the heart of their argument. 

Elsewhere, talking about dirty books and scary stories, Lewis said that it is notoriously difficult to predict what will inflame or terrify a child. But he claims that he can know with certainty the effect that a particular sentence in a text book will have on the readers, in the same way that he knows that educating children according to Ketley and King’s precepts ”must”—not “might” or “could” but “must—lead to the extinction of human civilisation.  

It is tempting to say that Lewis was trying to invent deconstruction twenty years early. Take a marginal, secondary, word or phrase. Make that the centre of the text. Interpret the text on the basis of this new centre. Demonstrate that the text now contradicts itself. Rinse and repeat.  

 "We appear to be saying something very important about something; and, actually, we are only saying something about our own feelings." 

Appear/important/only. 

Checkmate.

This is the first section of an ongoing critique of C.S Lewis's book The Abolition of Man. (I think that my essays should make sense if you aren't familiar with that tome.) This first section (which runs to six chapters) has already been published in full on my Patreon page, and the second section is being serialised there at present. 

Please consider joining the Patreon if you would like to read them, and to support the writer.

www.patreon.com/rilstone