Out of the Silent Planet Ch 1-11 Revisited
He knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are.
Even those who profess the Christian faith live in a dead and silent world: religion has retreated into the foxholes of the heart and says nothing about the stars. It is, I think, refreshing, invigorating, to enter a world of significance —of love and of love’s profound consequences.
-Anthony Esolen, Introduction to Dante’s Divine Comedy
Welcome to the heavens! Let’s jump in (out? off?)!
For these Read Along Guides, I am going to try a format which will hopefully be both interesting and succinct.
Game plan: pull out the quotes, and briefly touch on the themes.
But to begin, notes on structure:
Structure
Ch 1 - on earth
Ch 2 - on earth
Ch 3 - in space
Ch 4 - in space
Ch 5 - in space
Ch 6 - in space
Ch 7 - on Malacandra with Weston & Devine
Ch 8 - on Malacandra alone
Ch 9 - on Malacandra 1/2 alone & 1/2 with a Hross (but unable to communicate)
Ch 10 - on Malacandra with a Hross (learning to communicate)
Ch 11 - on Malacandra with Hyoi (knows names, can communicate better)
I’m laying this out, not because I know where I’m going to go with this information yet, but because I’m interested to see where Lewis lingers.
Quotes & Themes
Chapters 1-2 — Major Theme: Science & Business vs. Man
Throughout this trilogy (but we’ll focus on these first two chapters) Lewis explores modernity’s posture against leisure, but towards justifying all actions from a utilitarian perspective.
Weston (a physicist) and Devine (a businessman), being representatives of Science and Money, cannot see any purpose in Ransom’s occupation (professor of philology: the study of languages) or his recreation (walking for walking’s sake).
Referencing Revisiting Lazy Murder and Leisure: Antidote to the Busy Murder of Christmas, I read Weston and Devine’s position as distinctly anti-culture, anti-person, and anti-life.
Here’s some excerpts on this anti-Man theme.
“I don’t care two-pence what school he [Ransom] was at nor on what unscientific foolery he is at present wasting money that ought to go to research” (the character Weston, pg. 15).
And…
“How do you come to be in this benighted part of the country?” [asks Devine]
“I’m on a walking-tour,” said Ransom…
“God!” exclaimed Devine... “Do you do it for money, or is it sheer masochism?”
“Pleasure, of course,” said Ransom (pg 18).
And…
[Devine speaking] “Between ourselves, I am putting a little money into some experiments [Weston] has on hand. It’s all straight stuff—the march of progress and the good of humanity and all that, but it has an industrial side” (pg 19).
Notice that I called this an anti-Man theme, and not anti-humanity. Weston would call himself pro-humanity, therefore justifying the harm he does individual men (i.e. the mentally handicapped hired boy, or our own Dr. Elwin Ransom) in the name of assisting the “human race.”
[Weston speaking] “We have learned to jump off the speck of matter on which our species began; infinity, and therefore perhaps eternity, is being put into the hands of the human race. You cannot be so small-minded as to think that the rights or the life of an individual or of a million individuals are of the slightest importance in comparison with this.”
“I happen to disagree,” said Ransom. (pg. 29)
Me too.
It’s been observed, that those who are loudest about “the sake of humanity” are often the least likely to do something for the human next to them.
“Humanity” is a grand concept far away. Loving your neighbor, on the other hand, often means not grumbling when their dog’s poop is in your yard, and helping them move a wardrobe from the garage to the upstairs spare room…
Loving humanity means saying grand things. Loving a human, means doing crappy things.
Ch 3-6 — Major Theme: Light/Dante/the Heavens
“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”
-the character Ramandu, from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
One of the most beautiful aspects of this book, is the way in which Lewis fully embraces the Medieval concept of the heavens as a harmony of the spheres, continually dancing and singing in perfect order and beauty, rather than the scientific model of a vacuous random void.
Often he rose after only a few hours’ sleep to return, drawn by an irresistible attraction, to the regions of light; he could not cease to wonder at the noon which always awaited you however early you went to seek it. There, totally immersed in a bath of pure ethereal colour and of unrelenting though unwounding brightness, stretched his full length and with eyes half closed in the strange chariot that bore them, faintly quivering, through depth after depth of tranquility far above the reach of night, he felt his body and mind daily rubbed and scoured and filled with new vitality. Weston, in one of his brief, reluctant answers, admitted a scientific basis for these sensations: they were receiving, he said, many rays that never penetrated the terrestrial atmosphere.
But Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter darkness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now—now that the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for the empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it “dead”; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes—and here, with how many more! No: space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens—the heavens which declared the glory—.”
(pg.34)
These sections, along with the lack of any details about the mechanics of the space ship, are why some have called Out of the Silent Planet “Sci-Fi Lite.”
Lewis was not overly interested in what would cause a spaceship to be able to reach another planet. He was more interested in—what I would call—Genesis thoughts. The creation account in Genesis doesn’t examine the molecular composition of the soil or explain the process of photosynthesis. This information is interesting and valuable only within the context of a world that has meaning, rhyme and reason, and a study-able plan. Genesis was beautifully and poetically and hugely interested in building the frame of our story, answering the questions which provide meaning to any other inquiries: Who am I? Who made me, and the world? Why does it and I exist?
Similarly, Lewis is interested in Space as a place also created by the God he knows. Believing all that is Christianity, Lewis describes the heavens as God’s.
No need to look up the publication date (1938) to figure out how much Lewis could have known about Space when he wrote the book. Lewis was not cross-referencing astrophysics journals of the 1930s, he was referencing epic poems of the 1300s, namely, the Divine Comedy.
The Heavens declare the glory of God.
Most works of Science Fiction which we are used to, have a plot based off of the premise: if other worlds exist, the people there will be different (i.e. made by a different type of god/s, for a different reason).
In C.S. Lewis’s Science Fiction he begins, instead, from this premise: if other worlds exist, even if they are in a completely different universe and world (i.e. Narnia), and even if they think and look differently (i.e. the Hross), they will have been made by the same God. God does not cease to exist outside of earth, or our solar system. Thus, if other people exist, they too were created by the God who sent His Son to die on a cross out of love.
Ch 7-9 — Major Theme: Turning Thinking Upside Down
Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are (43).
I could have said this theme a multitude of ways, here are some: Suddenly Realizing Your Preconceived Notions; Being Shocked By Your Judgementalism; Perpendicularism; or simply…Less Gravity
There are multiple angles of perspective which Lewis alters.
In this theme of turning thinking upside down, I’ll lay out some of the moments when Ransom’s physical view is altered. In the next theme, Too Much Baggage to See Clearly, I’ll present passages when his spiritual view is challenged or altered.
Splitting this theme into two is partially wrong. How we see the world physically, affects how we see it spiritually, and vice versa. I believe that the marriage of these two themes (which I am breaking apart) was actually one of the intents of this Space Trilogy. (One might say the Space Trilogy is the Theology of the Body applied to the experience of extraterrestrial life.)
However, if I keep them combined, this section is too long and unwieldy. So they are split, for now.
Here are two perspective altering moments on Ransom’s physical concept of how a world can be:
Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets—the “earths” he called them in his thought—as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven—excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but be subtraction from, the surrounding brightness (41).
And secondly…
Before anything else he learned that Malacandra was beautiful; and he even reflected how odd it was that this possibility had never entered into his speculations about it. The same peculiar twist of imagination which led him to people the universe with monsters had somehow taught him to expect nothing on a strange planet except rocky desolation or else a network of nightmare machines (44).
And two moments, specifically on the “perpendicularity” sub-theme:
And glancing up at the purple leaves he saw the same theme of perpendicularity—the same rush to the sky—repeated there (49).
And…
“All terrestrial mountains must ever after seem to him to be mountains lying on their sides (54).
Before we conclude this physical-side of our theme on perspective shifts, let’s look at a final passage that begins to touch on the reality that we actually cannot divorce the way we see the exterior of something from its affect on how we see the interior of that same thing—physical impressions impact spiritual impressions:
It was only many days later that Ransom discovered how to deal with these sudden losses of confidence. They arose when the rationality of the hross tempted you to think of it as a man. Then it became abominable-a man seven feet high, with a snaky body, covered, face and all, with thick black animal hair, and whiskered like a cat. But starting from the other end you had an animal with everything an animal ought to have—glossy coat, liquid eye, sweet breath and whitest teeth—and added to all these, as though Paradise had never been lost and earliest dreams were true, the charm of speech and reason. Nothing could be more disgusting than the one impression; nothing more delightful than the other. It all depended on point of view (59).
Ch 10-11 - Major Theme: Too Much Baggage to See Clearly
Now let’s look at the spiritual perspective Ransom brings to this foreign planet, which, unbeknownst to him, initially keeps him from seeing clearly:
Perhaps the hrossa had a mythology — he took it for granted they were on a low cultural level—and the seroni were gods or demons (65).
And…
His first diagnosis of their culture was what he called “old stone age”… division of labour had been carried to a higher point than he expected (67 & 68).
But then there’s this small shift, and Ransom begins to just barely realize he has perspective-contorting baggage:
Ransom, who had deliberately given a childish version of the truth in order to adapt it to the supposed ignorance of his audience, was a little annoyed to find Hnohra painfully explaining to him that he could not live in the sky because there was no air in it (68).
And…
Ever since he had discovered the rationality of the hrossa he had been haunted by a conscientious scruple as to whether it might be his duty to undertake their religious instruction; now, as a result of his tentative efforts, he found himself being treated as if he were the savage and being given a first sketch of civilized religion (69).
The passages above, along with this next, and final, excerpt, are some of the best writing I have read on the experience of interacting with another culture. I found myself saying to Ransom, “What, you too!?”
One college semester, I studied in Morocco, and lived in the home of a wonderful Moroccan family. Some weeks into my stay, my own mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, and baby sister came over to visit. I specifically remember one night, after a long and lively conversation, when my host father squeezed all of my family and me into his car and one “taxi kabir,” in order to go to an overlook at about 11:30 at night to see…I have no idea what we were going there to see.
However, when we arrived, his car broke down. In the process of trying to figure out what happened, the best understanding I could translate from Arabic was: “The water has left the car.” I remember breaking down in stitches of laughter that this was the best explanation he could communicate to me, and which I could understand well enough to translate to my own family. And, in full humble honesty to you now, when I first heard his explanation, I assessed that his vehicular knowledge must be abysmally juvenile. Obviously, however, the limiting factor was not his knowledge, but my own.
He was hampered in this both by the humiliating discoveries which he was constantly making of his own ignorance about his native planet, and partly by his determination to conceal some of the truth (71).
I love how Lewis uses another planet to expose spiritual blindspots in ourselves.
Final Thoughts
He wanted men—any men, even Weston and Devine (65).
It is not good for man to be alone.
There’s nothing like being in a foreign world to make you long for your own people. There’s nothing like being in a foreign place to make you realize you even have your own people.
And, there’s also nothing like being in a foreign place to make you realize how much more similar you are than you’d ever imagined.
How are both of these truths true? How does a visit across the ocean, or space, cause you to dismantle your positive and negative assumptions, causing you to realize simultaneously how different you are, as well as how similar you are? And why is it that you cannot predict the ways in which you will fundamentally realize how different and how similar you are?
Ransom longs for his fellow men, even in the midst of realizing just how connected to the hross he is. Ransom longs for his fellow men, even while realizing that the hross are much better people than the opportunists from his native planet.
If I’m taking my cue from Chesterton’s assertion that paradox is at the heart of Christianity, than there is something deeper here. How is it we can be taught to love where we came from more, by seeing how much better the place is we have come to? Why is there: no place like home?
Until next time, keep revisiting the good books that enrich your life and nourish your soul.
In Case You Missed It:
On the Podcast:
Read Along Guides for the Othello:
Read Along Guides for the the Space Trilogy:
What We’re Reading Now/Next:
February
Out of the Silent Planet AND Perelandra by C.S. Lewis
March
That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis
April
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
May
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
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Read Luke 15 this morning with notes by Bishop Robert Barron. Lots of resonance between Out of the Silent Planet and The Parable of The Prodigal & His Brother. Was struck by these words from Bishop Robert. "The younger son wandering in a distant land is evocative of the human race - all the descendants of Adam and Eve - who have lost contact with the flow of the divine life. Living in the land of hiring, taking, paying and possessing, they starve spiritually. They are like the sad guests at the wedding feast of Cana who have run out of wine; they are like Israel in the land of exile, pining for Zion; or they are like the Psalmist's deer yearning for flowing streams. How appropriate, by the way is that last image. The divine life flows because it is a process of giving and receiving; sin is substantive and fixed, "hard" currency. The only solution is to return to a graced mode of being." (Word on Fire Bible Volume 1 page 395-396).
Great analysis! And your anti-man theme is nicely observed! Hang on to that one as you keep reading. Your writing on seeing / perspective shifting is great too. Those are my favorite themes of this novel. Keep it up and can’t wait to read your next post on OSP.