Temporum

(In response to "Temporum" by C.S. Lewis)

I did enjoy this piece. I felt that it may have been a little over my head. I'm still unsure if it was over my head because I didn't understand at what he was trying to say, or if I understood and believed in what he had to say so much so that I didn't think it worth writing about. I think it becomes clearer in this piece that it may have been my latter thought. Lewis points out two types of people in his piece, those who are of the old storied tradition yet are within the new, and those who are embracing the new with complete disregard for the old. If you are within the first group of people that Lewis talks about it is hard to understand why people think it unimportant to disregard history and things that happened in the past.

"When Watt makes his engine, when Darwin starts monkeying with the ancestry of Man, and Freud with his soul, and the economists with all that is his, then indeed the lion will have got out of its cage." This is a beautifully worded piece of mastery.

"Our rulers have become like schoolmasters and are always demanding 'keenness'. And you notice that I am guilty of a slight archaism in calling them 'rulers'. 'Leaders' is the modem word. I have suggested elsewhere that this is a deeply significant change of vocabulary. Our demand upon them has changed no less than theirs on us. For of a ruler one asks justice, incorruption, diligence, perhaps clemency; of a leader, dash, initiative, and (I suppose) what people call 'magnetism' or 'personality'." I found this part very interesting because I consider myself to be a leader. Lewis appears to be comparing leaders to Rulers. He says that this is a clever word change to change the perception of rulers. He says that they do the same things. I can agree with him in the fact that a ruler and a leader seeks the same goals. I guess that I can somewhat agree with the claims Lewis makes. I do feel that ruler has a negative connotation because of rulers that we have had in the past (e.g. Hitler). But this statement holds a lot of weight for me in terms of self assessment.

At the end of Lewis's piece he talks of a dinosaur coming into your building. He makes the point that all of us would run for the safety of our lives, as to not be eaten. However, wouldn't some of you look back out of curiosity? The dinosaur becomes history in this analogy. There are those who look back at the dinosaur to see how it moves, how it acts, to experience it. And there are those who run backs turned afraid of what they might see. I don't think Lewis's is necessarily pointing out that one is wrong and the other is right. I think he is just advocating on the behalf of those who look back, stating that they to have a valid reason for looking back. They have curiosity. It's not that they dislike the future, its that they are still intrigued by the past.