Day: May 18, 2008

“Some writings will ultimately end up in king’s palaces, as well as the prisons and rescue missions of the earth, for kings sit in both places.” Author Unknown

I recall reading these words many months ago but I didn’t make note of who wrote them. The truth of these words however made me take notice. Just look at the literature we have throughout history. Many of the greatest books ever written were never written to be books at all but simply expressed feelings someone happened to write down.

I can relate to this myself. Just as a painter needs to paint or a musician must play, I am destined to write. Our ultimate goal is one of expression and it cannot be contained. I suspect those who are unable to express themselves often feel like exploding and if a healthy outlet is not found, often they implode in a sense of failure they can’t even define.

Expression of self is found throughout history but for brevity’s sake I will only mention a couple of examples. “The Diary of Anne Frank”, the correspondence letters of our founding fathers of the United States, and much more intriguing are letters from ancient history such as the King of Persia.

None of these persons set out to write “the novel” but were simply living their lives and expressed themselves with words. Perhaps they inwardly wanted to have others read their thoughts in hopes to share something special but in all of these examples it was not possible to mass produce books. I find it telling that they wrote anyway. Without knowledge that one day their words would be read by generations throughout the world and beyond that, their expression would change how some of us think.

An interesting thought for us is this; with the internet we don’t know who may be reading our words. I can be impulsive and spew forth whatever comes into my little brain, but a statistic I heard recently stated we can have as many as 50,000 of those in a day so how do I choose which of those to express? All you have to do is surf for a minute or two to see plenty of that going on via “Myspace” pages.

Let us instead use history to teach us something important. Long after the end of ourselves in this reality, perhaps what we write will be read by others without our fore knowledge. It makes one wonder if they would write something more important than “I just read about who my favorite rock star is dating….”?

What would you write knowing you were to be read before a king?

The new Narnia movie “Prince Caspian” was interesting to me and held some surprises. I have not read the Narnia Chronicles in many years so my memory is dim about the details. The fighting and death at first seemed too much but then I am reminded, why should we try to hide these things from our children? They see it on a regular basis just flipping through television channels.
I enjoyed the truthfulness of how this movie was presented. The heroes seem less then perfect and question their own belief. What was truth in the past should still be true today but circumstances are different so their focus wavers as they look for things to be as they once were. Dealing with change is not easy and this is portrayed well in the elder brother Peter’s character as he retreats into moments of surly anger.
Overall even the battle scenes were portrayed well. The confidence shown by these characters to know they must fight regardless of not being sure when Aslan may come is a wonderful insight of ourselves. Standing strong in the face of the enemy is not a choice it’s an absolute certainty of what we have to do. Not letting themselves be frightened at the overwhelming numbers of the enemy was a stellar point to be made and was well done in this movie. Even the ending was a teaching opportunity, to not be frightened of what the future has in store even as we know changes are coming.