Parabola Magazine

Initiations invites younger writers to share stories of events and impressions in which they experienced deep human truths in the material of their real contemporary lives. Submissions can be emailed to editorial [at] parabola [dot] org.

It takes me about two hours, door-to-door, to get from my leafy suburban home to my summer internship in New York City. While nearly every morning is spent cursing the skies for making me get up at such an ungodly hour, I must admit that I thoroughly enjoy the time given to me as I ride the train into work. Surrounded by businessmen devotedly reading The Wall Street Journal, I lose myself in the pleasure of a rare stillness. Though I ride without physical companionship, each morning I find myself greeted by the Penvensies, Mr. Tumnus and, of course, The Lion – the heroes of The Chronicles of Narnia.

The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis’ famous children’s tale, is not a new realm for me. When I was young I begged my parents to make Narnia our next vacation destination, longing to abandon the supposed comforts of this world for an epic quest with talking beasts and mankind fighting side by side. Since I was very little, I’ve longed to live in an age of true gallantry and knighthood; of bravery and royalty; of magic and the firm belief that what you were doing was important in the greatest sense. This longing, sometimes dulled but never forgotten in the bustling world my education and life, has served as my largest comfort in times when my world seemed to swim in darkness and despair. Unfortunately, it also became a burden, putting me at odds with the reality around me in my New York home and even with my birth as a contemporary American citizen. Nothing in my ordinary life seemed as real as Narnia (or Middle Earth for that matter, the world created by CS Lewis’s friend JRR Tolkien).

Now nineteen years old and about to enter my second year of college, I have come to understand that I cannot book a plane ticket (no matter what the cost) to the imagination of a deceased Irishman. But something else changed: I returned to Lewis’ literature. It is one thing to hold onto ideas you garnered as a child and another to reevaluate those ideas years later (even if somewhat painfully). I had no intention of updating or changing my beliefs: I was simply taking a class on The Inklings, a group comprised of mostly-Oxford scholars including CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. While Tolkien’s Middle Earth has arguably had a larger influence on my being as an individual, Lewis will always be the foundation of my childhood, the source of my love of all things magical and epic. Over the semester I took the Inklings course, however, I was introduced to many of Lewis’s works which I had never explored before, significantly his autobiography Surprised by Joy, which explores his younger life as well as his conversion to theism and eventually to Christianity.

In the library, in my dorm room, even in the back of some classes I simply could not put this book down. Not only was I amused by Lewis’ writing - a humorous dry style only those of a certain generation seem to have - but I was completely captivated by his description of “Joy”, a moment of longing or bliss that is so utterly overwhelming and powerful that it cannot be truly described in words. Joy is an almost shocking feeling, heart-wrenching and yet so precious that you fear that when the moment slips away it will be lost forever.

I discovered that I knew exactly what Lewis meant when he wrote of the feeling called up by great sacrifice: it is exactly how I felt when I read the death of the Great Lion, Aslan, who serves as a Christ figure for all of the adventures in Narnia. The idea of sacrifice is one that I believe has resonated with me throughout my short years on Earth, though left unnamed and even unacknowledged until reading Surprised by Joy-- and later re-reading The Chronicles of Narnia. It became clear that the longing I felt for Narnia as a young child contained a yearning to find a way to make my own way to sacrifice. I was searching for a way to help others without regard for myself. I longed for a cause that was epic and powerful, something worth dying for to make my life meaningful, just like the Kings and Queens of Narnia.

Now summer is here and I have to wake up at that inhumane hour to go to work. Instead of the more "serious" classics I swore I would read this summer, I find myself grabbing my well-worn copies of the Narnia series. Horrendously rainy days are all too common this summer. It is absolutely perfect weather to abandon the commuter, newspaper-junkie world to one I always thought of as brighter and more just than my own. Except that now I know that Narnia is a world with pain corrupted by people who suffer greatly. In Narnia, wars are fought, children are kidnapped and even the Great Lion himself, Aslan, is forced to die to save others.

As a child I never ignored the pain in Narnia, but this summer I have come to realize that it isn’t all worthy and honorable. I also understand that none of the children in those tales got to stay there indefinitely. This truly came as a shock: I had never considered that given the opportunity to go to Narnia, I would only be allowed a short stay! No child, not even the High King Peter, can stay longer than is necessary. Rereading the books yet again, I realize that I too have come the point that is reached by all sons of Adam and daughters of Eve after traveling in those lands for long enough. In my mind, I have spent many years journeying from Cair Paravel to the Stone Table learning the power of bravery and the indescribable beauty of sacrifice. I think it is time for me to take these lessons back to my own world and find an adventure of my own.

Growing up on the river, as I slowly came into what might be called consciousness, for it took me some time, I reflexively internalized the water as a metaphor for the changes I myself was undergoing, always within its sight.

As I grew from a boy, the river was there. I recall an old black fisherman, Charlie, who would stand on the rock beach with a cigar in his mouth, looking out and waiting for the lines to draw taught. As I learned by visiting him regularly, all Charlie ever caught were catfish and eels. He put these in a red bucket. Before he left he threw them back.

Even then I suspected that Charlie was not fishing for catch, but for something within himself. That the act of stringing the line and tossing, for me, came to represent the visible image of an interior process. I never learned what Charlie hoped to lift from below the surface, what mythic creature, dripping heavily from the bow, he hoped to meet eyes with. Charlie has long since died.

When I was young, my parents would take me to the beach to skip stones. When I was older, I slipped down to the river to drink. At night, the river was black. The bridge looked like a colored arch over nothingness, supported only by rippling columns of light. Sometimes I remained on the beach until morning. At dawn, the river looked like a pink sheet of hammered steel.

With friends, I stole under the bridge, a construction site. Wood and rope and concrete walkways. The clamor of the traffic overhead was so loud we couldn’t hear one another, or ourselves even. We stretched out on the old docked barges and looked out onto the water. The southern half of the sky was orange even at midnight, the magnification of the lights from the city by the pollution. When we saw lights come on in a nearby house, we disappeared along the sand, foam tracing the high waves.

I began to canoe back and forth across the river. At that point, my hair was down to my shoulders. I would set out from the beach where Charlie had fished. On the other side, I discovered the old, overgrown, white concrete foundation of a demolished industrial plant, an car factory as I was later told. Weeds had grown up in the chinks and crevasses. Steps led down into abandoned, watery basements. I made eyes with a fox, which loped away as I approached.

One day, paddling back I was stopped by the river patrol. The man thought I was crazy. I couldn’t explain to him what I was thinking, that it was just something I needed, that I had so much energy. Weeks later, I was halfway across when the wind picked up and the clouds began to jet southward. The current began to sweep me downriver at a terrible speed, toward New York. I shot under the bridge and horseshoed about. As I reached the western shore the rain broke. I slowly paddled my way back north, reaching home after dark.

To mark the various stages of my life, consciously and by means of symbols, I have bathed in the river. With my friends one night, I remember leaving my clothes on the beach and wading in. There was a fragile feeling among us, almost sacred. We were aware of creating a memory of ourselves as we were, precisely to be remembered. The riverbottom was slippery and rocky. We swam out as far as we could and tread water, feet kicking in the dark, just our heads above the liquid miles streaked with the bridge’s lights.

With three girls now, I have been swimming. I have taken them down to the beach, and led them by the hand across the rocks, cold slapping against our knees. Swum with them among the docks, pointed to the seagulls on the serrated wooden posts. In my memory, these days form a unified sequence, as if they had occurred one after the next. Three days, three memories, three times myself. Now when I come back, I like to bathe in the river alone, to try to remember how it felt. Usually, I recover very little.

With the last of the girls, on the night before I left for college, unable to sleep, and desiring not to, I walked the streets for much of the night. We went to the bridge and back, then down to what I still thought of as Charlie’s beach. What I saw there terrified me. That day, of all the days they might have begun to do it, the town had reduced the beach to a mound of dirt. A bulldozer stood idly in the dark. I asked her if we could leave, and she said yes we could. We returned to my house and several hours later I departed, forever in a way, although how could I realize it. Although I have still not left the river, strangely enough. Where I am now overlooks the upper Hudson. Here the river is narrow and slow, not the wide and bottomless body I remember. And so am I, to be honest, narrower, slower, not the wide and bottomless body I remember.

Perhaps because of the strength of my early impression of the water, I have compulsively conducted various researches into the metaphor, which occurred to me as it has to others, I have learned. Looking at the same river I did, in Moby Dick, Ishmael asks what it is about water. Why as one strolls down the length of Manhattan Island one meets countless others, leaning against rails or sitting on benches, also peering into the depths. “Surely this is not without meaning,” he says:

And still deeper the meaning of the story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

In the beginning of Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud considers a claim made by novelist Romain Rolland. For Rolland, Freud writes, the source of religiosity is in “a peculiar feeling…a sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic.’” Freud concludes that what Rolland describes as ‘the oceanic feeling’ is a residual memory of an early period of life, in which the boundaries of the self have yet to solidify. The child is not yet separate from the world, at this stage. In the child’s self is contained everything. He is limitless, unbounded. Slowly, he comes into what might be called consciousness. He learns to demarcate, but the memory of the original state remains, like a sea inside. What he sees on the beach of any water body large enough is the visible image of who he was.

Years ago now, a friend I have since lost touch with told me about a metaphor of Friedrich Nietzsche’s. I have never been able to find it myself, despite having looked for it. Quite possibly, I am willing to admit, it does not exist, or, if it does, in my memory it is distorted beyond recognition. To me, of course, this hardly matters, because what has struck me is what I recall he said.

In the metaphor, man is the pilot of a tugboat, lost on the open sea. He does not know how wide the water is, much less how deep. Now and then, he sees other such tugboats in the distance. Every few years he runs into one, or at least comes within shouting distance. He cannot leave the helm.

For me, the metaphor is as follows. I am standing on the river bank, where the river is widest. And the water is flowing by. There is a wrecked wooden hull on the rocks. There is a metal bridge that arcs and slides colorfully I have never crossed. There are fish in the water, enormous fish that in some ancient past I have seen leap, bulk quivering in the air, faceless with colored scales glittering. And then I am in the water, and I can feel it rushing. And then I am underneath, legs tucked to chest and quietly turning.

James Molloy is a senior at Bard College.

Image: Bear Mountain Bridge from Below by SamuelWantman