Lewis essay: Transposition

How are we to truly understand? Imagine for a moment one of those early 2000’s movie boxes with a moving picture. From the top, a character appears in holding a little girl's hand. Looking from the bottom, it looks as though the little girl is standing all alone beside an unmarked grave. This has two perspectives based on how you look at the box, and could be two very different stories. In one, it is about a little girl and her daddy. In another, it is about a little girl and standing in a graveyard, which seems like a setup for a horror movie. The trick, if we take in both perspectives. If we do that, we see that the movie is actually about a girl struggling with the death of her father and moving on, thus he fades into a grave as we look at the movie box in its entirety. Transposition, for this essay, is the taking in of two perspectives to complete a full picture.

To start off this essay, we are thrown into a discussion on the speaking of tongues and Pentecost. Within this, the point that is trying to be made is that higher and lower experiences are inseparable from lower experiences.  In this, I mean that our experience as embodied creatures is such that we are able to recognize our soulish love as superior to our bodily appetite, but we cannot completely separate the two. One may be higher than another, but both are necessary to have the full experience. If they were separated, it would be like going to the movies, but only having the sound played without a picture, or vice versa.

In the New Testament, most notably in the book of Revelation, symbolism is used most notably to create a type of super earth. In this, I mean that Paul, and us, lack the proper vocabulary to describe Heaven. It is like translating a language that has a wide vocabulary to one that has fewer words than the original. Things can become lost in translation. Take, for instance, the story about the woman and her son. A woman was locked in a dungeon with only her pencils and paper. In that dungeon, she had a son. As the son grew, she tried to explain the outside world to him by drawing pictures. The only problem is that he believes the outside world is made of pencil lines. When she tells him it is not, his vision of the world becomes less clear. Thus as Christians, we must take in both realities, and relies that our point of view of a thing is not always correct, and try to incorporate a higher point of view.

I once heard a quote that said “to truly understand you must contrast, not adhere to an ideal.” I wonder if Lewis ever thought about something like this. In retrospect of what little I know of him, I think he did. In all his essays I have read, he thinks quite deeply about the subjects in which he writes about. In other essays, he tells of how he tries to see from another perspective, and cannot because that perspective is flawed. How many of us do this though? Have you looked through the eyes of someone else, to try and truly understand them. In the inner ring, do we look on the outside of a group, but do we stop to think what they might think on the inside of that ring. In this essay, the mother only saw the struggle of the child when she stopped and thought about what his point of view was. In the end, everything really depends on that. What we see is not what God sees. Can we really take in his point of view though? We can try, but we will always fall short. There are some things that have been explained to us, but the fall back is that God’s ways are not our ways. Perhaps this explanation is due because God’s ways cannot be described. Earlier we talked about things being lost in translation, so maybe there is something that cannot be translated for our understanding that we may understand God more. This is not my best summary and I apologize for that. I was lost in his rhetoric, and the only thing I really got out of it was that there is a high and low point of view, which are inseparable. I looked everywhere for explanations of this essay, for outlines, anything to help me understand this better, but found nothing. It feels as though Lewis’s writing style is leaps and bounds above my own. I find it hard to follow his main points because I feel there are so many I am missing while I am reading it. In any case, thank you for reading all these summaries. I am sorry this last one has turned out to be a bust, if it is indeed that. If you would, and if I did miss the main point of this essay, would you try to explain it to me in the section below? I would love to come to a new (if there was any before) understanding of this piece of literature.