Love in the Enderverse

22 July, 201321 July, 2013Marissa

Cover of the only version of *Ender’s Game* I could find in the library

Since the beginning of this year, I’ve been reading Orson Scott Card’s Ender books. Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say I’ve been absorbed by them. So far, I’ve finished Ender’s Game, the three sequels, and four of the Shadow books (Shadows in Flight is waiting for me on the bookshelf). After finishing these books, I feel like I know the characters better than many people I’ve been friends with for years.

I’d been meaning to read more Orson Scott Card for some time, since I stumbled upon one of his short stories in a sci-fi collection. Ender’s Game moved to the top of my reading list after I found out it’s going to be a film. I wanted to read the book before Hollywood ruins it (don’t get me wrong — I’m going to see the movie and it might be good, but there’s no way it can be as good as the book).

The Ideas

It’s not just the amazing characters that make these books so compelling. The ideas that Card presents in his stories are some of the most fascinating I’ve ever encountered in fiction. Ender’s key to defeating an enemy is just a sample of these compelling ideas (quote is from Ender’s Game, the idea shows up in all the books).

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them…. I destroy them.

Don’t you just want to give him a hug? Anyway, this is the idea I’ve pondered the most since starting this series: when you fully understand someone and see through their eyes, you can’t help but love them. This is underscored (for me at least) by my reaction to the characters. By the end of Ender’s Game, I knew him and felt for him. I had similar connections with Bean in Ender’s Shadow and Peter in the other Shadow books, especially Shadow of the Giant. Orson Scott Card wrote the characters so well that readers can understand them well enough to love them (to the point that I finished three of these eight books in tears not necessary because I was sad, but because I was overwhelmed by how much I sympathized with the characters).

A Spiritual Question

One of the thoughts this idea — the connection between understanding someone and loving them — has sparked in my mind is a possible answer to a spiritual question. Just reading though the Bible, I can accept “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son” (John 3:16). But when I start to think about this a little more deeply it’s mind-blowing. Christ didn’t come to die only for the good “lovable” people in the world. He died for and loved everyone, even the people we would classify as the most unlovable. How is such love possible?

Since reading books from the Enderverse, I’ve been wondering if God’s love for everyone might have something to do with the fact that He is all-knowing. He understands everything and sees into our hearts, and even when He does not approve of our actions or is angry with us, He loves perfectly. It’s an interesting “something to think about.”

If you’d like to try reading these novels, here’s a list of books in the series. It shows both publication order and a (rough) chronological order in the Enderverse.

Vive Les Introverts

24 June, 201322 June, 2013Marissa

I’ve been fascinated by type psychology since high school. In lieu of a guidance counselor (since I was homeschooled), my mother suggested I see if the library had any books about career testing or if I could find websites that offered free tests. That was when I first stumbled upon the MBTI and discovered my personality type. I know there are many people who don’t find value in personality types, either because the type method doesn’t fit them well or they just don’t care, but when I found out what my type was, I suddenly felt like I wasn’t alone in the universe. Apparently this is a typical reaction for INFJs, since it is the least common type.

Before this turns into a post about my personality type, I want to get on to my real topic. Last week, I came across this video via the blog Personality Junkie. If you have 19 minutes, I highly recommend watching it. Even if you’re not an introvert, she has an interesting perspective on culture and the contributions of both introverts and extroverts to society.

I read Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, a few months ago. If you like this talk, you should check it out. Her research is extensive, and it’s presented in a reader-friendly, almost conversational format.

“Introverts … may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.” – Susan Cain

Even though I grew up in one of the most introvert-friendly environments you can find (homeschooled by supportive, introverted parents), I’ve long felt like there was “something wrong with me.” This is apparently common for introverts, especially in western culture where we are constantly presented with extroversion as a cultural ideal. Fun, outgoing, talkative people are surrounded by friends and happy — melancholy, lonely bookworms who stay home on Saturday night can only wish they were that “cool.”

good grade, social life, adequate sleep. Pick Two [welcome to college] — I’ll take #1 and #3, please

By the time I was a couple years into my college studies, I’d become convinced that working alone was the best way for me to succeed. Writing my ideas was more productive than talking about them, working in groups just slowed me down. But even carrying a 3.98 GPA didn’t help much when favorite professors said, “You’d be the perfect student if only we could get you to talk more.” I was already talking more than I wanted — sometimes as much as once or twice per class to get those participation points I didn’t usually need, but was too contentious to just ignore.

Since reading Susan Cain’s book and another called Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life if Your Hidden Strength by Laurie Helgoe, I’ve started to feel more comfortable embracing my introvertedness. Ironically, this has helped me when I need (or want) to extrovert — it’s easier to talk to people when I’m more comfortable being myself.

“Let’s clear one thing up: Introverts do not hate small talk because we dislike people. We hate small talk because we hate the barrier it creates between people.” – Laurie Helgoe

About 50% of the world’s population is introverted, and research indicates we are born with a base personality type. Though socialization plays a role, we can’t help being introverted or extroverted. And there’s really no reason we should want to “help it.” Introverts have just as much to offer the world as extroverts. We just approach life a little differently.

Fairy Tales

17 June, 201316 November, 2014Marissa

I love fairy tales. When I was little, my exposure to fairy tales was mostly through Disney films (my favorite is Beauty and the Beast, just in case anyone is wondering). I started seriously reading fairy tales just a few years ago, when my favorite English professor loaned me a collection of Celtic Fairy Tales. Since then, I’ve read all the Brothers Grimm tales, many of Andersen’s fairy tales, more Celtic folklore, and collections of French fairy tales including Perrault’s writings.

I’ve been reading some of C.S. Lewis’s essays collected in the book “Of Other Worlds.” I’ve enjoyed reading his fiction (Narnia and the Space Trilogy), as well as Mere Christianity, so it was nice to get insight into his mind and writing process. For the blogt I wrote to post on my writing website tomorrow (yes, I write under a pen name), I turned to one of these essays for inspiration. I liked writing it so much, that I decided to post it here as well.

C.S. Lewis on Children’s Writings

By tracking down a quote on Pinterest, I came across C.S. Lewis’s essay “On Three Ways of Writing For Children” (full text online here). Though I don’t write specifically for children, I like to think that my fantasy novels would appeal to (and be appropriate for) some young people. After all, I can’t be the only child who was reading Jules Verne by age 10 and searching for other stories of the fantastic.

The essay becomes most interesting to me when Lewis addresses the question of what kinds of stories are worth reading as children. Since he wrote children’s fantasy — not because he set out to write for children, but “because a children’s story is [sometimes] the best art-form for something you have to say” — he spends much of the essay defending fairy tales.

If I have allowed the fantastic type of children’s story to run away with this discussion, that is because it is the kind I know and love best, not because I wish to condemn any other. But the patrons of the other kinds very frequently want to condemn it. About once every hundred years some wiseacre gets up and tries to banish the fairy tale. Perhaps I had better say a few words in its defence, as reading for children.

Just as when Lewis was writing (in 1952), modern parents have been banning classic fairy tales. Hansel and Gretle and Little Red Riding Hood are not read because they are “too scary,” but there are other reasons as well. More than 50% of parents wouldn’t “read their kids Cinderella because the heroine spends her days doing housework. Many felt that this theme of female domesticity didn’t send a good message.” The politically incorrect word “dwarves” disqualifies Snow White from polite society. Rapunzel’s kidnapping and imprisonment is “too dark” a theme (actually, it is darker than they think– in the Grimms version she’s not actually kidnapped. Her father gives her to a witch to save his own life).

Whether or not to read fairy tales (and which ones to read) to children is a choice that will vary from parent to parent and also depends on the child. There are plenty of fairy tales I wouldn’t read to a very young or sensitive child (like The Little Mermaid, where she is in agony the entire time she has legs and dies at the end). But on the whole, I tend to agree with Lewis when he said,

Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker. Nor do most of us find that violence and bloodshed, in a story, produce any haunting dread in the minds of children. As far as that goes, I side impenitently with the human race against the modern reformer. Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end the book. Nothing will persuade me that this causes an ordinary child any kind or degree of fear beyond what it wants, and needs, to feel. …

It would be nice if no little boy in bed, hearing, or thinking he hears, a sound, were ever at all frightened. But if he is going to be frightened, I think it better that he should think of giants and dragons than merely of burglars. And I think St George, or any bright champion in armour, is a better comfort than the idea of the police.

As a child who was deeply afraid of things that go bump in the night, I can wholeheartedly support Lewis’s claim that a “bright champion in armour” is a far better comforter than the police. And if my mind had not been filled with fairy tales, fantasy, and knights in shining armor I would never have dreamed up Jamen and Karielle or Bryant and Aelis (who now live in my in-progress and finished novels) or invented Ves’endlara.

Which fairy tales would you read, or not read to children? As an adult, do you enjoy reading fairy tales?

Sherlock, Roses, and God

8 June, 20138 June, 2013Marissa

prink rose 'Bill Warner' — ‘Bill Warner’

I was reading Sherlock Holmes “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty” the other day when I came across a quote about religion. I’ve read maybe a third of the Doyle’s Sherlock stories, but never thought of the character as religious before. In this story, Sherlock has just heard the particulars of a case and walks to the open window, where he plucks a rose.

“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,” said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. “It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a conditions of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

I’ve marveled at the roses growing in my garden as examples of God’s creative work, but not precisely in this light before. Sherlock’s belief that, “It is only goodness which gives extras” fits perfectly with this scripture:

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with Whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.(James 1:17)

How many “extras” has God put in your life? How many gifts has He given that are not necessary for your existence, but make life so much more enjoyable?

Aside from flowers, one of the first things I thought of was books. If all my 1,000+ books disappeared right now I would 1) have the most outrageous panic attack, but 2) life would go on in that I don’t need books to stay alive. Music, fluffy cats, chocolate covered almonds, and the computer I’m typing this with are all “extras.”

Considering this, the only thing I can think of to say is:

Praise ye the LORD. O give thanks unto the LORD; for He is good: for His mercy endureth for ever. Who can utter the mighty acts of the LORD? who can shew forth all His praise? (Ps. 106:1-2)

Fortuitous Fabric Shopping

15 April, 2013Marissa

Yesterday, my brother and I went fabric shopping. This in itself is momentous, considering he suffers from an allergy to all shopping that does not involve food or manly building projects. But he wants a Medieval costume for SCA events and I told him I’d sew it if he picked out the pattern and fabric.

I stumbled upon the Society for Creative Anachronisms a few years ago, but didn’t join because I didn’t want to be by myself when I went to the meetings. Now that my brother is older, he thinks full armored combat sounds amazing and can’t wait to join me in pretending we live in pre-17th-century Europe.

While we were getting our chosen fabric cut at Jo-Anne’s, the woman who was waiting on us asked what the costume was for. We told her, and lo-and-behold she was a member of our local SCA group. She invited us to the meetings, told us what to expect, said there were a couple people close to my brother’s age there, and (best of all) that they have people in the group who practice Medieval painting. As in, illuminated manuscripts. As in, I-CAN-BARELY-CONTAIN-MY-EXCITEMENT.

I got to see a collection of illuminated manuscripts at the Cleveland Museum of Art a couple years ago. “The Glory of the Painted Page,” it was called, and it was indeed glorious. I love books, and have a great deal of admiration for those long-dead artists who hand wrote and carefully illustrated manuscripts from the Medieval period. To have the opportunity to learn that art is incredibly exciting.