Repetitively Redundant in a Reiterative Manner

I've read some short selections from C. S. Lewis's God in the Dock before, and I've always been rather impressed by what I've read. This time, I determined I would plow through the whole text, and all the kernels of brilliance would finally be mine, all mine! Unfortunately, I've got to admit that the book gets disappointing in larger doses. When I first started reading, I was rather impressed by Lewis's power to craft memorable illustrations. For instance, C. S. Lewis argues that pre-Modern man was not superstitious and unaware of "the laws of nature": to prove this, Lewis points out that Joseph, Jesus's father, was familiar with the standard scientific m.o. for baby production and wanted to divorce Mary quietly. This is a rather memorable illustration. It is so memorable that in every instance in which C. S. Lewis wishes to make this same point, he uses the same illustration.

It's bad enough when Lewis repeats an illustration that I initially had some fondness for. It's harder when he's repeating himself about something that didn't mean much to me to begin with. For instance, I suppose that decades ago, there were hordes of atheists whose chief objection to the existence of God was the fact that science had proved that the universe was really big. Like Lewis, I am unable to see why this is a substantial objection against God's existence. Unlike Lewis, I have not written several different essays all explaining that this is wrong and that Christians (post-Ptolemy) have known that the universe is quite large. I don't doubt that Lewis knew a number of atheists who were committed to this disproof of the existence of God, but I don't think many of them are around right now, so reading about them becomes tiresome around the fourth essay about them.

To be fair to Lewis, God in the Dock is not his own compilation; the editor Walter Hooper compiled C. S. Lewis's writings from various sources. I'm sure if C. S. Lewis had been given the proofs, he probably would have cut out the redundant parts. Yet it still is surprising that as creative a writer as C. S. Lewis, in essays written over a period of twenty-four years (according to Hooper), keeps saying the same thing, and using the same anecdotes to say the same thing (even if, admittedly, he is writing for different audiences). Yes, he used the same anecdotes because they were good, and he made the same points because they were important. I get that. But it's still so tedious! In "Author's Prayer, "the poet Ilya Kaminsky writes, "I must write the same poem over and over/for the empty page is a white flag of their surrender. " That may be true. But after the tenth time of reading the same poem the reader might wave the white flag of surrender and move on to a different poet.

Noting the repeititive redundancies in Lewis has made me somewhat self-reflective. When you come right down to it, we all repeat ourselves endlessly. When I'm out in public with my wife and making small talk, even back before we were married, she heard the same anecdotes over and over again. Heck, back when I began this blog, I thought I had a nearly inexhaustible supply of weirdness coursing through my veins, but even my brain cannot provide me with enough instances of weirdness a week for regular blogging (say, three entries a week): Sometimes I must even take recourse to the rich untapped Alaskan oil wells of pseudoprofundities from the distant past.

Even when I find a unique subject to blog about, I find myself repeating similar sentence structures or using the same words (i.e. the word "cuteness"). It is odd to speculate that, perhaps at the point when most bloggers first begin their blog--before they have yet developed a fan base--such bloggers have the largest supply of new things to say, because they have been developing ideas for all of the previous portion of their life: all too soon, they will only have 2/3 days to develop a new idea. C. S. Lewis merrily wrote essays for different audiences and often said the same thing, probably never dreaming that the essays would be collected together and that close proximity would make the repetition so visible. When we blog, we also repeat ourselves, without the luxury of hiding the repetition into different places so that we seem more creative than we are. (I don't think this would have been Lewis's intention; it would, however, have been mine.) Perhaps we repeat ourselves in blogging because we cannot help dwelling on subjects that we care about and continue to care about. Perhaps we "must write the same blog entry over and over/for the empty computer screen is but the white flag of surrender."