Sunday, December 5, 2010
This must be a strange deception By celestial intervention
There's this quote near the end of The Magician's Nephew when Aslan tells Digory and Polly that Jadis "has won her heart's desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want: they do not always like it." I remember reading it and thinking that that was absolutely incorrect.
I don't think I ever believed him because people don't always get what they want. And from reading the stories I don't think Jadis is the sort of person to wallow in misery, she's too pragmatic to even think of being in depressive introspection. It is also quite doubtful that she would even feel misery because all that she is capable of feeling appears to be limited to anger, fear, pride, hatred, self-gratification, possessiveness, and possibly the sense of joy that she is possibly the strongest or most powerful person, or that she's hurt someone. Misery (and not even greed, or ambition!) is not something one would associate with her, because what she thinks seems to be more on the lines of 'everything is rightfully mine, I just need to get them to acknowledge it' and not of 'I want to take over the world'. If you have read The Magician's Nephew, you'd see that the way she acts in London (what with ordering people around) is as if she is the rightful ruler, even though she has just arrived in a world where no one has heard of "Charn", let alone her.
The other point is that he also said that "they do not always like it." This is admittedly partially true, of course, but Jadis would never be the sort to regret that she did something, or even if she did, she'd probably like it in the end. She is evil (and I don't think anyone would ever contend that point), cruel, apathetic, selfish, and I would even go as far as too say that she's sociopathic. She enjoys torturing people and revels in their pain. She'd probably even go as far as to murder her own subjects. She thinks of people as either tools for her use, and that she's their rightful owner and all she needs to do is to make them acknowledge it, or as obstacles that she can easily take care of. But immortality is what she desires, and when she gets it, Aslan says she'll regret ever getting it because all that she will feel with length of days and an evil heart is an exponentially increased length of misery. That is untrue, because you will only feel everlasting misery for being evil and immortal if you actually care about how people view your morality. I don't think Jadis actually cares about whether people thinks she's evil or not, and if she doesn't care, what she doesn't care about can't hurt her, can it? So you know that she doesn't not like it, nor does she regret it, because not only is regret is a waste of energy, she would only regret it if she cared about what people thought of her, and she doesn't care about that, does she?
So what can I say, I'll have to disagree with Aslan's words, and by association, C.S. Lewis.
I apologize for that ridiculously long post because I just had to say that somewhere. And of course, there are a lot of others, but don't expect them. Unless I really am in a terrible mood (or it is the holidays, like it is now), in which you'll probably see about three hundred different ideologies about a hundred different things and I'd probably never work up the nerve to post it. But the thing is that I do want to say something, and above all I do want to say something about my thoughts on different things and that just appeared out of nowhere while I was doing random character analyses. Yes, I actually do that when I have nothing better to do. It provides about just as much entertainment than song analyses, and it does get more interesting when people actually know who or what I am talking about, unlike in songs.
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Isn't it strange that the Legend of Zelda Main Theme was composed by Koji Kondo in 1986, which is the same year that the Different Light album came out and WLAE made to the top of the billboards for four weeks (which, by the way, is a first for girl bands) around Christmas time, 14 years ago.
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Posted at 2:02 PM
