En ny søndag og en ny smakebit fra boken jeg leser. Dette er et boktema hos bloggen Flukten fra virkeligheten. Et boktema hvor du kan finne smakebiter fra en hel rekke flotte bøker. I dag holder jeg på å pakke før min reise til Tyrkia, jeg prøver også å få sett noen tv program jeg har tatt opp for å få plass til det jeg vil ta opp mens jeg er borte. En liten tur ut burde det også bli tid til.
Boken jeg leser akkurat nå er Phantastes av George MacDonald, en fantasy som ble gitt ut i 1858. I forordet står det at dette var en bok C.S. Lewis leste før han skrev Narnia og at den handler om vår åndelige verden. Det var en spennende synsvinkel å lese boken i.

“Shall I be able to see these beings?” said I.
“That I cannot tell yet, not knowing how much of the fairy nature there is in you. But we shall soon see whether you can discern the fairies in my little garden, and that will be some guide to us.”
“Are the threes fairies too, as well as the flowers?” I asked.
“They are of the same race,” she replied; “though those you call fairies in your country are chiefly the young children of the flower fairies. They are very fond of having fun with the thick people, as they call you: for, like most children, they like fun better than anything else.”

“I was dead, and right content,” the narrator says in the penultimate chapter of Phantastes. C.S. Lewis said that upon reading this astonishing 19th-century fairy tale he “had crossed a great frontier,” and numerous others both before and since have felt similarly. In MacDonald’s fairy tales, both those for children and (like this one) those for adults, the “fairy land” clearly represents the spiritual world, or our own world revealed in all of its depth and meaning. At times almost forthrightly allegorical, at other times richly dreamlike (and indeed having a close connection to the symbolic world of dreams), this story of a young man who finds himself on a long journey through a land of fantasy is more truly the story of the spiritual quest that is at the core of his life’s work, a quest that must end with the ultimate surrender of the self. The glory of MacDonald’s work is that this surrender is both hard won (or lost ) and yet rippling with joy when at last experienced. As the narrator says of a heavenly woman in this tale, “She knew something too good to be told.” One senses the same of the author himself.