Plato. Gorgias, p36 s472b

You don't compell me, instead you produce many false witnesses against me and try to banish me from my property, the truth.

Many Dimensions by Charles Williams

Quick Take: A bit of a mess, atmospheric reading.

No one should be judged by side notes in a biography about someone else, but Charles

Williams may have deserved it. He was properly odd and Tolkien didn't like him (neither did Alan Jacobs) and he was a bit weird about the land being actually a woman named Albion that he overlaid on the geography. Bless.

Jack Lewis liked him. Either Charles Williams was extraordinary or Lewis's capability for friendship was. Since Lewis also befriended Tolkien, it was the probably latter. Lewis's most sensible friend seems like Owen Barfield, but that is beside the point.

A quick summation of the story: There is a stone that can weigh hearts, divide itself, teleport, heal and travel in time. It is divided and falls into the hands of a Judge and his secretary, a scientist, a salesman, and a millionaire. The original owners are after it. Shenanigans almost ensue, but because they can bend time, nothing actually does, but some people meet their Maker sooner.

To the point, picking up Williams is like reading That Hideous Strength as a genre or a thought

experiment. Everything ends up in a weird soup. Williams seems to have a concept, place it amongst a cast, then judge their reactions. It is not so much a story as a scenario. Nothing

happened and if it almost did, the actors were struck dead. That is part of the problem with so much power or opportunity being at hand. He created a novel that centered on M.A.D, so

everyone noodled about, trying to get around it.

The reactions and understanding of motives were accurate, but the deep dives into the mind seemed off to me. It could be because writing the thought life of a woman, even an intellectually gifted and coherent one, is beyond the skills of most men.

The scene changes were disorienting because a character would think of another and then vou would have found yourself eating kippers with Mark instead of staring jealously with Jim. It was like staring into the eyes of an author as he tells you his story, very intense.

I don't know enough to comment on the Islamic mysticism, but where he spoke about people and judgement being inherent to our desires he was on point.

"His desire was to fulfill good as he knew it," the Haji said "Therefore he was capable of

receiving within those conditions the End of Desire, which is eternally good."

"Once you are in contact, and you choose, and desire and will, you go into it and come out

again where you have desired because everything is in it, anyhow."

The choices of the characters brought them heaven or hell on earth depending on their desires  It was all bound up like the circles of Inferno and there was no resurrection, no eucatastrophe. Loss was true loss.

When it came to the sacrifice of the piece, it is like the power gouged out personhood senselessly. Or that she came too close to the Holy of Holies without protection or sanction though that would counter her actions in the rest of the book. Her personal goal was to empty herself of desire and return it to the stone to do what it would do and even in that she received her wish and was emptied. Maybe, this is the influence of a Muslim relic over a Christian one, but he did attempt to make it transcend that.

There is something wrong about that ending.

She was not built up towards fruitfulness, but sacrificed by all the men on their own heroic feelings about her. It smacked of the angel  in the house.

When you take Many Dimensions and place it next to That Hideous Strength, they parallel one another. It is as if Lewis read this and wanted to fix it. He distanced Ransom from Jane, pushing her towards her ordered love for her husband even though she wanted to reject it to become more right. In THS it is rejecting physical realities that gets Jane in trouble to begin with. She can’t stop messing around with John Donne, misunderstanding him entirely according to Lewis, and have babies.

When she finally gives it all up and repents, she is able to usher in Albion through the mundane glory of having a child.

Williams gets gnostic. As if the husk of a body left behind were the greater good and it would be noble for all of us to discard what God called very good.

The scientist and the salesmen were Weston and Divine.

Further Up and Further In

Plato. Gorgias, p25 s455

I call this flattery... It guesses at what is pleasant with no consideration for what is best.