Column: Mortal Remains
Kinderszenen
by S. M. Hutchens
In Out of the Silent Planet, Dr. Ransom interrogates a hross, one of the three intelligent species of the planet Malacandra, on the domestic life of his kind, finding it hard to believe that in that world no equivalent to marital infidelity is to be found. The hross regards what Ransom tells him about the situation on earth as equally remarkable. Ransom asks, and the hross replies:
"This love [conjugal desire], you say, comes only once while the hross lives?"
"But it takes his whole life. When he is young he has to look for his mate; and then he has to court her; and then he begets young; then he rears them; then he remembers all this, and boils it inside him and makes it into poems and wisdom."
"But the pleasure he must be content only to remember?"
"That is like saying, 'My food I must be content to eat.'"
"I do not understand."
"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing."
So it might be on an unfallen world, and so it should be in our fallen one, not just with pleasure but all experience. It should be "boiled inside" and made into poems and wisdom. The old should be rich with the power of perspective and full of digesting experience, poetic and wise.
I am now past sixty and find that scenes from childhood ("Kinderszenen," from the charming piano pieces by Schumann, which my father liked to play) are rising to consciousness with increasing strength and frequency, and with them the invitation to understand them with an older man's head—the "boiling" of which the hross was made to speak. Not being apt at verse, I shall try to make them into wisdom, and from time to time write some of it down here.
Sweet Desire
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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