Out Of The Silent Planet

 Out Of The Silent Planet

By CS Lewis

 

Ransom gets kidnapped by two villains and taken in a spaceship to a near by planet called Malacandara.  In the first days on the planet the three are challenged by habitants.   There is a clash and Ransom finds himself freed from his captives to discover on his own the workings of the civilization which until his arrival didn’t know existed.  He initially befriends the Hrossa , people involved in in the initial clash.  Over the course of quick time Ransom begins to learn their language and the lay of the land.  He learns of the destination in his quest to meet the planet’s god Oyarsa, to learn of his fate on this new planet or a journey back to earth; and his new friends attempt to escort him there.  On his quest after leaving the company of Hrossa he comes across an new clan of people call Hanakra.  It turns out the Hanakra are just as helpful as Hrossa in escorting him to his final destination.  And finally, along the way Ransom becomes aware of yet a third clan on the planet call pfifltriggi.  These creatures were mainly responsible to all creatures the making of things on the planet. 

While there is animosity amongst all creatures they all lived in relative harmony.  This comes out in the end with Ransom and his earthing capturers are interviewed by the planet leader Oyarsa as they learn their destiny.  As it turns out Oyarsa make the earthlings well aware of the civilization on earth as he point to the sky where earth is, and its close.  The moral message that Lewis was attempting to achieve was If we could even effect in one percent of our readers a change-over from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we should have made a beginning.

Notes (in draft will complete in near future):

·       Page 37: Space was the wrong name.  Of thinkers had been wiser when simply named the heavens – heavens which declared the glory the:

Happy climes that ly

Where day never shuts his eye

Up the broad fields of the sky

·       Page 47: He wondered how he could have ever thought of planets, even of Earth. As islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void.  Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets-  the earth’s he called them in his thought – as mere holes of gaps in the living heaven …

·       Page 48: you cannot see things to you know roughly what they are.  His first impression was bright. Pale world – a water-colour world out of a child’s paint box

·       Page 60:  “Hullo Ransom,- he stopped puzzled.  No, it was only himself: he was Ransom.  Or was he?  Who was the man whm he had led to a hot stream and tucked up in bed. Telling him not to drink the strange water”  Obvioisy some new-comer who didn’t know the place as wel as he.  Bust whatever Ransom had told him, he was he was going to drink now.  And he lay down on the bank and plunged his face in the warm rushing liquid.  It was good to drink.  It had a strong mineral flavor, but it was very good. He drank again and found himself greatly refreshed and steadied.  All that about the other Ransom was nonsense.

·       Page 70:  The thought of parting from the Hrossa could not be seriously entertained; in its animality shocked him in a dozen ways, but his longing to learn the language, and, deeper still, the shy, ineluctable fascination for unlike, the sense that the key to prodigious adventure was being put in his hands – all this had really attached to it by bonds stronger than he knew.

·       Page 86:  Hyoi, if you had more and more young, would the Meledil broaden, the handiamit (land) and make enough plants for them all?

“The seroni know that sot of thing.  But why shod we have more young?”  Ransom found this difficult,  At last he said: “Is the begetting of young not a pleasure of the Horossa?”  A very great one, Hman.  This is what we call love”.  If a thing is a pleasure more ofteh than the number of young that can be fed.’  It took Hyoi a long time to get the point.  “you mean” he said ‘that he might do it not only in one or two year of his life but again?”  “yes”

·       Page 87: “a pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.  You are speak, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another.  It is all one thing.  The seroni could say it is better than I say it now.  Not better than I say it in a poem.  What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem..  When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing.  Now it is growing something as we remember it.  But still we know very little about it. What it will be when remembering it as I lie down to die, what it takes in me all my days till then – that is its real meaning.  The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world.  Do they not teach you this?

·       Page 89: Oh but that is so different.  I long to kill this hanakra as he longs to kill me.  I hope…waiting for email

·       Page 92: perhaps, too. There was something in the air now breathed, on in society of the hrossa, which had begun to work a change on him.

·       Page 95: with such companions or with none – he must have a deed on his memory instead of one broken dream.  It was in obedience to something like conscience that he exclaimed.

·       Page 102:  email titled page 95

·       Page 111:  email

·       Page 118: The remote horizon seemed but an arm’s length away.   The fissures and molding of distant slopes were clear as the background of a primitive picture made before men learned perspective.  …  He was on the very frontier of that heaven he had known in the space-ship, and rays that were air enveloped worlds cannot taste were once more upon his body.  He felt the old lift of his heart, the soaring solemnity, the sense, at onve sober and ecstatic, of life and power offered un asked and unmeasured abundance.

·       Page 122: They were astonished at what he had to tell them of human history – of war, slavery, prostitution.  It was because they have no Qyarsa, said one of his pupils.  “It is because one of them wants to ba a little Oyarsa hum self” said Augray.  “they cannot help it” said the old sorn.  “there must be rule, yet how can creatures rule themselves?

·       Page 135: email

·       Page 137: “Then you must make every bent work/  How wold a maker understand working in suns’ blood unless he went into the home of the suns’ blood himself and knew one kind from another and lived with it for days out of the light of the sky till it was in his blood and his heart, as if he thought it and ate it and spat it?”

·       Page 146:  email

·       Page 149:  The voice of Oyarsa spoke for the fist time to the two men

“why have yu killed my hnau?” it said

Weston and Devine looked anxiously about them to identify the speaker>

‘God” exclaimed Devine in English. “ don’t tell me they’ve got a loud speaker”

“Ventriloquism” replied West in a husky whisper.  “Quite common among savages”

·       Page 181:  If we could even effect in one percent of our readers a change-over from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we should have made a beginning.