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 

·       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 hnakra as he also longs to kill me. I hope that my ship will be the first and I first in my ship with my straight spear when the black jaws snap. And if he kills me, my people will mourn and my brothers will desire still more to kill him. But they will not wish that there were no hnéraki; nor do I. How can I make you understand, when you do not understand the poets? The hnakra is our enemy, but he is also our beloved. We feel in our hearts his joy as he looks down from the mountain of water in the north where he was born; we leap with him when he jumps the falls; and when winter comes, and the lake smokes higher than our heads, it is with his eyes that we see it and know that his roaming time is come. We hang images of him in our houses, and the sign of all the hrossa is a hnakra. In him the spirit of the valley lives; and our young play at being hnéraki as soon as they can splash in the shallows.’"

·       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.  "It would be a strange but not an inconceivable world; heroism and poetry at the bottom, cold scientific intellect above it, and overtopping all some dark superstition which scientific intellect, helpless against the revenge of the emotional depths it had ignored, had neither will nor power to remove."

·       Page 102:  "It would be a strange but not an inconceivable world; heroism and poetry at the bottom, cold scientific intellect above it, and overtopping all some dark superstition which scientific intellect, helpless against the revenge of the emotional depths it had ignored, had neither will nor power to remove."

·       Page 111:  "‘That is not the way to say it,’ it replied. ‘Body is movement. If it is at one speed, you smell something; if at another, you hear a sound; if at another, you see a sight; if at another, you neither see nor hear nor smell, nor know the body in any way. But mark this, Small One, that the two ends meet.’ ‘How do you mean?’ ‘If movement is faster, then that which moves is more nearly in two places at once.’ ‘That is true.’ ‘But if the movement were faster still – it is difficult, for you do not know many words – you see that if you made it faster and faster, in the end the moving thing would be in all places at once, Small One.’ ‘I think I see that.’ ‘Well, then, that is the thing at the top of all bodies – so fast that it is at rest, so truly body that it has ceased being body at all. But we will not talk of that. Start from where we are, Small One. The swiftest thing that touches our senses is light. We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge – the last thing we know before things become too swift for us. But the body of an eldil is a movement swift as light; you may say its body is made of light, but not of that which is light for the eldil. His “light” is a swifter movement which for us is nothing at all; and what we call light is for him a thing like water, a visible thing, a thing he can touch and bathe in – even a dark thing when not illumined by the swifter. And what we call firm things – flesh and earth – seem to him thinner, and harder to see, than our light, and more like clouds, and nearly nothing. To us the eldil is a thin, half-real body that can go through walls and rocks: to himself he goes through them because he is solid and firm and they are like cloud. And what is true light to him and fills the heaven, so that he will plunge into the rays of the sun to refresh himself from it, is to us the black nothing in the sky at night. These things are not strange, Small One, though they are beyond our senses. But it is strange that the eldila never visit Thulcandra.’"

·       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: "Even allowing for the strangeness of the subject from a Malacandrian point of view and for the stylization of their art, still, he thought, the creature might have made a better attempt at the human form than these stock-like dummies, almost as thick as they were tall, and sprouting about the head and neck into something that looked like fungus. He hedged. ‘I expect it is like me as I look to your people,’ he said. ‘It is not how they would draw me in my own world.’"

·       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:  "‘For the first question, Oyarsa, I have come here because I was brought. Of the others, one cares for nothing but the suns’ blood, because in our world he can exchange it for many pleasures and powers. But the other means evil to you. I think he would destroy all your people to make room for our people; and then he would do the same with other worlds again. He wants our race to last for always, I think, and he hopes they will leap from world to world… always going to a new sun when an old one dies… or something like that.’ ‘Is he wounded in his brain?’ ‘I do not know. Perhaps I do not describe his thoughts right. He is more learned than I.’ ‘Does he think he could go to the great worlds? Does he think Maleldil wants a race to live for ever?’ ‘He does not know there is any Maleldil. But what is certain, Oyarsa, is that he means evil to your world. Our kind must not be allowed to come here again. If you can prevent it only by killing all three of us, I am content.’ ‘If you were my own people I would kill them now, Ransom, and you soon; for they are bent beyond hope, and you, when you have grown a little braver, will be ready to go to Maleldil. But my authority is over my own world. It is a terrible thing to kill someone else’s hnau. It will not be necessary.’ ‘They are strong, Oyarsa, and they can throw death many miles and can blow killing airs at their enemies.’ ‘The least of my servants could touch their ship before it reached Malacandra, while it was in the heaven, and make it a body of different movements – for you, no body at all. Be sure that no one of your race will come into my world again unless I call him. But enough of this. Now tell me of Thulcandra. Tell me all. We know nothing since the day when the Bent One sank out of heaven into the air of your world, wounded in the very light of his light. But why have you become afraid again?’ ‘I am afraid of the lengths of time, Oyarsa… or perhaps I do not understand. Did you not say this happened before there was life on Thulcandra?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And you, Oyarsa? You have lived… and that picture on the stone where the cold is killing them on the harandra? Is that a picture of something that was before my world began?’ ‘I see you are hnau after all,’ said the voice. ‘Doubtless no stone that faced the air then would be a stone now. The picture has begun to crumble away and been copied again more times than there are eldila in the air above us. But it was copied right. In that way you are seeing a picture that was finished when your world was still half-made. But do not think of these things. My people have a law never to speak much of sizes or numbers to you others, not even to sorns. You do not understand, and it makes you do reverence to nothings and pass by what is really great. Rather tell me what Maleldil has done in Thulcandra.’ ‘According to our traditions – -’ Ransom was beginning, when an unexpected disturbance broke in upon the solemn stillness of the assembly. A large party, almost a procession, was approaching the grove from the direction of the ferry. It consisted entirely, so far as he could see, of hrossa, and they appeared to be carrying something."

·       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.       

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