Author’s Note: ’“Weekend Short” is a weekly profile of a short story. Additional analysis by the readership is encouraged in the comments section.
Welcome to (what remains of) the weekend!
Apologies for the delay. I’m afraid Saturday was a physical one, with the heavens remembering that Wisconsin has a snow quota that they’ve been lax in issuing. So, we received the slickest, densest snowstorm of winter in a span of a few hours. Wiser men would have been home, but I was driving on the eastern side of Lake Winnebago (winneh-bayg-oh) with one-and-a-half windshield wipers operating out of the expected three — profuse apologies to the blue Toyota Rav4 that almost met its end on the steel prow of a sliding gold station wagon-turned-trireme at the roundabout near Sherwood.
With the icy, smeared lines of a lifting wiper blade in mind, C.S. Lewis’s short story “The Shoddy Lands” comes to life. Originally published in 1956 by the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, “Shoddy Lands” is slow to reveal itself, even as it is quick to bare the bodies and thoughts of its actors.
C.S. Lewis writes:
Being, as I believe, of sound mind and in normal health, I am sitting down at 11 p.m. to record, while the memory of it is still fresh, the curious experience I had this morning.
It happened in my rooms in college, where I am now writing, and began in the most ordinary way with a call on the telephone. “This is Durward,” the voice said. “I’m speaking from the porter’s lodge. I’m in Oxford for a few hours. Can I come across and see you?” I said yes, of course. Durward is a former and a decent enough fellow; I would be glad to see him again. When he turned up at my door a few moments later I was rather annoyed to find that he had a young woman in tow. I loathe either men or women who speak as if they were coming to see you aloneand then spring a husband or a wife, a fiancé or a fiancée on you. One ought to be warned.The girl was neither very pretty nor very plain, and of course she ruined my conversation. We couldn’t talk about any of the things Durward and I had in common because that would have meant leaving her out in the cold. And she and Durward couldn’t talk about the things they (presumably) had in common because that would have left me out. He introduced her as Peggy and said they were engaged. After that, the three of us just sat and did social patter about the weather and the news.I tend to stare when I am bored, and I am afraid I must have stared at that girl, without the least interest, a good deal. At any rate I was certainly doing so at the moment when the strange experience began. Quite suddenly, without any faintness or nausea or anything of that sort, I found myself in a wholly different place. The familiar room vanished; Durward and Peggy vanished. I was alone. And I was standing up.My first idea was that something had gone wrong with my eyes. I was not in darkness, nor even in twilight, but everything seemed curiously blurred. There was a sort of daylight, but when I looked up I didn’t see anything that I could very confidently call a sky. It might, just possibly, be the sky of a very featureless, dull, grey day, but it lacked any suggestion of distance. “Nondescript” was the word I would have used to describe it. Lower down and closer to me, there were upright shapes, vaguely green in colour, but of a very dingy green. I peered at them for quite a long time before it occurred to me that they might be trees. I went nearer and examined them; and the impression they made on me is not easy to put into words. “Trees of a sort,” or, “Well, trees, if you callthat a tree,” or, “An attempt at trees,” would come near it. They were the crudest, shabbiestapology for trees you could imagine. They had no real anatomy, even no real branches; they were more like lamp-posts with great, shapeless blobs of green stuck on top of them. Most children could draw better trees from memory.
It was while I was inspecting them that I first noticed the light: a steady, silvery gleam some distance away in the Shoddy Wood. I turned my steps toward it at once, and then first noticed what I was walking on. It was comfortable stuff, soft and cool and springy to the feet; but when you looked down it was horribly disappointing to the eye. It was, in a very rough way, the colour of grass; the colour grass has on a very dull day when you look at it while thinking pretty hard about something else. But there were no separate blades in it. I stooped down and tried to find them;the closer one looked, the vaguer it seemed to become. It had in fact just the same smudged, unfinished quality as the trees: shoddy.(You can read the rest here. Time: 10 minutes)
Assuming you read the story, isn’t it profound? I don’t know about you, but an acquaintance comes to mind when the narrator reflects upon Peggy’s vision for the world — shoddy, except for her glorious inflated self and the items that she lusts after. The world passes around her as a muddy wash, men and women combined into shifting androgyny and nature nothing but what is necessary to tread through to get what she wants.
But then the terrifying conclusion, as the narrator turns inward and wonders what would others see of his mind’s manipulation of reality. What would others see if they could take a stroll through the boulevards of our minds? I spend as little time as possible in that place; there’s darkness there that pools around the happier constructions. But to spend time away from the mind is to depend on other inputs to fill the void, as one can observe with Peggy’s dependence on advertisements to construct her self-image.
This past week, the national discussion concerned TikTok, and our fears of the platform’s influence are as pre-rational as they are rational, I think. We’ve known social media to exhale vapors facinorous and profane, but there did not exist a target as obviously “wrong” as Tiktok.
Similar to the pornography standard made famous in Jacobellis v. Ohio, “I know it when I see it,” the likes of Facebook and Instagram have ugly aspects. But their soft-core appearance and advances in communication made it difficult to build a coalition in light of market choice and protected speech — good. But TikTok, a creation that employs every psychological trick to keep users to its bosom, while raising an entire generation to arrange their self-worth by its endless scroll, all while harvesting data available to a vile foreign regime, is the point at which we’re seeming to say, “Enough.” If pornography is what we know when we see it, then TikTok has tipped into a category all its own. Watching children dance for the mute satisfaction of a phone in the middle of a Home Depot tells me that we have millions becoming Peggy, individuals blind to anything but selfish impulse.
To date, we’ve been chasing the dragon while the drake opens its jaws and its eyes twinkle. We may not have a Bard to end the predator, but we can at least sting the wyrm enough for it to return over the sea.
Here’s David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (I include the song to illustrate a personal discomfort with proscribing Americans’ social media access as much as to argue that bringing others back to Earth might be necessary.):
Many thanks to Danny for suggesting this weekend’s short.
Author’s note: If there’s a short story you’d like to see discussed in the coming weeks, please send your suggestion to label@nationalreview.com.