And Eru Smiled

[davem]

Originally Posted by Formendacil

.IS this primary world of ours not enchanted, but mundane? I, personally, feel that this is hardly the case. Our world is very much enchanted. I can look out at the Rockies from our house on a clear, sunny day, and see the sharp, snow-capped peaks rising into a clear blue sky. Or perhaps seeing the thrill in a young kid's eyes as he or she is looking at the animals in a zoo.

These enchantments are just as real to me, if not more real, than those found in a book. And they are the products of the real world. And is not the enchantment of the books a part of the enchantment of our own world? If we did not have this world to refer to, would the enchantment of the books be there?

Isn't the book a product of the mind of someone in this world?

Maybe for some people this is a world of the mundane, but for myself, it is a world with plenty of enchantment, just waiting for someone with the right frame of mind to walk around the corner and find it.

I think what you say about 'the right frame of mind' is the key to what we're talking about. Mountains in & of themselves are not 'enchanted' - they're just very big rocks. Animals in the zoo are not 'enchanted', either, or 'enchanting'.

The enchantment they inspire in us comes from the 'story' we tell ourselves about them when we look at them. We are responding to something else, something 'other' - to what they 'symbolise' for us. Its about awe, about suddenly being open to the Other. I'd say what you're talking about is a sudden 'baggage-free' moment, when the mundane is seen through, & there is a glimpse of 'Joy, beyond the walls of the World, poignant as grief.'

So, in the instances you cite, I'd say that rather than experiencing an 'enchantment' inherent in the primary world, you are experiencing an enchantment that comes through the primary world, from another level of 'Reality'.

I find this happens in reading Tolkien works - when I read them as they are, without theorising or making connections with primary world contents. The Secondary world is a 'between place', between the mundane primary world, & somewhere 'Else'. When we enter 'Faerie' we move a step closer to a place or state beyond words. The 'enchanting' of the primary world that we experience is a result of seeing it 'through enchanted eyes', & that enchantment happens within the secondary world - when it is experienced as much as possible as a world/state in its own right.

I'd say that whether you are conscious of it or not, that when you look at those mountains, you are not enchanted by their size, or their age, or their sense of permanence, but by the 'story' behind those things. I think its something along the lines of Charles William's 'Beatrician experience'/Romantic Theology - an experiencing of the Creator, the Source, through other creatures. He called it the Way of the Affirmation of the Images. Rather than rejecting the creation as 'not-God' & following an ascetic lifestyle in order to find the Divine, we seek to experience the divine through the creation, through the 'Images', or 'Masks' of God.