At last, there’s a class on the Inklings from The Great Courses! For years, The Teaching Company has offered world-class lectures from great professors on many subjects--history, science, math, philosophy, religion, literature, language, health, travel and more--but they haven’t had a course on your favorite writers: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield (or maybe Warnie Lewis, Humphrey Havard, or John Wain!). Now they do! Or, they will in less than a week.
I am happy to announce that my course The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Their Circle will be available on The Great Courses Plus starting on Thursday, July 2nd. If you already subscribe to The Great Courses Plus, you’ll be able to find it in your library on that date. If you do not already subscribe, well, I have a promo code to offer my supporters. It will get you 20% off a digital download. If you’re a resident of the US or the UK and member of my Author’s Circle, I'll put up another post just for you with a promo code, okay?
Here are detailed descriptions of the lectures:
The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Others
If you could time-travel back to a small Oxford pub or to a professor’s rooms in the 1930s or ’40s, you might overhear a reading from an early draft of The Lord of the Rings. Or a lively discussion about wardrobes and spaceships. You might even see distinguished men howling with laughter while trying to read bad poetry with straight faces. These were the Inklings: writers, teachers, thinkers whose books are still loved by many today. In this course, you’ll learn about the complicated friendship of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, as well as the writing group gathered around them. You’ll learn how some of the world’s most cherished characters and stories were influenced by both the encouragement and the sharp criticism of fellow Inklings. Your professor will explore the lives and works of Lewis, Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and others who may not be as familiar. You will come away with a new understanding and appreciation of these authors, their writings, and the power of community.
1. Welcome to an Inklings
If you could time-travel back to a small Oxford pub or to a professor’s rooms in the 1930s or ’40s, you might overhear a reading from an early draft of The Lord of the Rings. Or a lively discussion about wardrobes and spaceships. Or distinguished professors howling with laughter while trying to read bad poetry with straight faces. These were the Inklings: writers, teachers, thinkers whose books are still loved by many today. In this first lecture, I’ll paint a word-picture of a typical Inklings evening, introducing the personalities, describing the atmosphere, and catching something of the chemistry of the group. We’ll use Tolkien’s Notion Club Papers, Barfield’s Worlds Apart, letters and diaries of the members, and scholarly research to piece together what an Inklings gathering was like.
Then I will back up to the beginning, answering questions such as: What was “the Inklings” group? How homogeneous was it? Who were the members? What did they accomplish? I’ll explain how the name came from an Oxford club of mixed students and faculty members which C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien attended; when that club died, they kept the name for a new, informal gathering of adult writers with the Lewis brothers and Tolkien at its heart. They met, usually, twice a week: once for critique of each other’s works in progress, and once for more casual conversation. The group grew slowly and organically, so there is no clear starting date. Writing critique sessions may have begun as early as 1929, twice-weekly gatherings were regularized in the 1930s, the meetings began to dwindle after 1945, and all such events ceased in 1949. There were about nineteen attendees altogether, though some attended rarely and a few never even met one another.
The main qualifications, according to Lewis, were “a tendency to write, and Christianity.” However, as we’ll see throughout this course, even those two criteria were quite flexible: not all members were professional or even avid writers, and their various Christian practices covered an extremely wide range, including some alternative religious commitments among the more traditional ones. They came from a wide background of socio-economic status, country of birth, level of education, vocation, and interests—which only partly explains their appeal to an audience that crosses continents and includes people from extremely different demographics.
By the end of this course, you’ll have greeted all of them; in particular, you’ll learn about the lives, writing, and complicated friendships of the Lewis brothers, Tolkien, Williams, Barfield, and the others. You’ll learn how some of the world’s most cherished characters and stories were influenced by both the encouragement and the sharp criticism of fellow Inklings. The lectures will cover some biographical facts, including the historical and cultural context in which these men grew up, fought wars, studied, and worked. There will also be overviews of their main ideas, themes, and most influential books. Some close readings of crucial passages will help unlock shared symbolism across their works, and we’ll investigate the ongoing appeal of their imaginative worlds to a wildly diverse readership. You will come away with a new understanding and appreciation of these authors, their writings, and the power of community. Next time, we’ll begin to explore their main shared life experiences and ideas.
2. “The Meaning Hidden Inside Ordinary Things”
The core members of the Inklings were born in the last decade or so of the nineteenth century, raised during the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign, and came of age during the first World War. They were all “British,” but born in (what is now) Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, and New Zealand. They were members of the peerage, of academia, and of the working class. They worked as literary scholars, career military men, priests, historians, classicists, Medievalists, a theater director, a journalist, an editor, and maybe even a spy.
As far as their faiths, the group included Irish Protestants, Roman Catholics, high Anglicans, an Anthroposophist, and a ritual occultist/ceremonial magician. Many of them were veterans, some serving on the front, becoming ill with trench fever or getting wounded, while others served at home in various capacities or in other military zones abroad. Some of the younger members served in the second World War, and Warren Lewis saw active duty in both. These men were raised in a “boys’ club” culture, joining many groups that gathered for literature, creative writing, scholarship, talk, or drinking. In the first half of this lecture, I’ll cover basic biographical facts for the core members, then spend the second half discussing major themes they shared.
Many of them were career literary scholars, using classical, medieval, renaissance, or modern European myth and narrative as antidotes to the despair and nihilism so prevalent in their times. Against modernist disenchantment, they offered re-enchantment through mythology, fairy tales, and fantasy. In this lecture, we’ll sample Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories,” Lewis’s “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said,” Williams’s The Figure of Arthur, and Barfield’s Poetic Diction, all of which will help us understand why they chose to write in genres that many critics considered juvenile or lowbrow. Against what they saw as reductive, deterministic materialism, they told stories about supernatural realities and divine love. Some relevant works include Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, Barfield’s Night Operation, the attack on Isengard in Tolkien’s Two Towers, and the character Damaris in Williams’s Place of the Lion. Their commitment to religious faith(s) enabled them to depict darkness in their tales but also include redemptive turns that many readers then and now find encouraging, such as the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; the coming of the Rohirrim, the ships of Umbar, or the eagles at crucial moments in The Lord of the Rings; the miraculous calming of a destructive magical storm in The Greater Trumps; and many more such moments. Perhaps best of all, their writing answers the question so many people have, which is: Why do we feel like things matter? Why do we sense some kind of deep significance underneath our actions, relationships, and experiences? Why do we each feel we’re living in an epic, the hero of our own myth, acting out timeless archetypes? Their collective answer (although expressed differently by each) is that these feelings are real and true. Everything does have significance; there is far more meaning than we can see. Butterflies are manifestations of absolute beauty; romantic love is an expression of the divine on earth; ritual objects channel real spiritual power; doors are portals into other realms; gemstones and jewelry sparkle with otherworldly light; and poetry speaks eternal truth. They offered myths for modern times, and the perennial appeal of their books probably comes from their ability to draw forth the meaning hidden inside ordinary things.
3. The Lewises & Longing
In lectures three through six, I intend to go into greater detail about the lives and most influential ideas of five core Inklings, pairing one Big Idea in each with the author who developed or popularized it. Although they all shared these ideas to some degree, of course the ways they understood and deployed them varied greatly. I’ll explain the basic concept, perhaps touch on some of its sources, provide examples, do a little close reading to illustrate it further, and briefly introduce differences among Inklings’ approaches as necessary.
I’ll start with Warren Lewis, C.S. Lewis, and “joy.” Many scholars have investigated what held the Inklings together, and they generally agree C.S. “Jack” Lewis was the heart of the group, the one who brought them together and kept them going. However, his elder brother Warnie was arguably the hospitable host who created the welcoming atmosphere, made the members feel comfortable, and provided a cordial kind of social stability from which their high-flying conversations could take off. Therefore, I’ll provide a brief joint biography of the brothers, highlighting their shared experiences of what Jack called Sehnsucht, “joy,” or “romanticism”: a sense of longing for something beyond this world, often evoked by poetry, myth, landscapes, or music. Works considered will include selections from Surprised by Joy, the diaries and letters of the Lewis brothers, The Pilgrim’s Regress, The Major and the Missionary, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, the last chapter of The Problem of Pain, and the end of Till We Have Faces.
4. Tolkien’s Myth-making
Tolkien has probably proven himself the most influential Inkling, given the foundational nature of his fantasy world, the number of popular adaptations of his work, the fandom and gaming communities that have grown out of his creations, and the passionate embrace of his pseudo-medieval mythology by Christians and neo-pagans alike. Of his many inspiring ideas, perhaps the most fundamental is his insistence that literature and language exist in a dance of mutual interdependence, words and stories being inseparable. It is from this concept that he built his great mythology, and it is expressed in his lecture “A Secret Vice.” The notion that one individual could intentionally make a myth may have seemed absurd in his time, since mythology is by definition a traditional story or group of stories; usually of unknown, anonymous, and collective authorship; often passed down orally; integrated into the origins and history of a culture. However, Tolkien’s insight into the essential relationship of the history of a language with the development of a myth enabled him to create a universe, its peoples, its languages, its cultures, and its legends, almost single-handedly (although his son Christopher had a great deal to do with the creation and dissemination of his father’s work). Fantasy authors ever since have imitated him or struggled to find another way forward. As he experimented with mythopoeia—myth-making—he also developed other important related concepts, such as sub-creation, escape, consolation, recovery, and “eucatastrophe” (or happy ending), all of which have echoes in the works of his fellow Inklings and his heirs. Along the way, he also made medievalism sexy again by creating the Rohirrim (the horse-people in Lord of the Rings) as a compendium and showcase of his scholarly work on Anglo-Saxon culture. Cue every MMORPG, table-top role-playing game, Renaissance Faire, and cosplayer since! In this fourth lecture, I’ll cover the basics of Tolkien’s life, then talk about this most essential of his ideas: what it was, where it came from, how it influenced the others in the group, and what its after-lives have been. Other works discussed will include his poem “Mythopoeia,” the beginning of The Hobbit, and key moments from the Legendarium (The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Histories of Middle-earth, and related texts).
5. Carolingian Co-Inherence
Although Charles Williams was only a member of the Inklings for the last six years of his life (1939–1945), those were among the most productive of his writing career, and the influence he had on the others was enormous. He was a distinctive thinker, having developed his idiosyncratic ideas without the benefit of a systematic university education. He came from the working class and struggled financially all his life, often feeling marginalized from those with an Oxbridge education. His friendship with Tolkien has been a source of some confusion, and I’ll set out the evidence and clarify the timeline of their relationship.
In this lecture, I’ll provide an overview of his biography, then define and describe his key beliefs. Like many of his peers during the Modern Occult Revival, he joined secret societies and integrated hermetic and esoteric principles into his writings. His signature doctrines are “co-inherence” and “substitution” (also known as “The Way of Exchange”) as explained most clearly in his essay “The Way of Exchange” and in the novel Descent into Hell. He taught the inter-relationship of all human beings and claimed our spiritual identification with one another allows us to carry each other’s burdens, literally. Late in his life, Williams founded his own Order, the Companions of the Co-inherence, which existed to teach his disciples how to practice his Way of Exchange. I’ll explain both the Christian precedents and the Occult roots of his system, provide examples from his writings and life, and discuss to what extent the other Inklings knew about, agreed with, disagreed with, or tried out Williams’s odd ideas. I’ll also offer some tips for approaching his works—especially his Arthurian poetry—which requires a little more preparation than those of Lewis or Tolkien.
6. Participation with Barfield
Barfield is usually considered the third- or fourth-most-important Inkling, mainly due to his profound influence on Lewis and the depth of his philosophical thought. However, the majority of his intense friendship with Lewis occurred before the Inklings group began, and his writings mostly precede or postdate its active years. This is because he did not have a literary career, but worked as a solicitor (lawyer), so his writings about literature, language, and philosophy mostly come from his time as an undergraduate or after his retirement—he lived to be just shy of one hundred. I’ll begin by surveying the main events of his life, then dive into his distinctive ideas, mainly through Poetic Diction and History, Guilt, & Habit. Barfield was an Anthroposophist: that is, a follower of Rudolf Steiner, who taught a “scientific” approach to spiritual enlightenment, investigated phenomenologies of consciousness, believed in reincarnation, and affirmed the incarnation of Christ while holding to an entirely non-dogmatic and gnostic view of a Christ-being or Spirit of Love that transcends religious specifics. Barfield extended Steiner’s ideas in his own writings, whether fiction or nonfiction, poetry or prose.
It was Barfield’s deep exploration of the nature of language that had the most impact upon Lewis and Tolkien; most of the Inklings were multi-lingual, and a few studied the history of words professionally, but language was of vital importance to all of them. In Saving the Appearances, Barfield argued that human consciousness was proceeding through the second of three phases of evolution, and that the first stage had been characterized by a unity between various meanings of words that we now take as metaphorical. His concept of the “ancient unities” of language can be seen in Tolkien’s integration of words, things, stories, and ideas. I will make this complex idea simpler to grasp through specific examples, comparing and contrasting it with other influential theories of language, many of which superseded Barfield’s in the later twentieth century but are now starting to crumble under the pressure of world events. Other works considered will include Romanticism Comes of Age; History in English Words; This Ever Diverse Pair; History, Guilt & Habit; and The Rose on the Ash-Heap.
7. Lesser-known Inklings
While the Lewis brothers, Tolkien, Barfield, and Williams are the most well-known members of the Inklings, other men were essential to the group’s dynamics and/or made independent contributions of their own to their respective fields. In this lecture, I’ll discuss some of them, pointing out how their participation in Inklings meetings or through friendship and correspondence with other members added diversity, vitality, vibrancy, and sometimes discord to the group.
Dr. Robert Emlyn Havard, known lovingly by the nonsensical nickname “Humphrey” or even “The Useless Quack,” was a medical doctor, longtime physician of the Lewis and Tolkien families. He was a regular attendee, and while little is known of his writings, he was a priceless conversational partner for the core members, and we’ll glance at the appendix he provided for Lewis’s The Problem of Pain. Colin Hardie, Charles Leslie Wrenn, Jack Arthur Walter Bennett, the youngest member John Wain (no, not the actor), Hugo Victor Dyson Dyson, and the spectacularly named Lord Edward Christian David Gascoyne-Cecil were English professors. Of their works, it’s worth mentioning Cecil’s biographies, Wain’s novels, Bennett’s work on Middle English, and Hardie’s essays on Dante. Adam Fox, the oldest member, was Professor of Poetry (there’s a bit of a scandal there, which I’ll narrate) and later Canon of Westminster Abbey. Scotsman Ronald Buchanan McCallum was a History professor, while his fellow countryman James Dundas-Grant was not an academic, but a reserve officer of the Royal Navy and landlord of a house for Catholic students. Courtenay Edward Stevens, aka “Tom,” taught Ancient History and did intelligence work for the Foreign Office during World War Two; he was only an Inkling in the late years, 1947–1950, after the death of Charles Williams. Gervase Mathew was a Dominican priest, also a lecturer in modern history, theology, English, and Byzantine studies, and at one point an archeologist digging in Africa. Christopher Tolkien is most well known for the herculean task of compiling, editing, and publishing his father’s works; he was also a scholar himself, lecturing in English and Old Norse. The notes and commentaries he provided are vital tools for understanding his father’s vast body of work. Another member with a splendid name and a reputation earned outside the Inklings circle was Nevill Henry Kendal Aylmer Coghill, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Coghill was Anglo-Irish, a member of the peerage (as was, obviously, “Lord” David Cecil), a professor of literature specializing in Shakespeare and Chaucer, but most notably a theatre and film director and producer, famous for working with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor–and also for a translation and musical adaptation of The Canterbury Tales, which was a success on Broadway. I’ll sketch the lives and accomplishments of these men, adding to the overall story of the Inklings as a loose literary and cultural association.
8. A Great Company of Influences
I have mentioned “influence” many times (perhaps too many times) in these lecture summaries, but it is an important point. It is worth examining, briefly, some older writers whom all Inklings attendees loved and imitated. These include recent or near-contemporaries George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton, whom they all read and cited. Of course, they were educated in the “Western” classics, and they all adored Virgil’s Aeneid, Beowulf, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Romantic poets, and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Victorian verse. Some familiarity with the major writings and ideas of these previous authors will help us understand where the Inklings were coming from—and where they wanted literature and culture to go in the future.
As a group that met sometimes twice weekly for over two decades, obviously they rubbed off on each other as artists, too. Scholar Diana Pavlac Glyer has published two superb works about influence among the Inklings: The Company They Keep and Bandersnatch. There are also many articles and book chapters tracing specific details that show how these writers responded to each other’s critiques, encouragement, and suggestions for revision. I’ll pick out a few significant examples to unpack, then explore their ongoing influence on writers and thinkers today. We’ll start with Tolkien’s unfinished Lay of Leithian: his courage in showing it to Lewis in draft apparently got the whole thing going. Then there were a couple of Inklings meetings whose readings are known for certain, so we’ll put those pieces side by side for comparison.
While no women were admitted to the group (a strong boys’ club tradition prevailed at the time), they were close friends and associates with award-winning poet Ruth Pitter, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Joy Davidman, all skillful writers who impacted those men. Sometimes guests would stop by, too, including South African poet Roy Campbell and fantasy novelist E.R. Eddison. Other noteworthy compatriots were T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Roger Lancelyn Green, and I’ll weave them into the overall fabric of this tapestry.
9. This Ever Diverse Group
In this talk, now that we know the dramatis personae, I’ll go into detail about the diversity the Inklings group enjoyed, in spite of its superficial white, male membership. It included the very rich as well as the rather poor; the extremely privileged and those who had to fight for every inch of success. Some fraternized with royalty (their diaries and letters attest to their relationships with landed gentry, money, privilege, and power) while others plugged along in obscurity, writing letters in which they lament the difficulty of providing basic necessities for their families. The majority taught academic subjects at Oxford, Cambridge, or other universities, but several worked in the military, the theatre, journalism, or publishing. At least thirteen of the nineteen known Inklings performed military service in one or both of the World Wars; two were in British intelligence. Again, we can glean from their private writings what combat was like, and here I’ll provide some quotations for analysis from their memoirs or other personal narratives. Their ages spanned forty-two years; their sexualities included straight, gay, celibate, and possibly what we would now call transgender. Their religious commitments (while broadly speaking Christian) were Protestant, Catholic, Anglicans, Anthroposophist, and Occultist. Recognizing their diverse natures is important because it means they are more than narrow “evangelical” Christians (as they are often presented in certain bookstores and publications), and they present an important example of a thriving, multifaceted religious community—which is something many people struggle to find now in our polarizing times.
10. Flawed Humans
While the majority of this course celebrates the work and thought of the Inklings, it is also important to acknowledge their faults as human beings. As is true of every writer in every time and place, they personally committed questionable deeds and/or wrote some troubling things. For example, stereotyping and exoticizing the Other occur in several works (including the Calormenes in The Horse and His Boy, the Easterlings and the Drúedain in The Lord of the Rings, or Jews and “Gypsies” in The Greater Trumps and All Hallows’ Eve). Critics have often denounced the depiction of women in That Hideous Strength, Tolkien’s universe, or Williams’s poetry. Violence and cruelty are used by protagonists and even celebrated (in, for example, Heroes and Kings or the ending of Lewis’s Ransom trilogy). Some readers are disturbed by aspects of their personal lives: for instance, Lewis was attracted to sadism, Barfield engaged in adulterous intimacy, and Williams practiced sexual magic rites upon young women without their full consent. In this talk, I will not go digging for skeletons, but will discuss the facts that are already public knowledge. There’s an ongoing scholarly and cultural conversation on these subjects; not to join it would be irresponsible. Therefore, I’ll contextualize the potentially controversial elements of their writing and provide some tools for discernment readers can employ when encountering words, topics, or biographical details they find upsetting.
11. Ongoing Communities
A huge theme throughout the Inklings’ lives and this course is that of community: People coming together out of mutual affection for each other and for their shared passions. In this case, the Inklings (more or less, as we’ve seen) shared a love of writing in various genres and a commitment to some form of Christianity. They also had vast differences of thought, upbringing, subculture, and lifestyle, yet they were friends and collaborators for decades. This ability to work together in a field of mutual delight continues to this day in the many communities dedicated to celebrating and carrying on their work. I’ll talk about adaptations of their books to the stage, screen, or other media and genres, especially the controversial movies and television shows set in Middle-earth. I’ll introduce the listener to fan universes, scholarly societies, imitative and derivative fiction, gaming communities, and more. The breadth and variety of these kinships are astonishing, and audience members may be surprised to learn about how life-giving, even life-saving, many of these groups have proven to be for their dedicated fans.
These tales by white, Christian, (mostly) middle-and-upper-class, academic, British gentlemen resonate with, for instance, Ukrainian refugees hiding in a makeshift camp in Romania after their town has been bombed out of existence. A secular Jew admit that she comes back, over and over, to reread this symbolic retelling of Jesus’s death and resurrection. A Muslim teenager finds herself drawn into Narnia and Middle-earth in spite of objections to its depictions of imperialist domination. Both MAGA Republicans and progressive Democrats quote Tolkien or watch the Peter Jackson movies with pleasure.
However, there is also a darker side of Inklings fandom, which manipulates the fictional universes of these writers for hateful or even violent ends. Fan attitudes differ dramatically over, for example, the multicultural approach of projects like Amazon’s Rings of Power television show. Much further down the scale of exploitation is a subculture of white supremacy that takes the imagery of Norse mythology or modern medievalism—both of which the Inklings loved and used for quite different purposes in their books—and deploys it as iconography over acts of hate. It is necessary to examine the disconcerting reality of such appropriation if we are to understand it and reduce its harmful social impact while encouraging the healthy sorts of welcoming communities that have grown up around these books.
12. Why are their works still popular?
Finally, having spent twelve lectures together getting to know this group of authors, their main ideas, and some of their works, we’ll inquire why their stories are still quite popular decades after their deaths. The previous discussion of adaptations and subcultures forming around their imaginary worlds should have proven that popularity beyond a doubt; now, I’ll also present some of the ways their reach is expanding beyond their original cultures: into non-English-speaking countries and regions without an historical Christian tradition. One reason is that a good story is a good story, regardless of the spiritual or philosophical ideas that may have inspired it: Shorn of their bigger ideas, many of these books would still tell great stories with exciting plotlines about compelling characters. Yet the authors themselves would have bristled at the suggestion of stripping their ideas out of the stories and would have vehemently argued nothing would remain, as the ideas and storylines are inextricable.
I believe the answers are not mysterious, but are contained in the main themes that I presented at the beginning of the course. These men lived during extremely difficult times, suffering from the rise of nationalism, revolutions, two World Wars, the great flu pandemic of 1918, industrialization, economic collapse, mass migrations, and more. We also live in historically troubling times, with nationalism on the rise again, political partisanship reaching dangerous heights, brutal wars and genocide around the globe, a massive pandemic interrupting commerce and driving many people into isolation, mass migrations, and more. Both were eras of sudden, dramatic change in technology, social-religious commitments, traditional domestic arrangements, minority demographics, medical advancements, and cultural norms. In both times, we long for stories that include the possibility of a happy ending. We want villains redeemed, heroes victorious, victims rescued. We want there to be some magic to re-enchant our anxious lives. We want a glimpse of some Edenic land where our stress melts away and our antagonisms cease. As noisy data comes clattering at us, unorganized, all clamorous and demanding, we crave the power of storytelling to provide us with tranquility and significance. It is only by selecting among the billions of available facts, sorting through them, and arranging them into a narrative that we can make any kind of sense out of our current chaos. Today’s wars—real wars, culture wars, rhetorical wars—are over competing stories. While the stories themselves might be made up, they have real results, causing the deaths of millions of people or offering hope to whole nations and cultures. It matters, then, which stories we choose to read, to tell, and to live. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The stories by the Inklings, whether long or short, are set in a moral universe, and they bend toward justice overcoming injustice, catastrophe giving way to eucatastrophe, winter melting into spring, life blossoming out of death. In each of their tales, ordinary objects, actions, and people have deep, eternal significance. Everything matters. No one is disposable. These are the sorts of stories we humans need to hear and will always need to hear.
