Today's Reading
Good stories often introduce the marvelous or
supernatural, and nothing about Story has been so often misunderstood as
this.
Thus, for example, Dr Johnson, if I remember rightly, thought
that children liked stories of the marvelous /because they were too
ignorant to know that they were impossible. But children do not always
like them, nor are [those //who like them] always children; and to enjoy
reading about fairies – much more about giants and dragons – it is not
necessary to believe in them.
* marvelous : extremely good:
Belief is at best irrelevant; it may be a
positive disadvantage.
Nor are [the marvels in good Story] [ever mere
arbitrary fictions /stuck on to make the narrative more sensational].
* You use at best to indicate that even if you describe something as favourably as possible or if it performs as well as it possibly can, it is still not very good. 아무리 잘 쳐준다 해도
* irrelevant definition: 1. not related to what is being discussed or considered and therefore not important:무관한
* arbitrary
(usually of a decision) Based on individual discretion or judgment; not
based on any objective distinction, perhaps even made at random. 임의적인, 독단적인
I
happened to remark to a man //who was sitting beside me at dinner the
other night that I was reading Grimm in German of an evening but never
bothered to look up a word () I didn’t know, “so that it is often great
fun” (I added) “guessing what it was that the old woman gave to the
prince //which he afterwards lost in the wood.” “And specially difficult
in a fairy tale,” said he, “where everything is arbitrary and therefore
the object might be anything at all.” His error was profound. The logic
of a fairy tale is as strict as that of a realistic novel, though
different.
From On Stories
On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature. Copyright © 1982, 1966 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.