Story Spells for Refreshment of the Spirit

"On the next page she came to a spell 'for the refreshment of the spirit'....It went on for three pages and before she had read to the bottom of the page she had forgotten that she was reading at all. She was living in the story as if it were real....When she had....come to the end, she said, "That is the loveliest story I've ever read or shall read in my whole life...But here part of the magic of the Book came into play. You couldn't turn back. The right-hand pages, the ones ahead, could be turned; the left-hand pages could not..."oh dear, it's all fading away...It was about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill....."
And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story that reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book..."

--C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader


When I need refreshment of spirit, there are certain stories I return to again and again. When Lucy found she could not go back to the story-spell in the Magician's Book, she begged Aslan to tell it to her instead; and he replied, "Indeed, yes, I will tell it to you for years and years." And this is how the Great Lion tells that Story: by letting us catch glimpses of it, through a glass darkly, in other stories that we experience or encounter in our lives. Let Peter Pan and Wendy chant "I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!" But as for me, my chorus is "I do believe in stories! I do! I do!"

What Lewis calls "refreshment of spirit", his fellow-Inkling J.R.R. Tolkien calls "escape and consolation" (in the essay "On Fairy Stories", available in The Tolkien Reader). For a story to refresh the spirit, it is not enough that it merely inform or entertain. Indeed there are stories that will not refresh but poison the spirit-- like the spell Lucy found "to make beautiful her that uttereth it beyond the lot of mortals," and the one which allowed her to spy on her friends. Lewis-as-narrator remarks of the words of this last spell "nothing will induce me to tell you what they were."

Likewise I will not write on this blog about stories that flatter our human vanity or appeal to our selfishness and meanness. True, no humanly-made story is as perfect and unsullied as the one Lucy read about the cup, the sword, the tree and the green hill; but there are many stories which for a moment will let us catch a sudden scent of some divinely beautiful garden, or hear a single heart-wrenching measure of a transcendently glorious symphony.

These refreshing stories-- they may be told in various forms, such as novel, short story, epic poem, film, stage play, music, dance-- are by no means free from pain, darkness or fear. Yet they do bring us escape, refreshment, consolation. This blog will look at such stories, and the means by which they work their healthful magic. Hence the spoiler warning at the top of the blog; this is not a review blog as such, but a learning exercise for myself and anyone who cares to join me. As my main blog explains, I too am a writer of stories; I strive to make them the same refreshing kind of stories as I like to read, and also encourage my creative writing students to do the same.

Please feel free to comment on the ideas put forth in this blog, or nominate your own favorite stories of refreshment for examination in a future post here.