Semi-Daily Journal Archive

The Blogspot archive of the weblog of J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics and Chair of the PEIS major at U.C. Berkeley, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

Sunday, December 18, 2005

Let me endorse the quality of Garence Franke-Ruta's judgment in her high praise for C.S. Lewis's brilliant version of Cupid and Psyche: Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. It is, I think, the best thing Lewis ever wrote.

In one of the alternative branches of the multiverse in which I went to graduate school in English Literature rather than in Economics, I wrote an essay about the meaning of the big change Lewis made in the myth. In the myth, the works of the God Cupid are manifest and visible, and Psyche's sisters convince her that Cupid is a monster because they are evil and spiteful. In Lewis's book, Cupid is deus absconditus: his works are hidden, and invisible to Psyche's sisters. It makes a very big difference.

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