I think Americans (and not only Americans) often confuse popularity with greatness. A certain pop singer recently grabbed plenty of attention by her disgusting antics at a 'music' awards show. For a while her video was the most viewed on youtube. Popular, maybe, but there isn't a shred of greatness there.
But getting back to Kennedy, I think President Kennedy's fortune was that he was young and handsome, he had a wife with film-star good looks, and he died young. I mean, how many films was James Dean in? You can count them on the fingers of one hand. And yet, he's a legend.
President Kennedy's greatest accomplishment (other than dying in the glow of eternal youth) was staring down the Russians over the Cuban missiles. But on the negative side of the ledger come the disastrous 'Bay of Pigs' Cuban invasion attempt and American involvement in Vietnam.
His 'man-on-the-moon' speech, you say? OK, he was a good cheerleader for that mission but it was Congress which funded the program - with American taxpayers' money - and the numerous scientists and astronauts who put in countless hours to make it happen.
On the same day Kennedy was killed in 1963, occurred the deaths of two of the twentieth century's most influential writers. Naturally they received scant coverage by the media because of the Kennedy assassination.
Aldous Huxley died at age 69 in Los Angeles and C. S. Lewis died at age 64 in Oxford, England.
Aldous Huxley is best known for his novel Brave New World, a dystopian novel published in 1932 about a future world of scientifically controlled human reproduction and psychological manipulation of human behavior. It's a superficial world of pain avoidance and lack of deep and lasting human relationships.
When I was a kid and the year 1984 was approaching, many people saw George Orwell's dystopian vision in his novel 1984 as a likely future scenario. I read that book but as I grew older I began to doubt if human beings would ever acquiesce to such a grimly spartan, emotionally suppressed world. Then I read Huxley's Brave New World and I thought, Here is a likelier possibility!
I recently ran across this from a letter Huxley wrote to Orwell after the publication of Orwell's novel in 1949, congratulating him on his 'profoundly important book' but going on to state, 'Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.'
(Does anyone recall that 'Life of Julia' video from Obama's 2012 campaign? It wouldn't have surprised Huxley.)
Against all of this is the voice of C. S. Lewis. If Huxley's is a voice of warning, Lewis' is a voice bringing good news. Through the medium of print, Lewis may have brought the good news of Jesus Christ to as many people as Billy Graham and Pope John Paul II have done through public speaking.
I think I've read most of Lewis' books and there isn't a dull one in the entire lot. As far as I can tell, all of his books remain in print - decades after he wrote them.
The world as C. S. Lewis sees it in his books is full of drama and wonder and excitement. The Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is the greatest story ever; it is in fact THE story of all stories. Everything else in human history, both before and after the Incarnation, only matters in relation to that central event in history.
This applies as well to fairy tales. What are fairytales after all but the working out of the dramas of reality through the prism of human imagination. I think most all of us have been enchanted by Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia at some point in our lives. My own two children love the recent Narnia films, though the books are still a little bit beyond them. As an adult I've been astounded by his books The Screwtape Letters and the 'Space Trilogy' novels (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength).
Add to those his works of straightforward apologetics and literary criticism like Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, The Four Loves, The Discarded Image, etc., and you have a powerful body of writing. He never won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he didn't need to. Look at the list of Nobel winners and most of them you've never heard of and are little read nowadays. Lewis' books are like perennial flowers - they just keep coming back year after year.
The following comes from Lewis' The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses as reprinted in this month's Magnificat.
What more, you may ask, do we want? Ah, but we want so much more - something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words - to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.
That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves - that, though we cannot, yet these projections can, enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can't. They tell us that "beauty born of murmuring sound" will pass into a human face; but it won't. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy.
At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather a greater glory of which nature is only the first sketch. For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into Nature. Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendor which she fitfully reflects.
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