Greetings Shadow Chasers and Dust Makers.
In researching my eventual scholarly His Dark Materials book, I have been reading through numerous collections of essays and such that I have acquired over the years. The one featured above I believe hails from Borders Books, and is barely available anywhere these days. Apparently Amazon has a copy or two left, as seen here.
It offers about twenty essays of varying length and quality, often penned by popular young adult authors of the time such as Scott Westerfield, Cinda Williams Chima, O.R. Melling, and Herbie Brennan. All in all it was a fun, enjoyable read, with topics ranging from metaphysics to religion to romance to literature to bushido-esque bears (we're looking at you Iorek). I should mention some of the essay titles are particularly memorable, such as "Lord Asriel: Dad from Hell or Heroic Rebel?," "Hot Sex and Horrific Parenting in His Dark Materials," "Shedding Light on Dark Matter," and "A Short History of Hell and the Crabby Old God Who Sends You There."
One write-up was of particular interest though, and was simply called "Pullman's Dark Materials," by Alison Croggon. A poet herself, she delves into the bits of poetry that Pullman singled out as significant sources of inspiration behind his trilogy, particularly as used and outlined in The Amber Spyglass. She leaves out on the note of Lord Asriel as a Blakean hero in the Romantic revolutionary mode, but closes with a startling bit of literary insight which I wholly agree with and couldn't resist typing out here -
But in the end, I think the single most important informing idea behind His Dark Materials is in the line that rings out like a clarion trumpet at the end of Blake's poem, for me one of the most beautiful lines written by this most beautiful of poets. And it is perhaps what you might fruitfully take as the "meaning" of these books.
For every thing that lives is holy.
Many readers perhaps don't particularly clue into this, but your Jordan Scholar couldn't agree more.
And as Always
Stay Dusty My Friends
#HisDarkMaterials #TheBookOfDust #PhilipPullman
#BuildingTheRepublic #PullmanStudies #JordanScholarship
#InDustWeTrust #DownAndDusty #TheGreatProject
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