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.But it was terrifyingly different from the expression of humanfile:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis.spaar/C.%20S.%20Lewis%20-%20Voyage%20to%20Venus.txt (102 of 115)19-2-2006 4:46:18file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/C.%20S.%20Lewis%20-%20Voyage%20to%20Venus.txtcharity, which we always see either blossoming out of, or hastening to descend into, natural affection.Here there was no affection at all: no least lingering memory of it even at ten million years' distance, nogerm from which it could spring in any future, however remote.Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shotfrom their faces like barbed lightning.It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression couldeasily be mistaken for ferocity.Both the bodies were naked, and both were free from any sexual characteristics, either primary orsecondary.That, one would have expected.But whence came this curious difference between them? Hefound that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible toignore.One could try-Ransom has tried a hundred times- to put it into words.He has said thatMalacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody.He has said that Malacandra affected him likea quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre.He thinks that the first held in his hand somethinglike a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him.But I don't know that anyof these attempts has helped me much.At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the realmeaning of gender.Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certaininanimate objects are masculine and others feminine.What is masculine about a mountain or feminineabout certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon,depending on the form of the word.Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex.Our ancestorsdid not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them.The realprocess is the reverse.Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex.Sex is, in fact,merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings.Femalesex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender, there are many others, and Masculine andFeminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless.Masculineis not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female.On the contrary, the male and female of organiccreatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine.Their reproductivefunctions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent,the real polarity.All this Ransom saw, as it were, with his own eyes.The two white creatures weresexless.But he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female).Malacandra seemed to him to have the look of one standing armed, at the ramparts of his own remotearchaic world, in ceaseless vigilance, his eyes ever roaming the earthward horizon whence his dangercame long ago."A sailor's look," Ransom once said to me, "you know.eyes that are impregnated withdistance." But the eyes of Perelandra opened, as it were, inward, as if they were the curtained gateway toa world of waves and murmurings and wandering airs, of life that rocked in winds and splashed onmossy stones and descended as the dew and arose sunward in thin-spun delicacy of mist.On Mars thevery forests are of stone; in Venus the lands swim.For now he thought of them no more as Malacandraand Perelandra.He called them by their Tellurian names.With deep wonder he thought to himself, 'Myeyes have seen Mars and Venus.I have seen Ares and Aphrodite.' He asked them how they were knownto the old poets of Tellus [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]