Six (Or Maybe Three?) Degrees to Tolkien -- Aesthetic Inspirations

Below, a rare beautiful binding of The Hobbit from abebooks.com.

J.R.R. Tolkien fascinates me for many reasons. I think of him as a super-talented Renaissance man. He created an elaborate fictional world in Middle Earth. Not only did he show himself a master of letters in his Lord of the Rings trilogy, he illustrated his stories himself with skill. He is a writer, illustrator, cartographer,letterer, philologist, simply a creator on many levels.

Tolkien's illustration of Rivendell, a region of Middle Earth

A Tolkien illustration for The Hobbit

Mary Podles, a retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, wrote in Touchstone magazine that Tolkien may have been inspired artistically by illustrators Walter Crane, Arthur Rackham, John Bauer and Kay Nielsen and even by the Art Nouveau jewelry of Rene Lalique, in his descriptions of various jewelry for his fictional characters. The Art Nouveau style, most popular from 1890 to 1910, would have been prevalent in Tolkien's childhood. Tolkien was born in 1892.

Lalique pendant, below

Notice that the Lalique pendant is inspired by nature just as in Goldberry's belt of golden flag-lilies, Aragorn's eagle brooch or the hobbits' enameled leaf brooches.

Reproduction of Frodo's leaf brooch from The Lord of the Rings movies

Whether or not these other illustrators influenced Tolkien, I appreciate all of them. Arthur Rackham (1845 - 1939) had a style that is sometimes described as a fusion of European Nordic style and Japanese woodblock. Rackham would do soft pencil sketches, block in shapes around his outline, add details in pen and India ink and layers of washes of transparent tints.

I know, from numerous sources, that Tolkien was influenced by Nordic mythology, so it would not be surprising that he might be influenced by a 'Nordic' illustrator. In fact, Rackham did illustrations for The Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried and The Twilight of the Gods by Richard Wagner. Wagner's operas were based on Nordic mythology, and Tolkien's friend, C.S. Lewis, was an avid Wagner fan. Here are some of Rackham's illustrations, one of which is for one of my favorite children's books.

An Arthur Rackham illustration for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Dancing with the Fairies by Arthur Rackham

Walter Crane (1845-1915) was an illustrator of the Arts and Crafts movement as was William Morris, whose fantasy writings such as The Wood Beyond the World, 1894, and The Well at the World's End, 1896, also influenced Tolkien's writing. Crane was similarly influenced by Japanese woodblock design. He worked in watercolor and also in woodcuts.

Walter Crane's illustration for Little Red Riding Hood

Walter Crane's illustration for Beauty and the Beast

Compare Rackham and Crane's illustrations to the examples below.

The Great Wave by Hokusai, a Japanese woodblock design

Kay Nielsen illustration

Kay Nielsen (1886 - 1957), like Lalique, was an Art Nouveau artist. Nielsen, who was Danish, illustrated a collection of Nordic fairy tales in East of the Sun and West of the Moon. He even did some illustration for Night on Bald Mountain for Disney's 1940 Fantasia.

Night on Bald Mountain from the 1940 Fantasia

I see some similarities in each of these styles, in the strong use of outline, in the contrast of dark and light and the stylized shapes. Compare the curving and arcing lines in Night on Bald Mountain with Hokusai's The Wave. Compare both to the circular billows of smoke in Tolkien's own illustration from The Hobbit. I see both Japanese and Art Nouveau influences in Crane's illustration for Beauty and the Beast.

Are we playing six degrees to Tolkien? Maybe. Really, I think the relationships would be easier to diagram with bubbles and interconnecting lines than with a linear outline. Rackham and Nielsen may have influenced Tolkien with their style of art. Japanese woodblock art influenced Rackham and Crane. I personally find it very interesting to see the different philosophical or historical influences on a new trend or movement or relationships between different artists and their influences.

What Would Charles Dickens Do About the Toy Sweatshops in China?

I love Charles Dickens as a writer for a variety of reasons. I own the full collection of all his books, have read nine of his novels so far and jump at the chance to watch every BBC "Masterpiece Theater" special based on his books. This sounds like I am about to recite poetry to him, "How do I love Charles Dickens, let me count the ways," or stand on my desk like those students in "Dead Poets' Society," reciting, "Oh Captain, My Captain."

I know worship belongs only to God, but I admire Dickens very much, perhaps because some of Dickens' thoughts and feelings seem akin to the thoughts and feelings of God.

Dickens had a pronounced sense of social injustice. He wrote with much sympathy about the hardships of the poor and downtrodden, pointing out some of the flaws of his society, and even inspiring change. In "Nicholas Nickleby," the cruel schoolmaster of Dotheby's Hall, Wackford Squeers, is based on William Shaw of Bowes Academy in Yorkshire, a school Dickens had visited. Shaw's school is said to have gone bankrupt as a result of the novel's publication. Shaw was prosecuted in 1823 when two of his students went blind, allegedly because of the poor conditions in the school.

Below, Jim Broadbent as Wackford Squeers in the 2002 movie, "Nicholas Nickleby"

Dickens knew some of the hardships that inspired his writing firsthand. Dickens' father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea Prison just like the father of his character Little (Amy) Dorrit.

Photo from the 2008 "Masterpiece Theater" version of "Little Dorrit"

At twelve years old, with his father in prison, Dickens was put to work in Warren's Blacking Factory. It was a shoe polish factory. Young Dickens would stand in a little window, pasting labels onto bottles, where the passersby could watch him. Dickens wrote of this part of his life, "My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of [the experience] that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time in my life."

Warren's Blacking Factory

Similarly, some of the boy characters in Dickens' novels were also introduced to oppressive work conditions in childhood. Oliver is almost apprenticed to a cruel chimney sweep called Gamfield. Gamfield "happened to labor under the slight imputation of having bruised three or four boys to their death already." A board member of the workhouse where Oliver Twist lives tells Gamfield that boys have been smothered in chimneys.

From "Oliver Twist:"

"'That's acause they damped the straw afore they lit it in the chimbley to make 'em come down again,' said Gamfield; 'that's all smoke, and no blaze; vereas smoke ain't o' no use at all in making a boy come down, for it only sinds him to sleep, and that's wot he likes. Boys is wery obstinit, and wery lazy gen'l'men, and there's nothink like a good hot blaze to make 'em come down with a run. It's humane too, gen'l'men, acause, even if they've stuck in the chimbley, roasting their feet makes 'em struggle to hextricate themselves.'"

What a different picture this presents than the jolly dancing chimney sweeps in a favorite movie of mine, "Mary Poppins."

I prefer the idea of the jolly chimney sweep with the roofs of London as his playground, but you wonder how jolly you could be breathing in soot and crawling into tight spaces, with or without a cruel Gamfield to give you additional grief. The poet, William Blake, also wrote with sympathy about the child as chimney sweep.

In Oliver's case, his fate was saved from chimney sweeping. The magistrate, seeing Oliver's terrified face, does not sign the indentures. Oliver is later sold into service with an undertaker.

"Boy For Sale" from the 1969 musical "Oliver!"



In "David Copperfield," life changes for the title character when his mother remarries, a Mr. Murdstone.

David's stepfather, who has no affection for him, eventually sends him out to make his own way in the world.

"Murdstone and Grinby's Warehouse was at the waterside. It was down in Blackfriars. Modern improvements have altered the place: but it was the last house at the bottom of a narrow street, curving down hill to the river, with some stairs at the end, where people took boat. It was a crazy old house with a wharf of its own, abutting on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out, and literally overrun with rats. Its panelled rooms, discoloured with the dirt and smoke of a hundred years, I dare say; its decaying floors and staircase; the squeaking and shuffling of the old grey rats down in the cellars; and the dirt and rottenness of the place; are things, not of many years ago, in my mind, but at the present instant. They are all before me, just as they were in the evil hour when I went among them for the first time, with my trembling hand in Mr. Quinion's.

Murdstone and Grinby's trade was among a good many kinds of people, but an important branch of it was the supply of wines and spirits to certain packet ships. I forget now where they chiefly went, but I think there were some among them that made voyages both to the East and West Indies. I know that a great many empty bottles were one of the consequences of this traffic, and that certain men and boys were employed to examine them against the light, and reject those that were flawed, and rinse and wash them. When the empty bottles ran short, there were labels to be pasted on full ones, or corks to be fitted to them, or seals to be put upon the corks, or finished bottles to be put in casks. All this work was my work, and of the boys employed to it, I was one."

Dickens novels may be fiction, but some real people lived a life that resembled that fiction. David Cody, associate professor of English at Hartwick College, writes on www.Victorianweb.org,

"Many children worked 16 hour days under atrocious conditions, as their elders did. Ineffective parliamentary acts to regulate the work of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day had been passed as early as 1802 and 1819. After radical agitation, notably in 1831, when "Short Time Committees" organized largely by Evangelicals began to demand a ten hour day, a royal commission established by the Whig government recommended in 1833 that children aged 11-18 be permitted to work a maximum of twelve hours per day; children 9-11 were allowed to work 8 hour days; and children under 9 were no longer permitted to work at all (children as young as 3 had been put to work previously). This act applied only to the textile industry, where children were put to work at the age of 5, and not to a host of other industries and occupations."

Cody added that both boys and girls started work in coal and iron mines at age five and generally died by age 25.

Children working in a 19th century textile mill

But sweatshop labor did not die out with the 19th century or the making of Dickens novels. I have been vaguely aware of this for some time, hearing, at times, that we should boycott certain products made in China. The issue became more real to me recently when I delved into research, with my fictional mystery story in mind, on the toy industry. (My main character is a toy inventor.) I learned a lot from reading "The Real Toy Story" by Eric Clark, (who is, as far as I know, no relation to me.)

A staggering 80 percent of America's toys are made in Chinese factories. There are 8000 toy factories, employing 3 million workers, in China. These include Barbie dolls, Bratz dolls, G.I. Joe, Etch a Sketch and many others.

China does have labor laws in place, but they are routinely violated. The China Business Journal states, "Labor rights violations are so widespread in China that violations can be presumed to exist in every factory until proven otherwise."

In 1997, Mattel, the maker of Barbie, announced that all plants would have to comply with a code of conduct regarding hours, wages, conditions and minimum age of workers. Mattel, to their credit, has run routine inspections on their Chinese plants, but the situation is almost impossible to police. The plants will put on a good front for the sake of inspection while operating differently the majority of the time.

Chinese workers in a Mattel plant

Clark describes the conditions in these Chinese toy plants, the unbearable work conditions and living conditions for workers in the dormitories, unbelievably low wages, as well as the unfair contracts in which workers are essentially held in slavery, by systems of fines and deductions, with no options to go elsewhere. Most moving to me personally is the testimony of a particular individual, gained from clandestine interviews away from the factory.

From "The Real Toy Story" by Eric Clark:

"Li Mei is worn out, so she looks older than her 18 years. Her hair is in a smooth black ponytail, but her skin is bad from too little daylight, and she has many healing and still-open cuts on her hands. Her neck, chest and forearms are heavily mottled with the raised red patches of allergy caused by toxic chemicals, which she scratches as she speaks. She coughs a lot and has chronic aches and pains, frequent headaches and sometimes blurred vision. All these ailments appeared during the last two years: Li Mei works in a Dongguan toy factory.

She is a rural migrant from Xiaoshan, a remote mountain hamlet in the rural province of western Sichuan. Li Mei was thrilled to be one of the dagongmei, the working girls, to quit the hamlet where there are no roads, one telephone, and only limited electricity. She was also frightened because she knew that Dongguan has a reputation as a sweatshop. Many young people returned from the factories with disfigurements and strange illnesses. And then there was the fate of Li Chunmei, who was born in her village. She had been a runner in the Hainan Toy Factory in Songgang near Shenzhen, rushing stuffed animals swiftly from one worker to the next for each step in production. They said in the village that she ran all the time, 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for two solid months, without a day off. She was paid the equivalent of 12 cents an hour. She collapsed one night, bleeding from the nose and mouth on the bathroom floor, and was found hours later. She died before the ambulance arrived; she was just 19."

Bratz dolls in Chinese plant

Later, I read about Li Mei's own experience in the factory.

"The air in the coloring and spraying department was filled with paint dust and smelled sourly of chemicals -- acetone, ethylene, trichloride, benzene -- and hurt her throat. The windows were filled with heavy wire mesh, the exits locked to prevent pilfering. Noisy ventilators added to the din of the spraying machines, so the team leader had to shout at Li Mei to be heard. She was given a blue chef's apron to wear and shown how to paint eyes of the dolls with four pens of different sizes: fussy work, she thought, easy enough. But she had to paint one every 7.2 seconds -- 4000 a day. She was warned to check the chemical labels on the tins of paint and thinner she was to use but not asked if she could read. One of the girls -- some were only 12 o 13 -- told her no one understood the labels or even if they were correct, and some were labeled in English anyway. Li Mei's cotton mask and gloves were thin, and by the end of the second day, they were thick with paint particles and useless. She asked for new ones but was refused; they were replaced just once a week. Her hands were stained with the chemical paint, which plain water would not remove. The girls would show her how to clean them with solvents that irritated the skin and whose hazards they are ignorant of. During the first few days, she found the overpowering heat, combined with the smell of chemicals, repulsive. She felt she was going to throw up and she had stomachaches and felt dizzy. Once she fainted; her section leader told her to have a rest, rub on some herbal ointment, and go back to work."

I am not a parent. My niece and nephews are grown. I don't have great need to buy toys for the people in my family, with the exception, perhaps, of some more sophisticated toys such as board games, computer and video games. I buy toys once a year to benefit poor children around the world, through Operation Christmas Child, an aspect of Franklin Graham's organization, Samaritan's Purse. Many, many others also get involved with this organization as well as other organizations such as Toys for Tots that do toy drives around Christmas time. I now have mixed feelings about giving toys to benefit one poor child when another (perhaps) child was exploited in the making of that toy.

And the particulars of the suffering is much more than I can share in so few words. So, what do we do? What would Charles Dickens do about the toy sweatshops in China? Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, stated, "You can't call for boycotts. It is true that in this global economy, it is better to be exploited than to have no job at all." But a team of faculty and students at MIT said, "While accepting that a bad job may be better than nothing, we should continue to fight the abuse of human lives...If we justify abuse under the premise that is better than the worst alternative, we create a slippery slope, leading down to the complete devaluation of human life."

Would Charles Dickens boycott? Would he buy from only the 20 percent of toys not made in China? Perhaps. I'm sure that, even if he felt he could do very little else for such a complex problem, he would pick up his pen and write. And, so I hope I have begun to do my part by sharing information.

Women in Literature and in Life -- Modesty and Misogyny

Three years ago, I read Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, the story that weaves bold knights and chivalry with Richard the Lion-Hearted from history and known characters from the Robin Hood tales. It had only been sitting on my shelf for 16 years waiting for me to get to it. I know it was sitting on my shelf for 16 years, because it's encased in a fragrant leather book cover I brought back from a trip to Riga, Latvia in 1994. When I brought it home, I searched for the appropriate paperback to put in it and chose Ivanhoe; and there it sat in its place of honor neglected until recently.

There are many themes and thoughts I could expand on from Ivanhoe, such as the very unchristian way that the Jewish people were treated during this period of the Crusades. I do want to talk about a Jewish character, Rebecca of York, not as a Jewish woman, but simply as a woman.

As the story goes, she is sexually harrassed and kidnapped by the Knight Templar Brian De Bois Guilbert, a man who is sworn by his order to a chaste life. Rebecca must have feared for her chastity, because, in one of the book's dramatic moments, she threatens to throw herself from a parapet of the castle to save herself from him.

When De Bois Guilbert's crime is discovered by a superior of the Templars, it is explained away as the result of the Jewish woman's witchcraft and evil spells. That is the only thing that can explain this man's bad behavior. Rebecca is put to trial and sentenced to death at the stake for her supposed witchcraft. Of course, she is rescued by Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe who acts as her champion and wins her life back for her in a jousting match.

In the novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Archdeacon Claude Frollo parallels De Bois Guilbert in some respects. He falls in "lust" with the gypsy woman Esmerelda. Frollo's feelings cause him to kill his romantic rival, the soldier Phoebus whom Esmerelda loves, and have Esmerelda arrested for the crime. Later, he visits Esmerelda in prison, after she has endured torture, explains to her his feelings for her, saying, "Each night, on examining myself, I found that I was more helpless, more spellbound, more bewitched, more undone."

Frollo states:

"I learned who thou wert; Egyptian, Bohemian, gintara, zingara. How could I no longer doubt that there was witchcraft in the case? I hoped that the law would break the charm. A sorceress had bewitched Bruno D'Ast: he caused her to be burned and was cured. I knew him. I decided to try the same remedy."

Just as Rebecca had Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe as her champion, Esmerelda has the hunchback Quasimodo. He swings down on the ropes from the bell towers to rescue her from the gallows and takes her into the church for sanctuary.

Frollo makes several attempts to win Esmerelda's affection but is rejected each time. In the end, Esmerelda dies at the gallows, and Frollo dies at the hands of Quasimodo. The story of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is over all a tragic one. All of its major characters die in some tragic way.

Frollo, like De Bois Guilbert, could not take responsibility for his own actions. If he had feelings he shouldn't have for Esmerelda, it must be that he was bewitched. A psychologist might say that both De Bois Guilbert and Frollo used psychological projection. Unable to accept failure for their own sins, it was necessary to blame another.

Notice that it is two literary men, Sir Walter Scott and Victor Hugo, that write with such sensitivity about these issues concerning women.

Sir Walter Scott

Victor Hugo

Sadly, these examples in fiction make me think of real situations with real women. Another book I have read somewhat recently is the non-fiction Reading Lolita in Tehran, written by Azar Nafisi, a female literature professor, who gives a glimpse into what life is like for Muslim women in Iran.

There is one example in the book I remember where some Muslim girls find themselves in a similar position as Rebecca or Esmerelda. In one chapter, Nafisi describes comforting her daughter Negar who came home from school crying. Negar tells her mother her story.

"That day in the middle of her last class -- science -- the principal and morality teacher had barged in and told the girls to put their hands on their desks. The entire class had been escorted out of the classroom, without any explanation, their schoolbags searched for weapons and contraband: tapes, novels, friendship bracelets. Their bodies were searched, their nails inspected. One student, a girl who had returned from the United States the previous year with her family, was taken to the principal's office: her nails were too long. There, the principal herself had cut the girl's nails, so close she had drawn blood. Negar had seen her classmate after they were dismissed, in the school yard, waiting to go home, nursing the guilty finger. The morality teacher stood beside her, discouraging other students from approaching. For Negar, the fact that she couldn't even go near and console her friend was as bad as the whole trauma of the search. She kept saying, Mom, she doesn't know about our rules and regulations; you know, she just came back from America -- how do you think she feels when they force us to trample on the American flag and shout, Death to America? I hate myself, I hate myself, she repeated as I rocked her back and forth and wiped the mixture of sweat and tears from her soft skin.

This, of course, diverted the whole class [girls meeting in Nafisi's home.] Everyone tried to distract Negar by joking and telling stories of their own, how once Nasserin had been sent to the disciplinary committee to have her eyelashes checked. Her lashes were long, and she was suspected of using mascara. That's nothing, said Manna, next to what happened to my sister's friends at Amir Kabir Polytechnic University. During lunch, three of the girls were in the yard eating apples. They were reprimanded by the guards: they were eating their apples too seductively!"

The picture below is from the graphic novel Persepolis, an autobiography of Marjane Satrapi, depicting her life in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution.

An incredible burden is placed on Muslim women in some nations to guard their own modesty, to what would be deemed in most other cultures as ridiculous extremes. As with Brian de Bois Guilbert or Claude Frollo, if a Muslim man has a lustful attraction to a woman who is not his wife, the woman is blamed. Perhaps, she showed a little ankle or made direct eye contact. Maybe, she bit an apple seductively! A woman might even be blamed in her own rape, and thus victimized twice. Certainly, it is mysogynistic to put the full burden of purity on the woman, even to the extreme of defying all reason.

I confess I don't know how to bite an apple seductively. Perhaps, there are some people who might know how to make an attempt at it. But since what might be perceived as seductive is subjective, my thought is that these girls were merely eating apples with no thought of flirting.

I think I can relate to those apple-eating girls in a scenario from my own life. Once, I was with a friend shopping at a drug store in New York City.

The temperature was stifling hot inside the store, and my friend and I both found cold drinks to purchase which we carried with us around the store. My hair was quite long at the time, hanging halfway down my back. At one point, I lifted my hair and put the cold bottle I was carrying on the nape of my neck. Shortly after that, a man, who was a complete stranger to me, said something to me with a creepy leer on his face. I did not hear what he said. I only know that he made me uncomfortable, and I quickened my pace to hurry past him. It wasn't until months, maybe even years later, that I considered the thought that, perhaps, in this man's mind, my cold bottle to the neck was some sort of attention-getting flirtatious gesture, as I have since seen women on TV do a similar trick with a cold can or ice cube to some part of the body. The creepy leering man was quite mistaken if that's what he thought. My neck was hot, and that's all.

In the U.S. and Canada, rape shield laws have been put in place to prohibit cross-examination of the accuser(alleged victim)in certain areas, such as what she was wearing at the time of the incident. Of course, there have been cases where women have falsely accused men, such as in the 2006 case against three members of the Duke lacrosse team.

So it is hoped, that the truth would come out during a fair trial. Of course, it should be determined if the accusation rings true or not. However, in a case where there is force, not consent, I don't think it is really that consequential what the woman was wearing. Some choices of clothing may show poor judgment on the woman's part, but her state of dress or undress doesn't give license to the man to lose control of his behavior.

Modesty, pornography and related topics have often been a discussion point in my workplace, so I have given it much thought. Where does the burden lie in cases of sexual sin and sexual crime? Does the burden lie with women to guard their own modesty or does the burden lie with men to guard their own minds? I have heard arguments for either side, sometimes with an extreme lean towards one side or another, but I think the answer is more straight down the middle, a little bit of both.

As a Christian, I believe that all mankind descended from Adam and Eve. When sin came into the world with Adam and Eve, so did clothing. Adam and Eve first made clothing for themselves from fig leaves, and then God Himself made clothing for them from an animal's skin. If sin had not come into the world with Adam and Eve, I think it is reasonable to assume from the Bible that people would have continued to live in the Garden of Eden, as strange as it seems, in some sort of nudist colony type civilization. If everyone could be trusted to be pure-minded, nudity would not be an issue.

Nudity itself does not equal lust or necessarily produce lust. People of certain professions -- doctors, surgeons, medical examiners, people in the funeral business -- look at naked bodies repeatedly. We certainly hope that these professional people look at the body with a pure mind, in a professional way, and not a lustful way. Some people I know, who are not coming from a Christian worldview as I am, in debating with me, have taken this point to the extreme, that if we, as a culture, were less prudish about the body, if we were more lax about modesty and more lax about pornography, sexual crime in this country would actually decrease rather than increase. I think the point that my debaters attempted to make was that removing the mystery of the naked human body would remove the unhealthy obsession with it.

If this is the case and that point is valid, then it is only reasonable that cultures where people have traditionally worn less clothing should have less sexual violence.

In doing some research on this subject, I read Chapter 7 of "The Origins of War in Child Abuse," 2010, by Lloyd DeMause. What I found is far too disturbing to share in detail -- Feel free to look it up yourself. The book is online -- but the author made a study of this aspect of life in Papua New Guinea, Australian aboriginal culture and African tribal cultures. His study would certainly seem to suggest otherwise. In fact, some child abuse seems to be encouraged by the fact that some families in Papua New Guinea would sleep close together in the nude. This includes the abuse of boys and not just girls or women.

Clearly, removing the mystery of the human body does not lessen lust or sexual crime. It is true that, to the pure-minded, nudity is not necessarily pornographic. Titus 1:15, "To the pure all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure." At the same time, we are a fallen, sinful people, and we need the fig leaves. It is not wise to live as nudists or to wear provocative clothing. The mind can not be trusted to be pure, and we can not trust the minds of others to be pure. This makes modesty a necessity.

But how modest is modest? How much covering do we need? I Timothy 2:9 in Scripture says, "In like manner also, that the women should adorn themselves in modest apparel, with propriety and moderation..." But how do you define what modest apparel is?

Should women wear burkhas, smothering garments that impair both vision and movement?

Should we go back to wearing cumbersome Victorian swimsuits on the beach?

These measures are a bit extreme (certainly in the case of the burkha) but I think it's clear from the modern culture what is considered to be sexually provocative. Otherwise, a prostitute would not know how to dress. To be modest, a woman should not dress like a prostitute. She should not draw too much attention, as in showing cleavage, to the parts of the body that are eroticized.

Though she's far removed from being a theological or moral expert, I like this quote by fashion designer Edith Head.

In closing, yes, a woman should guard her own modesty, but, that said, a man should also guard his mind. "Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it." Proverbs 4:23

Assorted Thoughts on Reading Inspired by C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis is a personal hero of mine for his imaginative writing and his theological writing, spiritual insights, deep thinking, studious nature and many other reasons. He was also a voracious reader all his life, starting in childhood.

"You could never get a cup of tea large enough or a book large enough to suit me."

I can relate to this, can you? I am continuously reading. I constantly desire to enrich my mind and learn and explore new things or just appreciate the beauty of language and storytelling. Now that I have a Kindle, I can carry a large library with me everywhere. Some evenings, I go from my office to restaurants for dinner and then to municipal meetings at night.(I'm a reporter.)So, my Kindle is my companion when I eat solo or when I have a waiting period before the meeting starts or when the municipal council goes into a closed session. Council people will approach me and ask in a friendly way, "What are you reading today?"

I've heard many people say they prefer traditional books made from paper to the Kindle or the Nook, and I can understand those feelings somewhat. I would never want these contraptions to completely replace traditional books. However, it is much easier to carry around a "large book" such as Lewis liked around on a Kindle than tote around, say, "War and Peace" to read on your lunch break (which I actually did at a former job.)Toting "War and Peace" might be just as much exercise for the body as for the mind.

I only half-agree with Lewis on the tea part though. I'm an American but have a bit of the Anglophile about me. I adore pretty tea cups and teapots, and I do drink tea fairly often. My favorites are Darjeeling and Earl Grey. This said, I prefer coffee. So, this mug with a similar quote is perhaps more personally suitable.

I remember how inspired I was after reading Lewis's autobiography, "Surprised by Joy," reading just how voraciously Lewis read growing up. I remember reading how his family never borrowed books from libraries but always bought them and how they did not put any limitations on what books he could read. He did some pretty ambitious reading at a young age. Books were stashed in odd places throughout the house, even stacked on the stairs. This photograph I found on Pinterest reminded me of it.

I don't recommend this book storage system. I don't have a husband, but I think this would drive a husband berserk. As a single, I would still want friends and guests, and this, I would imagine, would drive your friends and guests berserk too. As much as I love books, I love people more. Still, it makes quite an interesting visual.

I've made such a hero of Lewis that, when I read about the books that inspired him, I have a desire to read those same writers and books. So, in recent years, I have explored George MacDonald and G.K.Chesterton like the books listed below.

I also have an interest in reading books written by the other Inklings, Lewis's writing friends, such as Tolkien.

I don't read these writers exclusively, but Lewis's example to me has inspired me to read more, to read more books of great quality and to keep book lists of the works I read each year.

This brings me to another quote of his.

One of my goals is to read more.

1) Read more good books.

2)Write good books. Finish what you start. Publish to Kindle.

3)Exercise more.

4)Lose weight.

5)Work on my weaknesses. Develop, with God's help, those positive traits that don't come naturally to my personality type. I am, by the way, a phlegmatic.

What are your goals?