One of my most formative educational experiences came in the first weeks of my first class as an undergraduate in the English Department. The impassive professor of my British Literature survey called on me to define the term ‘romantic.’ I offered a vague, listless response, which revealed nothing but that I had not adequately prepared for our seminar that day. With a stern gaze through thick glasses he stared at me and declared, “Butler, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Read MoreIn his Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis tells the story of a young boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb who, through habitual self interest and a careless fixation with a dead dragon’s hoard of gold, becomes a dragon himself. When the dragon-boy encounters the Christ-figure of the novel, the great lion Aslan, Eustace is informed that in order to become ‘un-dragoned,’ he will have to wash off the dragon skin in a nearby well. Eustace sets to work, and begins to scrub layer after layer off of himself, diminishing his dragonish stature until he reaches one final, intractable layer of dragon-skin that scrubbing cannot remove.
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