Last Time

"Oh dear, oh dear," said Lucy. "...I thought you'd come roaring in and frighten all the enemies away--like last time. And now everything is going to be horrid."

"It is hard for you, little one," said Aslan. "But things never happen the same way twice."

C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian

Like a zillion other Narnia fans, I went to see the newest movie version of Prince Caspian this weekend. Since I'm neither a careful critic nor a connoisseur of good films (I tend to love whatever movie I happen to pay ten dollars to see in the theater), I won't review it here. Still, I tend to be skeptical of adaptations, especially of books that I love, even more so when the books are of the imaginative sort. I often find myself ticking off a list of characters, lines, and circumstances that do not measure up, simply because they were different from the way that I pictured them, curled up under the covers with a flashlight when I was seven years old. This puts me in a difficult situation when I pay to see a fantasy film. One part of me--the rational adult part with all the money--wants to be pleased with the investment of a night of entertainment, and is willing to put up with any amount of cheesiness or contrivances of plot, acting, writing, and the like. The other side argues with a whiny, very seven-year-old voice, "But that's not how ________________ is supposed to look!" Moviegoing, for me, is a complicated affair.

All told, however, I did like this latest version. Clumsy embellishments aside, there were additions to the plot that retained the spirit of the story. That, in my useless film-critic opinion, is what adaptations should be about. I shrug my shoulders at wooden dialogue and awkward teenaged sexual tension, so long as the theme shines through. In great measure, it did here.

I am reminded, though, of how differently I read books at various stages in my life. I never remember caring much about this story, actually. Full of war and politics, I usually passed over it as a more concise version of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Today, though, as I see this children's story through adult eyes, I pick up on a theme that never stood out before.

Throughout the movie, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy lament that this journey to Narnia is different from the first. They remember being older, kings and queens with a glorious palace, conquerors in a peaceful and magical world. Their return to Narnia reveals a ruined palace and a dark, divided kingdom, into which they are not welcomed as saviors but scorned for being "just a bunch of kids." Expectations thwarted, they are left to pursue Narnia's redemption in a new way and, profoundly, without the direct intervention of Aslan, the lion Christ figure of the series.

By the time Lucy gets the chance to speak to Aslan face to face, near the end of the movie (and novel) a great deal of bloodshed has already occurred, and I can hear the undertone to her questions. "Where were you? Why didn't you just fix it like last time?"

Her questions come at an apt time for me, as I struggle to the end of the second and more difficult year of my brief teaching career. Two years ago, I was hired during a pay phone conversation in Italy at 9:00 PM, during which I wore linen beach pants and a swimsuit and nervously twirled a pigtail around my finger while I waded through my sun-drenched mind for coherent answers to the serious educational questions posed by a principal on the other side of the world. I returned to the beach to join my friends half an hour later, and we sipped wine and watched the sunset, celebrating our youth and education and my unofficial job offer. The moment was golden, a serendipitous beginning to a teaching career.

It's easy for me--and I suspect for others like me--to be seduced by the times and places that seem fated, knit together in intricate perfection. It's easy for me to demand that this year fit in with the glorious beginning, so that I always teach with grace, serenity, and wisdom, and my students consistently transform into mature and astute academics in the course of a ten-month school year. That would be "like last time," after all.

And Aslan's words are true. It is hard to accept, that a moment of rightness and sureness might seem to stand alone, that it might rather become a marker, reminding me that I am on the right path, instead of the first of many brilliant views. Of course, there have been other splendors along the way and more are ahead, I'm sure, but none will be just the same.

There are days like today, when I have lost my voice to a cold and my students cry, "Shut up! Ms. D can't talk loud today. We have to listen! Let me listen." And I write instructions on a yellow legal pad and they read them aloud to each other, their young voices spilling their compassion into the words I so frantically scribble down. They read sonnets to each other and try to understand, and I remember doing the same thing, nine years ago, on their side of the classroom. I whisper hints to them, rewording to fit into ten inexorable syllables all the wild imaginings of ninth grade poetics.

It's not a job interview in Italy, not a glass of wine and a sunset over the Mediterranean. It's not like last time.

But it's still good.