Real World

Will you live in the real or a pretend world in 2024? Choice is yours.

The Silver Chair’s Queen connived to convince Pole, Scrubb, and Puddleglum that her drab, dingy dungeon was the real world. Feasts, forests, fauns, even Aslan himself were only imaginary imitations. Fortunately, the marshwiggle recognized her ruse.

We may not be trapped Underworld, but even here above ground fatuous fantasies find fertile fields in the minds of many. It troubled me as a teenager that popular songs quickly devolved from decrying drugs to celebrating them:

Girl, you thought you found the answer

on that magic carpet ride last night.

But when you wake up in the mornin’

the world still gets you uptight.

Well, there’s nothin’ that you ain’t tried

to fill the emptiness inside.

But when you come back down, girl,

you still ain’t feeling right.

And don’t it seem like kicks just keep gettin’ harder to find,

And all your kicks ain’t bringing you peace of mind.

Before you find out it’s too late, girl, you better get straight.

That was Paul Revere and the Raiders, 1966. In 1968, the Temptations crooned:

You can be what you wanna be

(Cloud Nine) You ain’t got no responsibility

(Cloud Nine) Every man, every man is free

(Cloud Nine) You’re a million miles from reality (Reality).

Things have slid even further downhill since then.

Drug-induced pretend worlds are not the only ones people inhabit today. Some people imagine that hormones and surgery can transmogrify a girl into a boy (or vice versa). Some proclaim that humans are only evolutionary accidents, so that no objective standard of truth, beauty, or morality constrains us. Some are so enslaved to screens that they seldom step outside to survey a starry sky. Some fritter their hours by watching pretend worlds rather than learning, doing, or being fully alive in the real one.

God has created a world of wonder, majesty, mystery. The real one. Let’s live, love, and laugh in it.