W. H. Auden:
“Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Charles Williams…is what one might call the orthodoxy of his imagination, as distinct from his beliefs, for this is very rare in our technological culture. In describing the life of the body and its finite existence in time, most contemporary writers, what their beliefs, show a manichaean bias, an emphasis on the drab and the sordid. If they are materialists they place the beautiful and the exciting in some temporal future; if they are professing Christians the only road to salvation they can imagine is the Negative Way of ascetic renunciation. Even the few who…do not suffer from this bias, cannot find anything in the contemporary world to their relish and turn for sustenance to preindustrial societies.”
Maybe the first or second class day of my freshman year of college, I was standing outside the door of room where the Ancient Philosophy course would be taught. I was reading Phillip K. Dick’s *Divine Invasion*. My teacher, Jim Haden, walked by and noted the book but said nothing. The next class day, same thing. Except this time Haden stopped in front of me, lifted the Dick book out of my hands, and replaced it with Williams’ *The Place of the Lion*. Changed things for me, he did–’he’ being properly ambiguous between Williams and Haden.