It’s true that I am quiet the fan of New Zealand pop star Lorde. For me, ever since her Pure Heroine album and her second album Melodrama, Lorde’s music is characterized by a deep sense of existentialism. Her music just resonates and reminds me of pivotal moments in high school and college, specific nights and feelings that haunt me. A piece I want to touch on is Ribs from Pure Heroine and its connection with CS Lewis’ “The Great Divorce.” Be prepared, this is going to be real nerdy and to a point, subjective. Everyone experiences and hears different themes in music, so what I am writing is just my experience of listening to Lorde after reading Lewis. I don’t propose that my thoughts were what Lorde intended for listeners. What I hear in this song is a lot of talk about loneliness and a desire for something real, so real that it cannot be described in words. Shall we start?

Lorde’s “Ribs”

According to Lorde, this song was inspired by the time she threw a party at home while her parents were out of town. On the surface, the lyrics discuss the scary feeling of growing up. This theme is highlighted beautifully in the second verse:

“This dream isn’t feeling sweet

We’re reeling through the midnight streets

And I’ve never felt more alone

It feels so scary, getting old…”

The night harbors the adventures of high school. I think for the most part, many of us have experienced this edge between “fun” and the fear of the unknown, of the darkness, of the absence of authority and the risk of getting into trouble. High school was the time of the first steps of independence and discovery of adventure, good and bad. College is even more of this. Going to your first college party, seeing classmates falling from intoxication, spending night after night up in stress or boredom, eating or not eating food that you never would have at home, meeting new friends, and facing that split second decision of either presenting your usual self or a new self to the people you meet. So yeah, its scary growing up. Even in a dorm full of guys, I felt lonely. I felt surrounded by a lot of affluency and suburb kids. We did not have the same childhoods. We did not grow up hunting, or working in wheat fields. We did not listen to country music. And while the virtuous beauty of diverse communities is to live in this mix and match, the first week was a daunting week. I remember introducing myself to so many nameless faces and exchanging snapchats wildly with discernably the most popular girls.

“We can talk it so good

We can make it so divine

We can talk it good

How you wish it would all the time…”

Then Lorde sings about the let down of life, the existential neurosis of life. How we can make something so big and special, speak of it that this will be the thing that will satisfy, but it never does right?

“I want ’em back (I want ’em back)

The minds we had (the minds we had)

How all the thoughts (how all the thoughts)

Moved ’round our heads (moved ’round our heads)

I want ’em back (I want ’em back)

The minds we had (the minds we had)

It’s not enough to feel the lack

I want ’em back, I want ’em back, I want ’em…

…You’re the only friend I need

Sharing beds like little kids

Laughing ’til our ribs get tough

But that will never be enough…”

Have we not had those conversations, those amazing nights when it seems like this world and our selves open up to a wonderful experience of life? When conversations with others goes deep, heart-to-hearts as I have heard them called. Conversations of struggle and joy, of doubt and wonder. Conversations of vulnerable topics, like crushes, broken hearts, faith, truth, love, the future. How awesome if those conversations went forever right? Maybe not the conversation, but the experience? the feeling? For myself, those nights also seemed to fulfill me the most. The zombie like existence of high school was shattered by a deep and digging question by a peer. The times when we could freely talk about our crushes or the secrets held in the darkness, how liberating! I remember a feeling of being on top of the world, of feeling like there is something out there. I remember looking forward to those conversations happening again, being vulnerable and letting someone receive it. But, just like Lorde, those conversations would never last. They would end in sleep, or interuption, or fights. They would not satisfy. They were not enough. And again, I felt torn from that beauty of encounter this strange other.

CS Lewis and the Desire for the Divine

“The Great Divorce” is a fictional story of a man who journeys up to heaven—unknowningly starting from hell—and witnesses what happens when a bus full of ghosts try to visit the concrete world of heaven. There, loved ones in heaven try to convince the ghosts to repent and join them in joy. It’s a very allegorical story, with symbolic meaning bursting from each sentence. Lewis attempts to portray the experience of hell and heaven, using the sins or mercy of others to highlight how anyone can go to heaven or hell.

A chilling characterization of hell is its vast emptiness. A ghost explains,

“As soon as anyone arrives he settles in some street. Before he’s been there twenty-four hours he quarrels with his neighbor. Before the week is over he’s quarreled so badly that he decides to move. Very likely he finds the next street empty because all the people there have quarreled with their neighbours—and moved. If so he settles in. If by any chance the streeth is full, he goes further. But even if he statys, it makes no odds…he’ll move on again. Finally he’ll move right out to the edge of the town and build a new house…They have been moving on and on. Getting further apart. Millions of miles from us and from one another. Every now and then they move further still.” (472).

Hell is a lonely experience. People cannot stand those around them. They seek out isolation. This is contrasted to the imagery of heaven,

“The light and coolness that drenched me were like those of summer morning, early morning… It gave me a feeling of freedom, but also exposure, possbily danger…” (476).

And when the narrator discovers the reality of his hellish companions,

“Now that they were in the light, they were transparent…They were in fact ghosts: man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air. One could attend to them or ignore them at will as you do with the dirt on a window pane. I noticed that the grass did not bend under their feet: even the dew drops were not disturbed… It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than thigns in our country that men were ghosts by comparison” (477).

The reality of hell is nearly nothing compared to the realness of heaven. Even more, we realize that later in the book, hell in its vast emptiness, is actually small,

“All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfuly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or thave any taste…. all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heave, would have no weight that cold be registered at all” (538).

Hell and Dialectic Existence

What’s the connection between the two?

Both Lorde and CS Lewis are highlighting and characterizing the experience of loneliness.  From Lewis’ perspective, lonliness is a trademark to the experience of hell where we a state of the soul that cannot stand others. In Lorde, we see loneliness as an existential baracade, with community being a remedy to its effects. Lewis treats the contrast between hell’s isolation and heaven’s community seriously. Keepin in frame that hell is the place, or even existential state, of total deprivation and contradaction to human nature, loneliness was never the intended purpose of human life. This applies to feeling alone or actively avoiding communion, or encounter with others. Lorde knows that even roaming the streets at night with others can still feel lonely. And in Lewis’ description of hellish isolation, it’s scarily easy to see people in our own lives who resemble ghosts. We can taste the threshold of hell now. This is the seriousness of miserable solitude; it feels bad because it is bad, in fact, its evil.

On the other hand, if we can taste hell now, that must mean we can taste heaven now too.

Lorde depiction of laughing like a child as a insufficient remedy is the clue. Notice that this image is an image of encounter. Conversations are windows into the “divine” and the presence of another as fulfilling. Lewis also touches on this too, how human loves can turn to divine love,

“There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to enternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there’s also somethin in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly” (521)

This is the positive understanding of loneliness and divinity. Our lives only make sense when we live in relationship. Whether in the family, or romantically, or in friendship, human florishing is rooted fundamentally in dialectic existence.

The mother and the son, the family and other families, even the quiet hermit in the wilderness, our frame of reference is in referencing about and with others. And I said before, human community is a taste of heavenly communion. Heaven is a full place,

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us…

-Hebrews 12:1, RSVCE

The next time we walk through town, through the quad, through the pews of the parish, those people around you are a portal into the divine. Community is a reflection of the divine life.