The Watchtower of the Author

The blue mountains were further off than they looked, and higher, and it took the three of them four days to reach the foot of them. Analogy’s leg slowed them down, and the road climbed the whole way. But on the evening of the fourth day they came into a high green valley among the peaks, with a village of stone cottages beside a lake, and above the village, on the highest summit in the range, stood the white tower they had seen from the plain.

It was taller than the Lighthouse and plainer, with no lamp and no lens, just one slender shaft of white stone with a small open platform on top like a crow’s nest. A path went up the mountain to it in long zigzags.

The people of the village were shepherds who kept small, sturdy sheep on the high pastures. They took the pilgrims in kindly and fed them, and found a bed for Analogy in the house of an old woman who knew how to look after broken bones.

“You’ll be going up to the Watchtower,” said the shepherd who’d taken them in, a tall grey-bearded man called Steadfast. “Everybody does. Best view on the whole road. On a clear day you can see the City plain from the top, and you can see back the way you came, every step of it.” He paused. “But that’s not what it’s for.”

“What is it for?”

Steadfast smiled. “Seeing what the writer saw. Go up in the morning. The keepers’ll show you.”

They went up in the grey dawn, Inquirer and Plain-Sense. Analogy stayed behind with his leg up and a pile of the old woman’s books, grumbling. The path was steep, the air thin and cold, and as they climbed the valley dropped away under them and the peaks round about seemed to rise up and crowd in.

Halfway up the path went through a little stone gateway, and carved on the gate were the words: Knowing This First, That No Prophecy Of The Scripture Is Of Any Private Interpretation. For The Prophecy Came Not In Old Time By The Will Of Man: But Holy Men Of God Spake As They Were Moved By The Holy Ghost.

Inquirer stopped and read it twice.

“Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. Two speakers. The men, and the Spirit.”

“Yes,” said Plain-Sense. “That’s what this tower’s about, I think. Two authors and one meaning.”

They went on up.

The top of the tower was a round platform open to the sky, with a low parapet. It was so high that the clouds were underneath them, lying in the valleys like snow, and beyond the clouds the whole world lay spread out in every direction.

Two people were waiting up there. One was a tall, lean man with a longbow over his shoulder and a quiver at his hip, with a weathered, serious face and very keen grey eyes. The other was a woman, older, with a long shepherd’s crook and a face so calm and clear it looked lit from behind.

“Welcome,” said the archer. “I’m Single-Sense. You’ve met me before, I think, in a gallery in the Lighthouse. Not in this shape, though.”

“The one arrow in the gold,” said Inquirer.

“The one arrow in the gold.” Single-Sense nodded. “And this is my sister, Clear-Light.”

“Who lets the plain places light the dark ones,” said the woman, smiling. “You’ve met me too, in another room. We keep this tower between us. Come and look.”

She took them to the parapet on the east side. And there, far off over the clouds, at the very edge of the world, Inquirer saw the City of the Word.

It wasn’t a faint light on the horizon any longer. He could actually see it: walls and gates and towers, white and gold in the morning sun, a great river running beside it, a road going up to its gates, and small moving specks on the road that were pilgrims. It was still a very long way off. But it was real, a place and not a dream.

He couldn’t say anything for a long while.

“Now turn round,” said Clear-Light gently.

He turned to the west, and there behind them was the whole road he had come. The dark green Forest of Syntax. The Quarry country. The glittering town of the Exchange. The Province of Forms like a patchwork quilt. The broken plain of the Mosaic. The dead Clocktower in its hills. The Diggings. The brown Babel. The House of the Copyists. The Lighthouse out on its headland, with the beam still going round. The great cliff of the Kneeling Stair. And right at the edge of sight, a faint glitter on the plain like a scatter of broken glass, the city of Mine-Own-Meaning.

“You see how far you’ve come,” said Clear-Light.

“I see how far I’ve come.” His voice wasn’t steady.

“But that’s not what the tower’s for,” said Single-Sense. “Steadfast told you, I expect. Look here.”

In the middle of the platform stood a stone table with a Book lying open on it, and next to the Book a brass instrument like a long telescope. Only instead of pointing at the sky it was mounted on a swivel so it could be turned down onto any page of the Book.

“This is the Author’s Glass. Every step of your road so far has been about getting close to the text. The copies, the tongues, the history, the context, the kinds, the shape, the grammar, the words. You’ve learned to see every stone. Now you have to learn to see what the builder meant by putting them there. What he was aiming at. What he wanted his readers to understand and believe and do. That’s the meaning. Not just the words. The words are how he aimed. The meaning’s the mark.”

He swung the Glass down over the open Book. “Look through it.”

Inquirer bent and put his eye to the brass eyepiece.

The Book was open near the beginning of Mark. At first all he could see through the Glass was the words, very big and clear. And they come unto him, bringing one sick of the palsy, which was borne of four. The story of the paralyzed man let down through the roof.

Then, as he looked, the Glass seemed to focus deeper. The words didn’t go away, but behind them, as if through clear water, he started to see something else. Not a vision. More like understanding. He saw the man who had written the words sitting at a table with a pen, and he saw what that man was doing with the story. He wasn’t just setting down a miracle. He was building toward a sentence, the one the whole scene turns on: But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins… The roof and the four friends and the bed coming down were all there to bring the reader to that question, Who can forgive sins but God only?, and to its answer.

He took his eye away from the Glass. “It’s about who Jesus is. Not about friendship, or perseverance, or getting through roofs. All that’s in there. But the point is He forgives sins, which only God can do, and He heals the man to prove it. The writer built the whole thing to get us there.”

“That’s the mark,” said Single-Sense. “That’s the main point. Every passage has one. Some have a main point and a few lesser ones serving it, but there’s always a center. Find it, and say it in a sentence. This passage says this, in order to do this. If you can’t say it in a sentence, you haven’t found it yet.”

“But it isn’t only Mark’s meaning, is it?” said Plain-Sense. “The gate on the path said holy men spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”

“No,” said Clear-Light. “It isn’t only Mark’s. That’s the wonder of the Book. Every word of it has two authors. A human writer with his own mind and style and purpose, writing to his own people in his own day, and the Spirit of God breathing through him, so that what he wrote is God’s own word. The two don’t pull against each other. God spoke through Mark’s meaning, not round it. So when you’ve found what Mark meant, you’ve found what God meant, in that place.”

“Always?” said Inquirer. He had learned to be wary of that word.

Clear-Light smiled as though she was glad he’d asked. “There are places where God’s meaning is fuller than the human writer could see at the time. The prophets spoke of the Christ, and searched their own writings to find out what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify. So the Divine Author may intend more than the human author fully grasped. But mark this. That fuller meaning is never against what the human author meant. It grows out of it, the way a tree grows out of a seed. And the way we know it isn’t by private insight. It’s by the later Scripture showing it to us. When the apostles tell us a psalm of David speaks of Christ, we know it because they said so, under the same Spirit. Not because some clever reader had a feeling.”

“And how do we know if a passage has that fuller sense?” said Plain-Sense.

“By letting the rest of the Book tell you. That’s my work, letting the clear places light the dim ones. Where the New Testament opens a door in a passage of the Old, walk through it. Where it doesn’t, don’t go knocking down walls looking for one.”

That was when they heard the hoofbeats.

They came up the mountain path from below, a single horse ridden hard. Inquirer went to the parapet and looked down. A long way down on the zigzags, but coming fast, was a rider on a tall grey horse: a long thin man in a black scholar’s gown with a cap on his head and a quill in his hand.

“Mr. Felt-Meaning,” said Inquirer.

He hadn’t laid eyes on him since the Ferry of Tongues, sipping his drink under the awning of the Express. But he’d felt him the whole way along the road, he told me: in the wreckers’ lanterns at the Lighthouse, in Mr. Mood’s cushion, at the dinner in the Exchange. The Master of the School of Relevance was never where you’d left him.

Single-Sense’s face had gone very still. He slid the longbow off his shoulder.

“He comes every year. He tries to take the Glass.”

Mr. Felt-Meaning came up onto the platform a few minutes later, a little short of breath from the last steep steps, and smiled his small patient smile round at all of them.

“Good morning. How nice to see you again, Self-Reader. Or is it Inquirer now? You’ve come a long way. I’ve been following your progress with the greatest interest.” He looked round the platform at the Book on its table and the brass Glass beside it. “And now here you are at the famous Watchtower, being taught to look for the author’s intention.” He gave a dry little laugh. “How charming. How terribly old-fashioned.”

“Is it wrong?”

“Wrong? My dear fellow, it’s impossible.” Mr. Felt-Meaning sat down on the parapet and crossed his long legs. “Think about it. Mark’s been dead nineteen hundred years. How could you possibly know what was in his mind? You can’t get inside his head. You don’t know what he was feeling or hoping, or what private associations those words had for him. The author’s gone. All that’s left is the text, and a text, once it’s written, belongs to its readers. It means whatever it comes to mean in each reader’s hands. The author’s intention is a ghost, my friend. You’re climbing mountains to look for a ghost.”

He waved at the brass Glass. “That machine’s a fraud. When you looked through it just now you didn’t see Mark’s meaning. You saw yours, the one you’ve been trained to expect. You’ve swapped one pair of lenses for another, that’s all. You’ve moved out of Mine-Own-Meaning and into Mine-Own-Method.”

Inquirer felt the old pull. It was the subtlest argument he’d met on the whole road, and it sounded so humble. Who are you to know another man’s mind?

He looked at Single-Sense, but the archer only nodded at him, as if to say, you answer him.

So Inquirer thought about it for a bit. Then he said, “Mr. Felt-Meaning, you’ve just said a great many things to me. Did you mean any of them?”

Mr. Felt-Meaning raised his eyebrows. “Of course.”

“Then let me tell you what I think you said. I think you said the author’s intention is the only thing that matters, and we have to climb every mountain to find it, and you’ve come all the way up here to help us.”

The smile flickered. “That isn’t what I said at all.”

“How do you know? You’ve finished speaking. Your words belong to me now. They mean whatever they come to mean in my hands. Isn’t that what you just told me?”

There was a silence on the platform. Plain-Sense made a small noise that might have been a laugh.

“That’s a cheap trick,” said Mr. Felt-Meaning coldly.

“It’s your trick. I’ve only turned it round. You rode all the way up this mountain to tell me something. You picked your words very carefully. You meant me to understand them. And you’d be angry, you are angry, when I twist them. Every man who speaks or writes means something and expects to be understood. You do. I do. Mark did. That’s all the author’s intention means. Not his private feelings, or what he had for breakfast. Just what he meant to say by the words he chose. And we can know that the same way I know what you meant just now. By reading the words carefully, where they stand, the way he meant them to be read.”

“And you,” said Single-Sense quietly, “have spent your whole life writing books, Mr. Felt-Meaning. Long books, full of careful arguments, and every one of them written to be understood exactly as you meant it. If you really believed what you’ve just said, you’d never have written a line.”

Mr. Felt-Meaning stood up. His long face had gone an odd grey color.

“You’re very clever. All of you. Very clever. But you’ve forgotten one thing.” He turned to the stone table. “Without that Glass you can’t prove any of it. You’ll be just like the rest of us. Reading and guessing.”

And he grabbed the brass Glass in both hands and wrenched it off its swivel.

He was stronger than he looked. The swivel broke with a crack, and he lifted the long brass tube over his head and ran for the parapet. He meant to throw it over, a thousand feet down onto the rocks.

Single-Sense had an arrow out and on the string in one smooth movement. But he didn’t loose it. Mr. Felt-Meaning was at the parapet already, and if the arrow hit him he’d go over.

It was Plain-Sense who got to him first. He didn’t tackle him or grab him. He just stepped in between Mr. Felt-Meaning and the edge and held out his hand.

“Don’t. Please. It isn’t yours.”

Mr. Felt-Meaning stood with the Glass over his head and his thin chest heaving. For a long moment nobody moved at all.

Then Clear-Light spoke from behind him, in her calm voice.

“Throw it if you like. It won’t make any difference.”

Mr. Felt-Meaning turned his head.

“It’s only a glass. There’s no magic in it. It’s only a way of looking carefully, with all the tools he’s learned on the road, at the words the author wrote. You can smash it on the rocks, and tomorrow Single-Sense will make another. Any honest reader can make one. It’s only reading.” She paused. “That’s the thing you’ve never been able to bear, isn’t it? That it’s only reading. That an ordinary person can open the Book and read it carefully and find out what it says. You’ve spent your whole life telling people they can’t. Because if they can, they don’t need you.”

Mr. Felt-Meaning stood there with the Glass held up, and something in his face broke. It wasn’t repentance. Inquirer told me he could never make up his mind afterwards what it was. It was something like a very old man realizing he has forgotten the way home.

He lowered the Glass and set it down, very carefully, on the stone. Then he turned and went down the steps without a word, and they heard the hooves going away down the zigzag path, slower than they had come.

It was a quiet hour on the tower after that. Single-Sense mended the swivel with a strip of leather and put the Glass back on its table, and Clear-Light handed round bread and cheese from a basket, and they ate looking out at the City.

Then Single-Sense set them to work.

He had them look through the Glass at passage after passage and give the main point of each in one sentence. It was harder than Inquirer expected. With the paralyzed man it had come clearly, but with others he caught himself wanting to say three things, or five, or something true that wasn’t quite the thing. Single-Sense was patient but exact.

“That’s in it,” he’d say. “But is it what it’s for? What’s the mark? Look again.”

And once, after Inquirer had looked at a passage in Isaiah and announced its point with great confidence, Single-Sense lowered his bow and laughed.

“That’s the third time you’ve told me a passage is about the danger of reading the Book through your own lenses.”

Inquirer went red. “Is that wrong?”

“It’s your hobby-horse,” said Single-Sense, not unkindly. “Every reader has one. The theme closest to his heart, the one he learned the hard way, so he sees it everywhere. One man finds justification by faith in every verse. Another finds social justice. Another finds the end times. Another finds the danger of self-reading.” He grinned. “It’s a good theme. It’s true, and it’s in the Book. But it isn’t what Isaiah’s on about in that chapter. Isaiah’s talking about Babylon. Watch for your hobby-horse. It’s the last pair of lenses a man notices.”

Inquirer laughed too, if a little ruefully. He told me on the wall it was the single most useful thing anybody said to him on the whole road.

Late in the afternoon Plain-Sense came to a passage he couldn’t make out.

It was in First Corinthians fifteen. Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?

He looked through the Glass a long time, then stood back and rubbed his eyes. “I can’t see it. I don’t know what Paul means. Baptized for the dead? What were they doing? Whose dead? Was he approving of it? I haven’t a clue.”

Inquirer expected Single-Sense to tell him. The archer only nodded.

“Nor does anyone. There are forty explanations of that verse at least, and good men have argued over it for centuries. We don’t know what the Corinthians were doing. Paul knew and they knew, and he didn’t stop to explain because they didn’t need him to.”

“Then what do I do?”

Clear-Light came over and put her hand on the Book.

“Three things. First, you say I don’t know. That’s honest, and it’s allowed. The Book’s clearness doesn’t mean every verse is clear to every reader. It means what’s necessary is clear. Second, you look at the main point of the passage it sits in. Is that clear?”

Plain-Sense looked again. “Yes,” he said slowly. “The main point’s very clear. Paul’s arguing that the dead will rise. The whole chapter’s about the resurrection, and this verse is one of his arguments, whatever it means: if the dead don’t rise, why do people do this? Whatever they were doing, it shows they believed the dead would rise.”

“Then you’ve got the main point. And third: you never, ever build anything on a dark verse that the plain verses don’t teach. There’s a whole sect away in the far north that baptizes the living on behalf of the dead, by the thousand, on the strength of that one sentence and nothing else. They took a lamp nobody can see by and tried to light a house with it. Don’t. Let the clear passages carry the weight. Let the dark one stand where Paul put it with its little light, and wait. One day you might understand it. And if you don’t, you’ll have lost nothing you need.”

They came down from the Watchtower at sunset. Analogy was waiting for them at the old woman’s cottage, sitting up on a bench outside with his leg on a stool.

They told him everything, Felt-Meaning and the Glass and the hobby-horse and the dark verse. Analogy listened, nodding. When they got to the part about the two authors, he limped inside and came back with one of the old woman’s books, a battered copy of the Book with a great many notes in the margins in a faded hand.

“Steadfast’s mother’s. She kept the tower before the archer did. Look what she wrote here.”

Beside the story in Luke of the risen Lord walking with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus there was a note in the faded hand:

The Lord Himself is the scope of the whole. When you find what each writer meant, you will find that it was always pointing, near or far, toward Him. Not because you must force every verse to speak His name. But because the Author of the whole had Him in mind from the beginning. Read each passage for what it says. And then ask how it fits into the story that ends in Him.

Inquirer read it twice.

“That’s the next thing, isn’t it. How it fits into the story.”

“That’s the next thing,” said Steadfast, who had come up behind them. “The road down from here goes east to the Covenant Highway. It’s the oldest stretch of the whole road. Some say it was laid in Eden. It runs from the first promise to the last, and every stone of it’s a covenant God made with His people. You’ll walk it, and you’ll see how all the passages you’ve learned to read one at a time fit together into one story.” He looked at the three of them. “And you’ll meet some on it who’ll try to make that story simpler than it is, and some who’ll try to make it into something it isn’t. Be careful. The Highway’s straight, but it’s long, and not everybody who walks it walks it honestly.”

That night Inquirer couldn’t sleep. He went out of the cottage and stood by the lake in the starlight looking up at the white Watchtower on its peak.

And far off to the west he thought he could see, very small, a single light moving on the road below the mountains. It might have been a lantern, or a rider. It was going west, away from the City, back toward the plains, slowly, like something with a very long way to go that wasn’t sure it wanted to get there.