Before there was Star Wars, there was the Journal of the Whills. This two-page narrative outline drawn up in 1973 ended up becoming the most popular story of the 20th century, bar none. “Star Wars” was originally thought of as a story being recorded by ethereal beings called the Whills, like angels, and written down in a journal of galactic history.
"Originally, I was trying to have the story be told by somebody else (an immortal being known as a Whill); there was somebody watching this whole story and recording it, somebody probably wiser than the mortal players in the actual events. I eventually dropped this idea, and the concepts behind the Whills turned into the Force. But the Whills became part of this massive amount of notes, quotes, background information that I used for the scripts; the stories were actually taken from the Journal of the Whills."
―George Lucas
The Skywalker saga, the Clone Wars, the Old Republic….it’s all just a passing story in this broad sweep of history. One of the Whills even has to remind the other not to forget the Clone Wars in their timeline. A Star Wars fan in 2024 couldn’t possibly forget the Clone Wars…it’s half the story as we know it.
To eternal beings, however, it’s just a blip on the radar, a mere paragraph in a dense history book.
This is a matter of perspective.
It’s a way of seeing the world and understanding current events in our own lives. Someone asked me recently how I would write the section of a future history book when it comes to the 2024 Election.
To do such a thing, you have to pick out a pair of eyeglasses to try and see things more clearly.
The lens you choose changes everything.
This is a passage that stuck out to me in the novelization of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, where a poem of sorts is used to open the book. It’s ascribed to the Journal of the Whills.
"First comes the day
Then comes the night.
After the darkness
Shines through the light.
The difference, they say,
Is only made right
By the resolving of gray
Through refined Jedi sight."
―Journal of the Whills, 7:477
This poem seems to me to be a lyric on balance. There will be Light, and then comes Dark to corrupt it. Light will return and cut through the Dark. But the ultimate resolution only comes from resolving the gray area created by the battle between Dark and Light. Darkness leaves so many people feeling lost and confused. Not everyone becomes a Sith Lord.
Some of us just lose our understanding of the Light and what it is.
What helps us to accomplish this resolution?
Looks like…eyeglasses.
By the resolving of gray
Through refined Jedi sight
The Jedi way is not just a lifestyle or set of specific commitments, it’s a methodology for seeing the world.
Religious faith raises people to understand world events as a spiritual struggle.
Marxism rejected this and framed human events as an ongoing power struggle between oppressor and oppressed, with class as the single most important marker of which side you fall on.
Buddhism makes sense of the world through a narrative of perpetual and guaranteed suffering and the quest to both understand it and make peace with it.
The Jedi and the Sith aren’t just asking their followers to enlist on a team and pick between a blue, green, or red lightsaber. They are asking you to consider their narrative understanding of why we exist and what we are doing here.
I feel as though this could be taken as a completely obvious statement, but I know from lived experience and deep prolonged pain, how much the eyeglasses we wear matter.
I’ve been reading through a biography of C.S. Lewis lately, which is why Geeky Stoics has had so much to say about Lewis as of late. It’s on my mind. And glasses were something on the mind of C.S. Lewis, almost always it seems. He writes about them so often through his published works, including Mere Christianity, The Weight of Glory, The Problem of Pain, and The Chronicles of Narnia…..just to name a few. The glasses keep coming up in the biography because Lewis viewed the existence of God and his conversion to faith as his old prescription no longer working.
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
- C.S. Lewis
He couldn’t see clearly anymore, but through his busy hands and fumbling about in the dark Lewis could feel the contours of this room, its furniture, and a deeper reality than what he’d understood previously in his life as an atheist.
Christianity was to C.S. Lewis a self-evident thing because the story it tells about humanity and who we are aligned with what he could make out with his own struggling eyes. Those glasses brought it all into focus.
The dark room C.S. Lewis was lost in turned out to be just a foyer, an entryway into a large, ornate hallway with a dozen or more doors. Behind each door await people and traditions and a warm fire where you rest and warm yourself. Any of the rooms is preferable to being outside alone, blind, and cold.
My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.
Job 42:5-6
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