At first I was scared at the thought of seeing "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." The children might be smarmy! Aslan might be pompous! Turkish Delight might be nasty-lookin'! I'm one of the legions of children who repeatedly ransacked those books for every drop of mystery and comfort they could render--curled up with an apple and a piece of cheese and unable to break the spell of Narnia until the need to pee was crippling. To C.S. Lewis I credit my unusual capacity as an adult female to, you know, Hold It.

But I also credit him with bringing me in contact with one version of the enthralling joy that religious myth can render. I was raised by psychologists--one a rebellious ex-Espicopalian and one a godless but ethical California hillbilly--and never was the word "Jesus" spoken at home except as one the milder expletives. That was fine, and frankly, I'm glad for it. But I'm also glad for the texts that blew my mind, that froze and burned me with their transcendency and beauty. These included among many others, Edith Hamilton's" Greek Mythology", "Charlotte's Web", and the Chronicles of Narnia.

I remember first reading of the death of Aslan in "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe." The witch has betrayed Aslan, has gone back on her word. Edmund will not be ransomed. "With that knowledge," she says (or something like that), "Despair and die." Aslan is dead (In tears, I accepted it, I knew what death was). Susan and Lucy try to untie him afterward, I remember, as he lies bound on the Stone Table. His mane has been shorn. They wipe foam and blood from his face. The horror is over, and nothing is left but hopelessness. They go for a walk, I think, in the woods. And when they return, the body is gone. They think it has been subject to some final humiliation. But no--Aslan has returned to life. He is romping like a kitten. They ride on his back, coursing down through the Narnian woods to join the battle and defeat the ghoulish army. For there is a 'deep magic', something unknown even to the White Witch, that has brought the victim of selfless sacrifice back to life.

I was overjoyed. It confirmed what I knew and what I hoped--that the world was dangerous, magnificent, horrible and infinite, that radiant life could spring out of bleakness. Yes, in its allegorical specifics, the death is Christian. It didn't convert me, but it has made me sympathetic to what devoted Christians feel. It also makes me sympathetic to pagans, to Buddhists, to Jews, to any tradition that celebrates honor, courage, radical love and the capacity of the spirit for renewal. A talking lion who speaks peace. I'll hold him forever in my heart. No movie, good or bad, can alter what I felt, and feel.

Monk and before Monk. The dark-eyed gravity, the inarticulate pain fueling the fussiness, the hot body encased David Byrne-like in a large square suit. That top button firmly closing his shirt at the hollow of the throat? I itch to pop that button off with my teeth.

Amen on Don Cheadle. He's fascinated me ever since he was the magic that made "Volcano" watchable.

As for writers: I have a kind of a Jonathan Lethem thing.

It just strikes me as wrong to imagine that the therapist made rich by the dutiful attendance at therapy of uptight boyfriends will purchase a BOAT. Therapists don't purchase boats. They buy Passat wagons, weeks at Rancho La Puerta, and trips to Siena. Not boats. They shrink your head for the PASSAT WAGON!

but I also have love, guilt and fear. The love is for the Iraqis who have suffered for so long, and the guilt is for the ruin brought to their country in my name. I'm fearful of what will happen to them when the US soldiers leave. And not only to them--to Israel, to Jordan, to Saudi Arabia. War, panic, displacement, famine, epidemic? I don't know what a U.S. withdrawal augurs--no one does. But it's those feelings that check the action my outrage would otherwise spur me toward. My outrage is real--but it's stymied, deformed, and sometime swallowed up by fear and sympathy.

There are millions of us straddling this moral fence. It's probably true that since not everyone is affected by the loss of U.S. soldiers we're less motivated than we might be to act. But it's not because we don't care. It's because we occupy a position that allows us to see an equivalency between American and Iraqi lives, and pulling back the troops can seem--seem--like the selfish privileging of the lives of our own children over those of strangers.