Great Meetings

Some people have been blessed with enormous personalities. Whether their personalities are overbearing, goofy, bombastic, ridiculous, or wonderful, these people remain in one's mind long after a conversation like the taste of garlic remains in one's mouth long after a lunch of mashed potatoes. The silly expression or the outrageous claim keeps popping up again and again in one's mind to cause either a smile or a grimace of remembrance. Occasionally I have the pleasure of seeing great personalities meet one another and observing how well or terribly they get along. This study gives me so much enjoyment that I often find myself thinking up all sorts of hypothetical combinations and imagining how their conversations might ensue. For instance, I've always thought that Lucas Allamon and Father Ox would be a real delight to watch together. Or perhaps Hayden and Buttons from Anamaniacs.
I have just finished reading War in Heaven and The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams. Both books were certainly the products of a man with a marvelous imagination and personality. Both novels were filled with Romance and incredible descriptions of both beauty and terror, and characters that were just as memorable as the man who had thought them up. As I was finishing up the second book, I kept thinking about the letters that C.S. Lewis had sent to Charles Williams in the second volume of The Collected Letters. I reread the correspondance between the two afterwards, and witnessed the great meeting of two men who each had such remarkable personalities. Isn't it wonderful to have read what someone else has read, and thought what someone else has thought? Reading C.S. Lewis praise the author that I have praised is like introducing two separate friends for the first time, and explaining to each how wonderful each one is.