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For the C.S. Lewis Soci­ety meet­ing on Monday, we read “The Weight of Glory” (the essay itself, that is, not the whole col­lec­tion of essays). It’s amaz­ing. Where to begin? I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, so I’ll just quote my two favorite parts:

I am trying to rip open the incon­solable secret in each one of you — the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by call­ing it names like Nos­tal­gia and Roman­ti­cism and Ado­les­cence; the secret also which pierces with such sweet­ness that when, in very inti­mate con­ver­sa­tion, the men­tion of it becomes immi­nent, we grow awk­ward and affect to laugh at our­selves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for some­thing that has never actu­ally appeared in our expe­ri­ence. We cannot hide it because our expe­ri­ence is con­stantly sug­gest­ing it, and we betray our­selves like lovers at the men­tion of a name. Our com­mon­est expe­di­ent is to call it beauty and behave as if that had set­tled the matter. Wordsworth’s expe­di­ent was to iden­tify it with cer­tain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remem­bered would turn out to be itself a remem­ber­ing. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was long­ing. These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mis­taken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, break­ing the hearts of their wor­ship­pers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a coun­try we have never yet vis­ited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Per­haps I am; but remem­ber your fairy tales. Spells are used for break­ing enchant­ments as well as for induc­ing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchant­ment of world­li­ness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hun­dred years.

This ties in quite well with the heaven feel­ing I talked about a few days ago, hit­ting it right on the head.

And at the end of the essay, this rather famous quote:

It is a seri­ous thing to live in a soci­ety of pos­si­ble gods and god­desses, to remem­ber that the dullest and most unin­ter­est­ing person you can talk to may one day be a crea­ture which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to wor­ship, or else a horror and a cor­rup­tion such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare…. There are no ordi­nary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cul­tures, arts, civil­i­sa­tions — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immor­tals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immor­tal hor­rors or ever­last­ing splendours.

Ah, I love C.S. Lewis’s words. :) FYI, we’re read­ing “The Inner Ring” and “Membership” for next week.

[tags]C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory[/tags]