Surprised by Joy
For the C.S. Lewis Society meeting this past Monday, we finished reading Surprised by Joy. Here are some of the quotes I liked:
I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
Yum. 
That’s what I want my house to be like someday…
What drove me to write was the extreme manual clumsiness from which I have always suffered…. I longed to make things, ships, houses, engines. Many sheets of cardboard and pairs of scissors I spoiled, only to turn from my hopeless failures in tears. As a last resource, as a pis aller, I was driven to write stories instead; little dreaming to what a world of happiness I was being admitted. You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.
And this one:
All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still “about to be.”
(For what he means by “joy,” you’ll have to read the book. )
Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man’s life than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself.
The parts that got me interested in studying Latin and Greek when I was younger were those about Kirk (”the Great Knock”):
We opened our books at Iliad, Book I. Without a word of introduction Knock read aloud the first twenty lines or so in the “new” pronunciation, which I had never heard before. Like Smewgy, he was a chanter; less mellow in voice, yet full gutturals and rolling r’s and more varied vowels seemed to suit the Bronze Age epic as well as Smewgy’s honey tongue had suited Horace…. He then translated, with a few, a very few explanations, about a hundred lines. I had never seen a classical author taken in such large gulps before. When he had finished he handed me over Crusius’ Lexicon and, having told me to go through again as much as I could of what he had done, left the room. It seems an odd method of teaching, but it worked. At first I could travel only a very short way along the trail he had blazed, but every day I could travel further. Presently I could travel the whole way. Then I could go a line or two beyond his furthest North. Then it became a kind of game to see how far beyond. He appeared at this stage to value speed more than absolute accuracy.
The great gain was that I very soon became able to understand a great deal without (even mentally) translating it. I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language. Those in whom the Greek word lives only while they are hunting for it in the lexicon, and who then substitute the English word for it, are not reading the Greek at all; they are only solving a puzzle. The very formula, “Naus means a ship,” is wrong. Naus and ship both mean a thing, they do not mean one another. Behind Naus, as behind navis or naca, we want to have a picture of a dark, slender mass with sail or oars, climbing the ridges, with no officious English word intruding….
Later in my career we branched out into German and Italian. Here [Kirk’s] methods were the same. After the very briefest contacts with Grammars and Exercises I was plunged into Faust and the Inferno. In Italian we succeeded. In German I have little doubt that we should equally have succeeded if I had stayed with him a little longer. But I left too soon and my German has remained all my life that of a schoolboy.
Good stuff. A little bit later on, Lewis talkes about his friend Arthur’s word “Homeliness,” by which he meant “the rooted quality which attaches them [’the good, solid old books,’ the classic English novelists] to all our simple experiences, to weather, food, the family, the neighborhood.” I’ve really started noticing that quality this past year — it’s the joy one gets when peeling potatoes, for example. Sure, the joys of the romantic (in the broad sense) are there, but there’s so much that is wonderful to be found in the day-to-day activities that many call monotonous or drudgery. Familiarity can be just as beautiful as mystery.
Oh, I got elected president of the club, by the way.
