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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.

[tags]C.S. Lewis, Sur­prised by Joy[/tags]