It’s quote time. I finished The Problem of Pain last night, and there’s a lot of good stuff. The book is (obviously) about pain: if God is good, then why do bad things happen? What’s the purpose of pain? And it does an excellent job of answering those questions.

Anyway, page numbers refer to my Signature Classics (HarperSanFrancisco) edition, and I’ve included the chapter numbers in case you have a different edition. Here we go:

If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that. The direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief. (Chapter 1, p. 3)

[God’s] Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. (Chapter 2, p. 18)

When the relevant difference between the Divine ethics and your own appears to you, you will not, in fact, be in any doubt that the change demanded of you is in the direction you already call ‘better’. The Divine ‘goodness’ differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning. (Chapter 3, p. 30)

Lewis then talks about what he calls the “intolerable” compliment:

Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life — the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child — he will take endless trouble — and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and recommenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumbnail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less. (Chapter 3, p. 34-35)

On love:

Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved; his ‘feeling is more soft and sensible than are the tender horns of cockled snails’. Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all. (Chapter 3, p. 39)

This is great:

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell. (Chapter 3, p. 46)

And regarding God and happiness (you’ll want to read this one in context):

If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows — the only food that any possible universe ever can grow — then we must starve eternally. (Chapter 3, p. 47)

In the next chapter he talks about human wickedness:

A God who did not regard this [incredibly mean and ugly action, referring to wickedness] with unappeasable distaste would not be a good being. We cannot even wish for such a God — it is like wishing that every nose in the universe were abolished, that smell of hay or roses or the sea should never again delight any creature, because our own breath happens to stink. (Chapter 4, p. 51)

Later on:

We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved: we are, as Newman said, rebels who must lay down our arms. (Chapter 6, p. 88)

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. (Chapter 6, p. 91)

You would like to know how I behave when I am experiencing pain, not writing books about it. You need not guess, for I will tell you; I am a great coward. But what is that to the purpose? When I think of pain — of anxiety that gnaws like fire and loneliness that spreads out like a desert, and the heartbreaking routine of monotonous misery, or again of dull aches that blacken our whole landscape or sudden nauseating pains that knock a man’s heart out at one blow, of pains that seem already intolerable and then are suddenly increased, of infuriating scorpion-stinging pains that startle into maniacal movement a man who seemed half dead with his previous tortures — it ‘quite o’ercrows my spirit’. If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find it. (Chapter 6, p. 105)

My own experience is something like this. I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contendedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over — I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless. (Chapter 6, p. 107)

Indignation at others’ sufferings, though a generous passion, needs to be well managed lest it steal away patience and humanity from those who suffer and plant anger and cynicism in their stead. (Chapter 6, p. 108)

A merciful man aims at his neighbour’s good and so does ‘God’s will’, consciously co-operating with ‘the simple good’. A cruel man oppresses his neighbour, and so does simple evil. But in doing such evil, he is used by God, without his own knowledge or consent, to produce the complex good — so that the first man serves God as a son, and the second as a tool. For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John. (Chapter 7, p. 111)

The bit about pain being “sterilised or disinfected evil” on p. 117 of Chapter 7 is quite interesting. I’ll let you find it yourself.

To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is ‘remains’…. Hell was not made for men. It is in no sense parallel to heaven: it is ‘the darkness outside’, the outer rim where being fades away into nonentity. (Chapter 8, p. 128-129)

I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. (Chapter 8, p. 130)

The mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you — you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith…. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it — made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand. (Chapter 9, p. 151-152)

If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note. (Chapter 9, p. 155)

And finally, my favorite part of the book:

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw — but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of — something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ (Chapter 9, p. 151)

From C.S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism:

What then is the good of … occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feelings which we should try to avoid having in our own person? … The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own. … In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.

(from Intellectuelle)

Ran across this quote from C.S. Lewis in Letters to an American Lady:

“How little people know who think that holiness is dull. When one meets the real thing (and perhaps, like you, I have met it only once) it is irresistible.”

Yesterday one of my colleagues[1] returned from South Africa and brought a box of Turkish delight with her. Now, I’ve been off sweets (candy, cakes, cookies, ice cream, doughnuts, soda, etc.) for over a month now, and nothing has been able to make me bend. Until now. I’d never had Turkish delight, and it’s associated with Narnia in my mind (for obvious reasons), and I couldn’t resist it on literary grounds, so I gave in. It was decently good. Not something I’d consider selling my soul to a witch for, granted, but tasty enough. Afterwards I smelled baby powder in my nose — so now we know what that “powdered sugar” really is.

[1] Can I say that? “One of my co-workers” or “one of my friends at work” feel more appropriate in my context, being a college student working at a university lab. “Colleagues” is for professors. But the OED’s definition is “one who is associated with another (or others) in office, or special employment; strictly, said of those who stand in the same relationship to their electors, or to the office which they jointly discharge. (Not applied to partners in trade or manufacture.)” Does this lab count as an office? I guess not. So there we have it.

The bad news is that my laptop died yesterday. The good news is that this may end up giving me more time to read. I finished Alice in Wonderland a few days ago, and I’m still making my way through Jane Eyre, War and Peace and Getting Things Done. And for school I’m enjoying every page of Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. Mmm. Oh, and I’ve started reading The Problem of Pain. Now I’m off to the library to see if the computer is telling the truth when it says that there’s a copy of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People on the shelves (admittedly an older 1989 edition, but I doubt it’s changed that much between editions).

We’ve been reading Miracles in the C.S. Lewis Society, and although the first few chapters ended up almost devoid of markings, the chapters since then have seen a fair amount of scribbles. Here are some of the quotes I liked:

In chapter 8, Lewis says:

It is therefore inaccurate to define a miracle as something that breaks the laws of Nature. It doesn’t…. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born…. Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern.

And in chapter 9:

To say that God has created her [Nature] is not to say that she is unreal, but precisely that she is real. Would you make God less creative than Shakespeare or Dickens? What He creates is created in the round: it is far more concrete than Falstaff or Sam Weller.

And in chapter 11:

The ultimate spiritual reality is not vaguer, more inert, more transparent than the images, but more positive, more dynamic, more opaque. Confusion between Spirit and soul (or ‘ghost’) has here done much harm. Ghosts must be pictured, if we are to picture them at all, as shadowy and tenuous, for ghosts are half-men, one element abstracted from a creature that ought to have flesh. But Spirit, if pictured at all, must be pictured in the very opposite way. Neither God nor even the gods are ’shadowy’ in traditional imagination: even the human dead, when glorified in Christ, cease to be ‘ghosts’ and become ’saints’. The difference of atmosphere which even now surrounds the words ‘I saw a ghost’ and the words ‘I saw a saint’ — all the pallor and insubstantiality of the one, all the gold and blue of the other — contains more wisdom than whole libraries of ‘religion’. If we must have a mental picture to symbolise Spirit, we should represent it as something heavier than matter.

Reminds me of Joseph Smith’s teaching that “there is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it, but when our bodies are purified, we shall see that it is all matter.”

Finally, from chapter 14:

For God is not merely mending, not simply restoring a status quo. Redeemed humanity is to be something more glorious than unfallen humanity would have been, more glorious than any unfallen race now is (if at this moment the night sky conceals any such). The greater the sin, the greater the mercy: the deeper the death the brighter the rebirth.

Death is, in fact, what some modern people call ‘ambivalent’. It is Satan’s great weapon and also God’s great weapon: it is holy and unholy; our supreme disgrace and our only hope; the thing Christ came to conquer and the means by which He conquered.

At present spirit can retain its foothold against the incessant counter-attacks of Nature (both physiological and psychological) only by perpetual vigilance, and physiological Nature always defeats it in the end. Sooner or later it becomces unable to resist the disintegrating processes at work in the body and death ensues. A little later the Natural organism (for it does not long enjoy its triumph) is similarly conquered by merely physical Nature and returns to the inorganic. But, on the Christian view, this was not always so. The spirit was once not a garrison, maintaining its post with difficulty in a hostile Nature, but was fully ‘at home’ with its organism, like a king in his own country or a rider on his own horse — or better still, as the human part of a Centaur was ‘at home’ with the equine part.

I rather liked the corn-religion part of chapter 14 as well. (I’d describe it, but I’ll leave it to you to read it on your own. That’s half the fun, anyway. ) Eighty pages remain unread and I’m sure there’ll be more quotables to come. We’re reading The Problem of Pain next, by the way.

I’ve got to get to bed so this’ll be short, but I started reading War and Peace a couple of days ago (I’ve read the first two chapters so far). Good stuff. I’m sure it’ll be even better once I get into the story, but I’m already liking it. Tolstoy’s amazing. I’m also still reading Jane Eyre (one of these days I need to just set aside four or five hours and finish it) and I’ve started Alice in Wonderland. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has been tempting me to read it as well, but I figure that three novels at a time is a bit much as it is. (And I’m also reading C.S. Lewis’s Miracles and David Allen’s Getting Things Done, along with Learning Python on the programming end.) And textbooks. My favorite textbooks are The Smithsonian Book of Books and Arthur Henry King’s Arm the Children. Mmm. But now it’s bedtime.

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.

I just read C.S. Lewis’s essays “Membership” and “The Inner Ring” for today’s CSL Society meeting. In the former, Lewis says that “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.” I couldn’t agree more — while I love socializing and being with other people, I need my solitude. Without it, I wouldn’t — couldn’t — be who I am. Perhaps I’m particular because I’m a book person and reading most often isn’t a group affair, but I think it’s a human need. The world today is too noisy and there are far too many demands on our attention.

“There is, in fact, a fatal tendency in all human activities for the means to encroach upon the very ends which they were intended to serve.” All too true. My favorite quote, though, is this: “Those who are members of one another [meaning the Church, families, etc.] become as diverse as the hand and the ear. That is why the worldlings are so monotonously alike compared with the almost fantastic variety of the saints. Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality.”

One last quote before I’m off to the meeting. (”The Inner Ring” was good and reminded me a lot of Mark in That Hideous Strength, but it’s not really an issue for me — at least not at the moment — and so it’ll be put on the back shelf of my brain for future reference.) Here it is:

True personality lies ahead — how far ahead, for most of us, I dare not say. And the key to it does not lie in ourselves. It will not be attained by development from within outwards. It will come to us when we occupy those places in the structure of the eternal cosmos for which we were designed or invented. As a colour first reveals its true quality when placed by an excellent artist in its pre-elected spot between certain others, as a spice reveals its true flavour when inserted just where and when a good cook wishes among the other ingredients, as the dog becomes really doggy only when he has taken his place in the household of man, so we shall then first be true persons when we have suffered ourselves to be fitted into our places. We are marble waiting to b shaped, metal waiting to be run into a mould…. There is no question of finding for [man] a place in the living temple which will do justice to his inherent value and give scope to his natural idiosyncrasy. The place was there first. The man was created for it. He will not be himself till he is there. We shall be true and everlasting and really divine persons only in heaven, just as we are, even now, coloured bodies only in the light. (Emphasis mine.)

Alas, I’ve got to go, but it’s a good quote.

This quote from C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves has been running through my mind a lot lately:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

I completely agree. Opening your heart to love anything is dangerous and automatically brings the risk of being broken, but that’s the only way to reach the heights of love. The idea applies to more than just love, too — without taking risks, we can’t excel in creativity, business, etc.