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.

Yesterday a friend asked me why I like C.S. Lewis so much. Good question. And good questions deserve thoughtful answers, so I’ve been thinking about it since then and have come up with the three biggest reasons:

1. Heaven. How can I describe this? There’s a feeling in Lewis’s books — particularly in the Chronicles of Narnia and in The Great Divorce — of “further up and further in,” of a next life where things are greater and grander and more solid than they are here on earth — so much so that this life is a mere shadow of the next (thus Shadowlands). Reading Lewis’s books fills me with a wistful longing for that land beyond the sunset. (On a side note, the song Into the West from the Return of the King soundtrack is amazingly beautiful and captures a lot of this feeling.) I suppose you could call it the land of dreams, except that the dreams will be real and even better than we could possibly have imagined. That’s the heaven I’m looking forward to.

2. His explanations of things Christian. Lewis had a knack for taking things that pass underneath our noses — usually bits of human nature or doctrine, often small but rarely inconsequential — and crafting ingenious and memorable descriptions that pierce to the very center of the thing and ensure that it will never slip away without our notice again. And some of his Christian imagery is just incredible. Take, for example, this quote from Mere Christianity: “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.” Or this: “If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell” (The Great Divorce, Preface).

3. His love of books. This wasn’t why I first started reading Lewis, but when I got to Surprised by Joy and discovered how much he read — how deeply and how broadly — he became my literary role model. If you have the chance, check out some of the collections of his letters — they’re full of his comments about the books he was reading at the moment. Delicious stuff.

P.S. If you’re interested in C.S. Lewis quotes, check out Wikiquote’s page on him.

I finished reading C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce today, for the second time. In the last 40 pages I decided to start marking passages I liked. Of those 40 pages, only 11 don’t have markings now. Here are some of the good quotes and the page numbers in my British edition:

‘Pam, Pam — no natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.’ (p.84)

Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country; but none will rise again until it has been buried. (p.88-89)

Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity. (p.108)

Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see. (p.113)

And of course the beautiful scene with the man and his Lizard, which gives me goosebumps every time I read it. Last but not least, the scenes with Sarah Smith — “Every young man or boy that met her became her son — even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.” (p.98) I want to be like her.