A Severe Mercy: A Heartrending Memoir of Love, Faith, Grief, and the Healing Power of God, Featuring Unseen Letters from C. S. Lewis

by Sheldon Vanauken

Thus, Lewis says, ‘if a man diligently followed this desire [for joy], pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given—nay, cannot even be imagined as given—in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.’ This, I think, is what C. S. Lewis’s life and writings are about; and mine, too. Davy and I, having each other, longed for unpressured time— time-free existence—for thus we should find joy. We dimly glimpsed eternity, but what we, like Lewis, longed for was joy. But, though we never quite forgot the timelessness that was originally the end to which the boat was to be the means, we sometimes in those early years saw the schooner-to-be as an end in itself, an object containing the joy.