That Hideous Strength (The Space Trilogy #3)

by C.S. Lewis

blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of

that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.

All the women laughed as MacPhee in a somewhat louder tone replied, “Mrs. Studdock, I have no opinions—on any subject in the world. I state the facts and exhibit the implications. If everyone indulged in fewer opinions” (he pronounced the word with emphatic disgust), “there’d be less silly talking and printing in the world.”

“The cardinal difficulty,” said MacPhee, “in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, ‘Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you’ll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.’ The female for this is, ‘Put that in the other one in there.’ And then if you ask them, ‘in where?’ they say, ‘in there, of course.’ There is consequently a phatic hiatus.” He pronounced this so as to rhyme with “get at us.”

The pleasures of conversation were coming, for Mark, to have less and less connection with his spontaneous liking or disliking of the people he talked to.

What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men?

Vindictiveness was by no means one of Mark’s vices. For Mark liked to be liked.

There was a good deal of the spaniel in him.

“This is the courtesy of Deep Heaven: that when you mean well, He always takes you to have meant better than you knew. It will not be enough for always. He is very jealous. He will have you for no one but Himself in the end. But for tonight, it is enough.”

He had a picture of himself, the odious little outsider who wanted to be an insider, the infantile gull, drinking in the husky and unimportant confidences, as if he were being admitted to the government of the planet.

When had he ever done what he wanted? Mixed with the people whom he liked? Or even eaten and drunk what took his fancy? The concentrated insipidity of it all filled him with self-pity.

The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs.

Even if they could, the day for a large population has passed. It has served its function by acting as a kind of cocoon for Technocratic and Objective Man. Now, the macrobes, and the selected humans who can co-operate with them, have no further use for it.”

But I don’t feel like that about God. But He ought to be worse, if you see what I mean.” “He was, once,” said the Director. “You are quite right about the Powers. Angels in general are not good company for men in general, even when they are good angels and good men. It’s all in St. Paul. But as for Maleldil Himself, all that has changed: it was changed by what happened at Bethlehem.”

is idle to point out to the perverted man the horror of his perversion: while the fierce fit is on, that horror is the very spice of his craving. It is ugliness itself that becomes, in the end, the goal of his lechery; beauty has long since grown too weak a stimulant.

Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing.

For the Hideous Strength confronts us and it is as in the days when Nimrod built a tower to reach heaven.”

“The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their mother and from the Father in Heaven.

The Hideous Strength holds all this Earth in its fist to squeeze as it wishes.

When you have attained real objectivity you will recognize, not some motives, but all motives as merely animal, subjective epiphenomena.

“And that,” continued Frost, “is why a systematic training in objectivity must be given to you. Its purpose is to eliminate from your mind one by one the things you have hitherto regarded as grounds for action. It is like killing a nerve. That whole system of instinctive preferences, whatever ethical, esthetic, or logical disguise they wear, is to be simply destroyed.”

To sit in the room was the first step towards what Frost called objectivity—the process whereby all specifically human reactions were killed in a man so that he might become fit for the fastidious society of the Macrobes.

She must, of course, be very different with him when they met again. But it was that “again” which so took the savor out of the good resolution—like going back to a sum one had already got wrong and working it out afresh on the same scrawled page of the exercise book. “If they met again . . .” she felt guilty at her lack of anxiety. Almost the same moment she found that she was a little anxious.

In fighting those who serve devils one always has this on one’s side; their Masters hate them as much as they hate us. The moment we disable the human pawns enough to make them useless to Hell, their own Masters finish the work for us. They break their tools.”

Then, quite sharply, it occurred to her that the Director never talked about Religion; nor did the Dimbles nor Camilla. They talked about God.

A boundary had been crossed. She had come into a world, or into a Person, or into the presence of a Person. Something expectant, patient, inexorable, met her with no veil or protection between.

“You have had a religious experience. This is very interesting. Not everyone does. How much better you will now understand the Seventeenth-Century poets!”

King William said, Be not dismayed, for the loss of one commander.

In Viritrilbia and Venus and Malacandra were represented those two of the Seven Genders which bear a certain analogy to the biological sexes and can therefore be in some measure understood by men. It

It seemed to each that the room was filled with kings and queens, that the wildness of their dance expressed heroic energy and its quieter movements had seized the very spirit behind all noble ceremonies.

Mark never could remember afterwards whether he simply forgot to obey this order or whether his real rebellion dated from that moment.

Now whereas Jane had abandoned Christianity in early childhood, along with her belief in fairies and Santa Claus, Mark had never believed in it at all. At this moment, therefore, it crossed his mind for the very first time that there might conceivably be something in it.

Escape for the soul, if not for the body, was offered him. He became able to know (and simultaneously refused the knowledge) that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed.

Love, Plato says, is the son of Want.

He had gone wrong only in assuming that marriage, by itself, gave him either power or title to appropriate that freshness. As he now saw, one might as well have thought one could buy a sunset by buying the field from which one had seen it.

if one is thinking simply of goodness in the abstract, one soon reaches the fatal idea of something standardized—some common kind of life to which all nations ought to progress. Of course, there are universal rules to which all goodness must conform. But that’s only the grammar of virtue.

So geht es in Snützepützhäusel Da singen und tanzen die Mäusel!