That Hideous Strength (The Space Trilogy #3)

by C.S. Lewis

I am following the traditional fairy tale. We do not always notice its method, because the cottages, castles, woodcutters and petty kings with which a fairy tale opens have become for us as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to the men who made and first enjoyed the stories. They were, indeed, more realistic and commonplace than Bracton College is to me: for many German peasants had actually met cruel stepmothers,

“Mutual society, help, and comfort,” said Jane bitterly. In reality marriage had proved to be the door out of a world of work and comradeship and laughter and innumerable things to do, into something like solitary confinement. For some years before their marriage she had never seen so little of Mark as she had done in the last six months. Even when he was at home he hardly ever talked. He was always either sleepy or intellectually preoccupied. While they had been friends, and later when they were lovers, life itself had seemed too short for all they had to say to each other. But now . . . why had he married her? Was he still in love? If so, “being in love” must mean totally different things to men and women. Was it the crude truth that all the endless talks which had seemed to her, before they were married, the very medium of love itself, had never been to him more than a preliminary?

He did not always like Curry either. His pleasure in being with him was not that sort of pleasure.

Odd thing it is—the word ‘experiment’ is unpopular, but not the word ‘experimental.’

There was a quality in the very muscles of his wife’s body which took him by surprise. A certain indefinable defensiveness had momentarily deserted her. He had known such occasions before, but they were rare. They were already becoming rarer. And they tended, in his experience, to be followed next day by inexplicable quarrels. This puzzled him greatly, but he had never put his bewilderment into words.

We think the lamb gentle because its wool is soft to our hands: men call a woman voluptuous when she arouses voluptuous feelings in them.

Jane hardly noticed them: for though she was theoretically an extreme democrat, no social class save her own had yet become a reality to her in any place except the printed page.

That’s what happens when you study men: you find mare’s nests. I happen to believe that you can’t study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living and not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.”

There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.

Even when she had discovered that she was going to marry Mark if he asked her, the thought “but I must still keep up my own life” had arisen at once and had never for more than a few minutes at a stretch been absent from her mind. Some resentment against love itself, and therefore against Mark, for thus invading her life, remained. She was at least very vividly aware how much a woman gives up in getting married. Mark seemed to her insufficiently aware of this.

Husbands were made to be talked to. It helps them to concentrate their minds on what they’re reading—like the sound of a weir.

Mark often helped; but as he always took the view—and Jane could feel it even if he did not express it in words—that “anything would do” and that Jane made a lot of unnecessary work and that men could keep house with a tithe of the fuss and trouble which women made about it, Mark’s help was one of the commonest causes of quarrels between them.

Men hated women who had things wrong with them, specially queer, unusual things.

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

he was still at that age when a man would rather be fleeced to his last penny than dispute a bill.

her first thought was to wonder, as she had wondered before, why Mark’s present friends were so inferior to those he once had.

“We both like Weather. Not this or that kind of weather, but just Weather. It’s a useful taste if one lives in England.”

“Everyone begins as a child by liking Weather. You learn the art of disliking it as you grow up. Haven’t you ever noticed it on a snowy day? The grown-ups are all going about with long faces, but look at the children—and the dogs? They know what snow’s made for.” “I’m sure I hated wet days as a child,” said Jane. “That’s because the grown-ups kept you in,” said Camilla. “Any child loves rain if it’s allowed to go out and paddle about in it.”

Those who had actually seen ugly incidents were surprised to read in the Telegraph, that the new Institute was settling down very comfortably in Edgestow and the most cordial relations developing between it and the natives. Those who had not seen them but only heard of them, finding nothing in the Telegraph, dismissed the stories as rumors or exaggerations. Those who had seen them wrote letters to it, but it did not print their letters.

This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world’s history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a 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.

When a man has crossed the T’s and dotted the I’s, and likes the look of his work, he does not wish it to be committed to the wastepaper basket.

In his company she had that curious sensation which most married people know of being with someone whom (for the final but wholly mysterious reason) one could never have married but who is nevertheless more of one’s own world than the person one has married in fact.

But her world was unmade; she knew that. Anything might happen now.

I am not allowed to use desperate remedies until desperate diseases are really apparent. Otherwise we become just like our enemies—breaking all the rules whenever we imagine that it might possibly do some vague good to humanity in the remote future.”

“They would say,” he answered, “that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”

Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food.

But you see that obedience and rule are more like a dance than a drill—specially between man and woman where the roles are always changing.”

What are the things that most offend the dignity of man? Birth and breeding and death. How if we are about to discover that man can live without any of the three?”

He’s one of my oldest friends. And he’ll be about our best man if we’re going to be defeated. You couldn’t have a better man at your side in a losing battle. What he’ll do if we win, I can’t imagine.”

The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honor to help him.

Fool, All lies in a passion of patience, my lord’s rule.”

Not all the times that are outside the present are therefore past or future.

Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result.

There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall.

If you must see ghosts, it is better not to disbelieve in them.

If he were ever cruel it would be downwards, to inferiors and outsiders who solicited his regard, not upwards to those who rejected it. There was a good deal of the spaniel in him.

Dimble was simply trying very hard not to hate, not to despise, above all not to enjoy hating and despising, and he had no idea of the fixed severity which this effort gave to his face.

He himself did not understand why all this, which was now so clear, had never previously crossed his mind. He was unaware that such thoughts had often knocked for entrance, but had always been excluded for the very good reason that if they were once entertained it involved ripping up the whole web of his life, canceling almost every decision his will had ever made, and really beginning over again as though he were an infant. The indistinct mass of problems which would have to be faced if he admitted such thoughts, the innumerable “something” about which “something” would have to be done, had deterred him from ever raising these questions. What had now taken the blinkers off was the fact that nothing could be done. They were going to hang him. His story was at an end. There was no harm in ripping up the web now for he was not going to use it any more; there was no bill to be paid (in the shape of arduous decision and reconstruction) for truth. It was a result of the approach of death which the Deputy Director and Professor Frost had possibly not foreseen.

Her anxiety had reached that pitch at which almost every event, however small, threatens to become an irritation. But then, if anyone had been watching her expression, they would have seen the little grimace rapidly smoothed out again. Her will had many years of practice behind it.

You’ve got to become human before the physical cravings are distinguishable from affections—just as you have to become spiritual before affections are distinguishable from charity.

Angels in general are not good company for men in general, even when they are good angels and good men.

The approval of one’s own conscience is a very heady draft; and specially for those who are not accustomed to it. Within two minutes Mark passed from that first involuntary sense of liberation to a conscious attitude of courage, and thence into unrestrained heroics.

It 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.

And then we had to break it to him that we weren’t the British at all, but the English—what he’d call Saxons. It took him some time to get over that.”

Ha

To a modern it seemed strange that, having recovered his self-control, he did not show the slightest embarrassment at his temporary loss of it. The whole character of the two-sided society in which this man must have lived became clearer to Ransom than pages of history could have made it.

In Mrs. Dimble’s hands the task of airing the little house and making the bed for Ivy Maggs and her jailbird husband became something between a game and a ritual. It woke in Jane vague memories of helping at Christmas or Easter decorations in church when she had been a small child. But it also suggested to her literary memory all sorts of things out of sixteenth-century epithalamiums: age-old superstitions, jokes, and sentimentalities about bridal beds and marriage bowers, with omens at the threshold and fairies upon the hearth.

Ivy had not seemed conscious of the purely social stigma attaching to petty theft and a term of imprisonment, so that Jane would have had no opportunity to practice, even if she had wished, that almost technical “kindness” which some people reserve for the sorrows of the poor. On the other hand, she was given no chance to be revolutionary or speculative—to suggest that theft was no more criminal than all wealth was criminal. Ivy seemed to take traditional morality for granted. She had been “ever so upset” about it. It seemed to matter a great deal in one way, and not to matter at all in another. It had never occurred to her that it should alter her relations with her husband—as though theft, like ill health, were one of the normal risks one took in getting married.

Indeed, throughout the man’s conversation this gusto was the most striking characteristic. He never passed any kind of moral judgment on the various things that had been done to him in the course of his career nor did he even try to explain them. Much that was unjust and still more that was simply unintelligible seemed to be accepted, not only without resentment, but with a certain satisfaction provided only that it was striking. Even about his present situation he showed very much less curiosity than Mark would have thought possible. It did not make sense, but then the man did not expect things to make sense.

Undeceiving was an activity wholly foreign to his mind.

“Religion” ought to mean a realm in which her haunting female fear of being treated as a thing, an object of barter and desire and possession, would be set permanently at rest and what she called her “true self” would soar upwards and expand in some freer and purer world. For still she thought that “Religion” was a kind of exhalation or a cloud of incense, something steaming up from specially gifted souls towards a receptive Heaven.