The Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength

by C.S. Lewis

You might halve its intensity, Ransom perceived, and the remaining half would still be what the whole had been—merely less, not other.

A wonderful, nearly holographic way of describing an indivisible "something".

Is that the real void, the real death? Unless . . . he groped for the idea . . . unless visible light is also a hole or gap, a mere diminution of something else. Something that is to bright unchanging heaven as heaven is to the dark, heavy earths. . . .

Gloria in excelsis!

every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?”

Be grateful for the day and all its gifts.

the present functions and appetites of the body would disappear, not because they were atrophied but because they were, as he said “engulfed.”

In other words, the future reality is more real than the current experience.

He used the word “transsexual,”

That word has an utterly different meaning vin the 21st century than it did 80 years prior.

he saw reality, and thought it was a dream.

The true world, not the veiled illusion.

And if you wished—if it were possible to wish—you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.”

This attitude is our will being pre-eminent rather than acceptance of God's will.

“We shall meet when Maleldil pleases,” she answered, “or if not, some greater good will happen to us instead.”

Wonderful viewpoint.

as men in war or sickness are surprised to find how much can be borne. “It will drive us mad,” “It will kill us outright,” we say, and then it happens and we find ourselves neither mad nor dead, still held to the task.

This is what it neans to have a cross to bear: one can neither discard it nor run from it.

What other reason can there be?

As a testimony of loyalty and obedience.

all the loathing had vanished clean out of his mind, so that neither then nor at any other time could he remember it, nor ever understand again why one should quarrel with an animal for having more legs or eyes than oneself.

That is so true. The creatures are good in themselves for they were made by God.

But there ought to be some record.

A record even if there is no one to read it, in an archive closed forever, nevertheless, a record.