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by
C.S. Lewis
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April 20 - June 12, 2022
Devine had learned just half a term earlier than anyone else that kind of humor which consists in a perpetual parody of the sentimental or idealistic clichés of one’s elders.
We have learned how to jump off the speck of matter on which our species began; infinity, and therefore perhaps eternity, is being put into the hands of the human race. You cannot be so small-minded as to think that the rights or the life of an individual or of a million individuals are of the slightest importance in comparison with this.”
now that the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He
Unless . . . he groped for the idea . . . unless visible light is also a hole or gap, a mere diminution of something else.
Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are.
only later did he set himself the question, “What else could a boat be like?”
Nothing could be more disgusting than the one impression; nothing more delightful than the other. It all depended on the point of view.
His whole imaginative training somehow encouraged him to associate superhuman intelligence with monstrosity of form and ruthlessness of will.
“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmn, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.
Ransom pondered this. Here, unless Hyoi was deceiving him, was a species naturally continent, naturally monogamous. And yet, was it so strange? Some animals, he knew, had regular breeding seasons; and if nature could perform the miracle of turning the sexual impulse outward at all, why could she not go further and fix it, not morally but instinctively, to a single object?
“Undoubtedly,” he said. “Maleldil made us so. How could there ever be enough to eat if everyone had twenty young? And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back—if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?”
The hnakra is our enemy, but he is also our beloved.
do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.
These things are not strange, Small One, though they are beyond our senses.
Where was Oyarsa when all this happened to the harandra?” “Where he is now.” “And he could not prevent it?” “I do not know. But a world is not made to last for ever, much less a race; that is not Maleldil’s way.”
“Ogres” he had called them when they first met his eyes as he struggled in the grip of Weston and Devine; “Titans” or “Angels” he now thought would have been a better word.
They were astonished at what he had to tell them of human history—of war, slavery and prostitution. “It is because they have no Oyarsa,” said one of the pupils. “It is because every one of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,” said Augray.
“They cannot help it,” said the old sorn. “There must be rule, yet how can creatures rule themselves? Beasts must be ruled by hnau and hnau by eldila and eldila by Maleldil. These creatures have no eldila. They are like one trying to lift himself by his own hair—or one trying to see over a whole country when he is on a level with it—like a female trying to beget young on herself.”
His old terrors of meeting some monster or idol had quite left him:
Then it occurred to him that perhaps this—this waiting and being looked at—was the trial; perhaps even now he was unconsciously telling them all they wished to know.
To every man, in his acquaintance with a new art, there comes a moment when that which before was meaningless first lifts, as it were, one corner of the curtain that hides its mystery, and reveals, in a burst of delight which later and fuller understanding can hardly ever equal, one glimpse of the indefinite possibilities within.
will tell you. He has left you this one because a bent hnau can do more evil than a broken one. He has only bent you; but this Thin One who sits on the ground he has broken, for he has left him nothing but greed. He is now only a talking animal and in my world he could do no more evil than an animal.
It even occurred to him that the distinction between history and mythology might be itself meaningless outside the Earth.
Some instinct starved in us, which we try to soothe by treating irrational creatures almost as if they were rational, is really satisfied in Malacandra. They don’t need pets.
I suppose everyone knows this fear of getting “drawn in” the moment at which a man realizes that what had seemed mere speculations are on the point of landing him in the Communist Party or the Christian Church—the sense that a door has just slammed and left him on the inside.
“Oh, they’ll put all sorts of things into your head if you let them,” said Ransom lightly. “The best plan is to take no notice, and keep straight on. Don’t try to answer them. They like drawing you into an interminable argument.”
“On the contrary, it is words that are vague. The reason why the thing can’t be expressed is that it’s too definite for language.”
Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity—like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.
for at that moment he had a sensation not of following an adventure but of enacting a myth.
He had always disliked the people who encored a favorite air in an opera—“That just spoils it” had been his comment. But this now appeared to him as a principle of far wider application and deeper moment. This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backward . . . was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself—perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defense against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film.
“The tragedy of my life,” he said, “and indeed of the modern intellectual world in general, is the rigid specialization of knowledge entailed by the growing complexity of what is known.
Early and revered associations may have put it out of your power to recognize in this new form the very same truths which religion has so long preserved and which science is now at last re-discovering.
It—the Force—has pushed me on all the time.
Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?
Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places.
Predestination and freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heard on this subject.
And it appeared to Ransom that there might, if a man could find it, be some way to renew the old Pagan practice of propitiating the local gods of unknown places in such fashion that it was no offense to God Himself but only a prudent and courteous apology for trespass.
He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, meter.
Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor
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Love me, my brothers, for I am infinitely superfluous, and your love shall be like His, born neither of your need nor of my deserving, but a plain bounty. Blessed be He!”
is like a fruit with a very thick shell,” said Tinidril. “The joy of our meeting when we meet again in the Great Dance is the sweet of it. But the rind is thick—more years thick than I can count.” “You see now,” said Tor, “what that Evil One would have done to us. If we listened to him we should now be trying to get at that sweet without biting through the shell.”
It was an old rule at Bracton, as presumably in most colleges, that one never mentioned in the presence of a man the circumstances of his own election, and Studdock had not realized till now that this also was one of the traditions the Progressive Element was prepared to scrap.
The NICE was the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world.
“I agree with James,” said Curry, who had been waiting somewhat impatiently to speak. “The NICE marks the beginning of a new era—the really scientific era. Up to now, everything has been haphazard. This is going to put science itself on a scientific basis.
The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past. One hopes, of course, that it’ll find out more than the old freelance science did; but what’s certain is that it can do more.”
“No. We want you to write it down—to camouflage it. Only for the present, of course. Once the thing gets going we shan’t have to bother about the great heart of the British public. We’ll make the great heart what we want it to be. But in the meantime, it does make a difference how things are put. For instance, if it were even whispered that the NICE wanted powers to experiment on criminals, you’d have all the old women of both sexes up in arms and yapping about humanity. Call it reeducation of the maladjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive
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But the Fairy pointed out that what had hampered every English police force up to date was precisely the idea of deserved punishment. For desert was always finite: you could do so much to the criminal and no more. Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no fixed limit; it could go on till it had effected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was.
Of course. 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.
They walked about that village for two hours and saw with their own eyes all the abuses and anachronisms they came to destroy.
It made Mark feel as he were on a holiday, for it was only on holidays that he had ever wandered about an English village. For that reason he felt pleasure in it. It did not quite escape him that the face of the backward laborer was rather more interesting than Cosser’s and his voice a great deal more pleasing to the ear.
