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“I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude…Also, of endless books...”
Were he alive today, C.S. Lewis might offer us a reminder of one essential tenet that unites the entire body of his lifetime’s work: that in examination of a thing, it is possible to lose sight of the thing itself.
somewhere around age seven, Jack Lewis experienced three distinct bursts of awe— moments from “another dimension”—which would linger in his memory and form the earliest threads of true “joy” as he himself defined it; an ache, from the soul’s deep longing to know that which— beyond the physical, temporal realm— has created it.
All his pocket money went to ordering books by post, and he began to take interest in other genres: Poetry and verse; romantic writings which his parents hadn’t had much taste for, and works concerned with the land of Faery. This is not to say Lewis developed an interest in fairies as we think of them today; rather, there was and is, in the more Celtic-influenced areas, a lasting lore about another realm which paralleled that of visible Britain. Faery and its inhabitants were neither inherently good, nor bad; they could be both tempting, beneficial, and cruel.
Tolkien’s legacy to Lewis, though their friendship would receive a later rift over this very issue, would be getting him to see that fiction was a vehicle through which issues of morality could be explored—though not specifically those themes of Christianity itself.
The underlying message is that spiritual deafness is self-perpetuating, and entirely optional.
