The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

by C.S. Lewis

WE SEEK AN ENLARGEMENT OF OUR BEING. WE want to be more than ourselves.

We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.

I AM ALMOST INCLINED TO SET IT UP AS A CANON THAT a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story.

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Some critics seem to confuse growth with the cost of growth and also to wish to make that cost far higher than, in nature, it need be.

that extraordinary amalgam of high rank, coarse manners, gruffness, shyness, and goodness. The child who has once met Mr Badger has ever afterwards, in its bones, a knowledge of humanity and of English social history which it could not get in any other way.

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.

The true aim of literary studies is to lift the student out of his provincialism by making him ‘the spectator’, if not of all, yet of much, ‘time and existence’.

The gold behind the paper currency is to be found, almost exclusively, in literature. In it lies deliverance from the tyranny of generalisations and catchwords.

It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth.

He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.

The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic.

Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book. Nothing will persuade me that this causes an ordinary child any kind or degree of fear beyond what it wants, and needs, to feel. For, of course, it wants to be a little frightened.

If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said.

None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.

This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty—except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.

The New House [Little Lea, Lewis’s childhood home] is almost a major character in my story. I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged.

There is a fear which is twin sister to awe, such as a man in war-time feels when he first comes within sound of the guns; there is a fear which is twin sister to disgust, such as a man feels on finding a snake or scorpion in his bedroom. There are taut, quivering fears (for one split second hardly distinguishable from a kind of pleasurable thrill) that a man may feel on a dangerous horse or a dangerous sea; and again, dead, squashed, flattened, numbing fears, as when we think we have cancer or cholera.

It is quite easy to contrive a story in which, though the enemies are of normal size, the odds against Jack are equally great. But it will be quite a different story.

Another way is verbiage, by which I here mean the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of, is an example.

Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.

Almost the central theme of the book is the contrast between the Hobbits (or ‘the Shire’) and the appalling destiny to which some of them are called, the terrifying discovery that the humdrum happiness of the Shire, which they had taken for granted as something normal, is in reality a sort of local and temporary accident, that its existence depends on being protected by powers which Hobbits dare not imagine, that any Hobbit may find himself forced out of the Shire and caught up into that high conflict. More strangely still, the event of that conflict between strongest things may come to depend on him, who is almost the weakest.

there are no pointers to a specifically theological, or political, or psychological application. A myth points, for each reader, to the realm he lives in most. It is a master key; use it on what door you like.

Much that in a realistic work would be done by ‘character delineation’ is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls.

The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it the real meat.

To be sure, this conviction had not made my friend (God rest his soul) a villain; only an extremely lovable old ass.

The shocking truth is that, while insincerity may be fatal to good writing, sincerity, of itself, never taught anyone to write well.

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.

No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work’s sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.

The more up to date the Book is, the sooner it will be dated.

The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.

The very essence of our life as conscious beings, all day and every day, consists of something which cannot be communicated except by hints, similes, metaphors, and the use of those emotions (themselves not very important) which are pointers to it.

If only one had time to read a little more: we either get shallow & broad or narrow and deep.