Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

by C.S. Lewis

‘No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city’,

I think I laughed more in those days than in all my life before. Toil? I lost more sleep looking on Psyche for the joy of it than in any other way. And I laughed because she was always laughing.

It was beauty that did not astonish you till afterwards when you had gone out of sight of her and reflected on it. While she was with you, you were not astonished. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. As the Fox delighted to say, she was ‘according to nature’; what every woman, or even every thing, ought to have been and meant to be, but had missed by some trip of chance. Indeed, when you looked at her you believed, for a moment, that they had not missed it. She made beauty all round her.

‘Orual,’ she said, ‘you make me think I have learned the Fox’s lessons better than you. Have you forgotten what we are to say to ourselves every morning? “Today I shall meet cruel men, cowards and liars, the envious and the drunken. They will be like that because they do not know what is good from what is bad. This is an evil which has fallen upon them not upon me. They are to be pitied, not—”’ She was speaking with a loving mimicry of the Fox’s voice; she could do this as well as Batta did it badly.

you must keep all the things that you and I have really loved. Let her have all that’s big and costly and doesn’t matter.