Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

by C.S. Lewis

And you won’t understand the wonder and glory of my adventure unless you listen to the bad part.

‘Oh, grandfather, I don’t mean things like that. If there are souls, could there not be soul-houses?’

It was no ugly sound; even in its implacable sternness it was golden. My terror was the salute that mortal flesh gives to immortal things.

But I was wrong to weep and beg and try to force you by your love. Love is not a thing to be so used.’

Now, instantly, I knew I was facing them—I with no strength and they with all; I visible to them, they invisible to me; I easily wounded (already so wounded that all my life had been but a hiding and staunching of the wound), they invulnerable; I one, they many.

‘I’ve heard your story told otherwise, old man,’ said I. ‘I think the Sister—or the Sisters—might have more to say for themselves than you know.’ ‘You may be sure that they would have plenty to say for themselves,’ he replied. ‘The jealous always have.

So back to my writing. And the continual labour of mind to which it put me began to overflow into my sleep. It was a labour of sifting and sorting, separating motive from motive and both from pretext;

My anger protected me only for a short time; anger wearies itself out and truth comes in.

My love for Bardia (not Bardia himself) had become to me a sickening thing. I had been dragged up and out onto such heights and precipices of truth, that I came into an air where it could not live.

It was as if my whole soul had been one tooth and now that tooth was drawn. I was a gap.

The voice of the god had not changed in all those years, but I had. There was no rebel in me now.

She won without effort what utmost effort would not win for me.

The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, ‘Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.’ A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

‘Why, yes, child. The gods have been accused by you. Now’s their turn.’ ‘I cannot hope for mercy.’ ‘Infinite hopes—and fears—may both be yours. Be sure that, whatever else you get, you will not get justice.’ ‘Are the gods not just?’ ‘Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were? But come and see.’

This age of ours will one day be the distant past. And the Divine Nature can change the past. Nothing is yet in its true form.’