Till We Have Faces: A Great Fall or Halloween Read

by C.S. Lewis

It was when I was happiest that I longed most.

Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

To love, and to lose what we love, are equally things appointed for our nature. If we cannot bear the second well, that evil is ours.

But in the reality (not in the dreams), with the horror came the inconsolable grief. For the world had broken in pieces and Psyche and I were not in the same piece. Seas, mountains, madness, death itself, could not have removed her from me to such a hopeless distance as this. Gods, and again gods, always gods . . . they had stolen her. They would leave us nothing.

What have we to do with gods and wonders and all these cruel, dark things? We’re women, aren’t we? Mortals.

I learned then how one can hate those one loves.

Don’t mar what you’ve learnt you can’t make.’

But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understand why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was—not at all that it blotted out these sorrows—but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and reverend for feeling them. I was a great, sad queen in a song. I did not check the big tears that rose in my eyes. I enjoyed them.

Perhaps in the soul, as in the soil, those growths that show the brightest colours and put forth the most overpowering smell have not always the deepest root.

There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.

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?