Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

by C.S. Lewis

The Divine Nature is not like that. It has no envy.’ But whatever he said, I knew it is not good to talk that way about Ungit.

‘You old fool, do you think I need you or any of the other wiseacres to tell me where my own belly aches? Hateful to Ungit, is it? Why does Ungit not mend it then? She’s had bulls and rams and goats from me in plenty; blood enough to sail a ship on if all were reckoned.’

‘Those who have seen it closest can least say what it is like, King.

They demand to see such things clearly, as if the gods were no more than letters written in a book.

I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man.’

‘There is a cold doubt, a horrid shadow, in some corner of my soul. Supposing—supposing—how if there were no god of the Mountain and even no holy Shadowbrute, and those who are tied to the Tree only die, day by day, from thirst and hunger and wind and sun, or are eaten piecemeal by the crows and catamountains? And it is this—oh, Maia, Maia. . .

‘Or else,’ said Psyche, ‘they are real gods but don’t really do these things. Or even—mightn’t it be—they do these things and the things are not what they seem to be? How if I am indeed to wed a god?’

No herd of other beasts, gathered together, has so ugly a voice as Man.

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.

And my struggle was this. You may well believe that I had set out sad enough; I came on a sad errand. Now, flung at me like frolic or insolence, there came as if it were a voice—no words—but if you made it into words it would be, ‘Why should your heart not dance?’ It’s the measure of my folly that my heart almost answered, ‘Why not?’

‘Don’t you think the things people are most ashamed of are the things they can’t help?’

What would it do to me for my blasphemies and unbelievings?

What is the use of a sign which is itself only another riddle?

If they had an honest intention to guide us, why is their guidance not plain?

I perceived now that there is a love deeper than theirs who seek only the happiness of their beloved. Would a father see his daughter happy as a whore? Would a woman see her lover happy as a coward?

I saw that for years my life had been lived in two halves, never fitted together.

We might have been two images of love, the happy and the stern—she so young, so brightface, joy in her eye and limbs—I, burdened and resolute, bringing pain in my hand.

In my folly I had thought I was to him as he was to me. ‘Fool!’ said I to myself. ‘Have you not yet learned that you are that to no one?

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 made her think that a prattle of maxims would do,

‘Are the gods not just?’ ‘Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were? But come and see.’