Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

by C.S. Lewis

The two families from which I spring were as different in temperament as in origin.

From my earliest years I was aware of the vivid contrast between my mother’s cheerful and tranquil affection and the ups and downs of my father’s emotional life,

Both my parents,

were bookish or ‘clever’ people.

If I am a romantic my parents bear no responsibility for it.

My mother, I have been told, cared for no poetry at all.

nurse, Lizzie Endicott, in whom even the exacting memory of childhood can discover no flaw—nothing but kindness, gaiety, and good sense.

I had understood that certain jokes could be shared with Lizzie which were impossible in the drawing-room;

The other blessing was my brother.

From a very early age I could draw movement—figures that looked as if they were really running or fighting—and the perspective is good.

This absence of beauty, now that I come to think of it, is characteristic of our childhood. No picture on the walls of my father’s house ever attracted—and indeed none deserved—our attention.

my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew.

What the real

garden had failed to do, the toy...

As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.

I was taught the usual things and made to say my prayers and in due time taken to church.

The charm of tradition and the verbal beauty of Bible and Prayer Book (all of them for me late and acquired tastes) were his natural delight,

The New House is almost a major character in my story. I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.

There were books

books readable and unreadable,

my brother was packed off to an English boarding-school and thus removed from my life for the greater part of every year.

I, meanwhile, was going on with my education at home; French and Latin from my mother and everything else from an excellent governess, Annie Harper.

what memory reports as my real life—was increasingly one of solitude.

I was, I believe, an intolerable chatterbox. But solitude was nearly always at my command, somewhere in the garden or somewhere in the house.

I soon staked out a claim to one of the attics and made it ‘my study’.

There I kept my pen and inkpot and writing books and paint-box;

combine my two chief literary pleasures—‘dressed animals’ and ‘knights in armour’.

Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel,

Mark Twain’s Yankee at the Court of King Arthur,

E. Nesbit’s trilogy, Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet, and The Story of the Amulet.

Gulliver in an unexpurgated and lavishly illustrated edition

complete set of old Punches

Tenniel gratified my passion for ‘dressed animals’ with his Russian Bear, British ...

Then came the Beatrix Potter books, and here at last beauty.

imagination is a vague word and I must make some distinctions. It may mean the world of reverie, day-dream, wish-fulfilling fantasy.

Animal-Land was not (in that sense) a fantasy at all. I was not one of the characters it contained. I was its creator, not a candidate for admission to it.

Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf:

I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.

it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy,

Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic,

the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again.

Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

the great loss which befell our family

my mother did not come to me.

cancer

an operation

convales...

return of the ...

increasin...

d...