Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

by C.S. Lewis

Children suffer not (I think) less than their elders, but differently.

adult misery and adult terror has an effect on children which is merely paralysing and alienating.

our father’s sufferings

Under the pressure of anxiety his temper became incalculable; he spoke wildly and acted unjustly.

losing his sons as well as his wife.

my brother and I, to rely more and more exclusively on each other

We drew daily closer together

my hatred for

distaste for all that is public, all that belongs to the collective; a boorish inaptitude for formality.

My mother’s death was the occasion of what some (but not I) might regard as my first religious experience. When her case was pronounced hopeless

I remembered what I had been taught; that prayers offered in faith would be granted. I accordingly set myself to produce by willpower a firm belief that my prayers for her recovery would be successful; and, as I thought, I achieved it. When nevertheless she died I shifted ...

I had approached God, or my idea of God, without love, without awe, even without fear.

as a magician;

With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security.

the putting on of the school clothes was, I well knew, the assumption of a prison uniform.

that cluster of lights astern, receding from us, is everything I have known.

impressions of England.

I reacted with immediate hatred.

I myself was rather a pet or mascot of Oldie’s—a position which I swear I never sought and of which the advantages were purely negative.

he had his favourite victims, boys who could do nothing right.

The curious thing is that despite all this cruelty we did surprisingly little work.

supervision was slack and very little assistance was given.

I could continue to describe Oldie for many pages; some of the worst is unsaid.

He forced us to reason, and I have been the better for those geometry lessons all my life.

the neighbours in general, believed Oldie to be insane.

At that school as I knew it most boys learned nothing and no boy learned much. But Oldie could boast an impressive record of scholarships in the past. His school cannot always have been the swindle it was in our time.

My father piqued himself on what he called ‘reading between the lines’. The obvious meaning of any fact or document was always suspect: the true and inner meaning, invisible to all eyes except his own, was unconsciously created by the restless fertility of his imagination.

If the parents in each generation always or often knew what really goes on at their sons’ schools, the history of education would be very different.

our father’s

he was a man not easily informed. His mind was too active to be an accurate receiver. What he thought he had heard wa...

My father must not bear the blame for our wasted and miserable years at Oldie’s; and now, in Dante’s words, ‘to treat of the good that I found there’.

I can even remember from those days what must have been the first metaphysical argument I ever took part in. We debated whether the future was like a line you can’t see or like a line that is not yet drawn.

To this day the vision of the world which comes most naturally to me is one in which ‘we two’ or ‘we few’ (and in a sense ‘we happy few’) stand together against something stronger and larger.

But I have not yet mentioned the most important thing that befell me at Oldie’s. There first I became an effective believer.

What really mattered was that I here heard the doctrines of Christianity (as distinct from general ‘uplift’) taught by men who obviously believed them.

I began seriously to pray and to read my Bible and to attempt to obey my conscience. Religion was among the subjects which we often discussed; discussed, if my memory serves me, in an entirely healthy and profitable way, with great gravity and without hysteria, and without the shamefacedness of older boys.

Quo Vadis, Darkness and Dawn, The

Gladiators, Ben Hur.

Rider Haggard;

H. G. Wells.

Life at a vile boarding-school is in this way a good

preparation for the Christian life, that it teaches one to live by hope.

Even, in a sense, by faith, for at the beginning of each term, home and the holidays are so far off that it is as hard to...

They have the same pitiful unreality when confronted with...

Our slight alienation from our father imperceptibly increased. In part no one was to blame; in a very great part we were to blame.

My poor father, while he spoke, forgot not only the offence, but the capacities, of his audience. All the resources of his immense vocabulary were poured forth.

Up to a certain age these invectives filled me with boundless terror and dismay.

Everything invited us to develop a life that had no connection with our father. The most important of our activities was the endless drama of Animal-Land and India, and this of itself isolated us from him.

The tendency of the Lewises to re-open wounds and to rouse sleeping dogs was unknown to her as to her husband.

Mountbracken, and there lived Sir W. E. Lady E. was my mother’s first cousin and perhaps my mother’s dearest friend, and it was no doubt for my mother’s sake that she took upon herself the heroic work of civilising my brother and me. We had a standing invitation to lunch at Mountbracken whenever we were at home; to this, almost entirely, we owe it that we did not grow up savages. The debt is not only to Lady E. (‘Cousin Mary’) but to her whole family; walks, motor-drives (in those days an exciting novelty), picnics, and invitations to the theatre were showered on us, year after year, with a kindness which our rawness, our noise, and our unpunctuality never seemed to weary. We were at home there almost as much as in our own house, but with this great difference, that a certain standard of manners had to be kept up. Whatever I know (it is not much) of courtesy and savoir faire I learned at Mountbracken.