Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

by C.S. Lewis

Friends of our own age—boy and girl friends—we had none. In part this is a natural result of boarding-school; children grow up strangers to their next-door neighbours. But much more it was the result of our own obstinate choice. One boy who lived near us attempted every now and then to get to know us. We avoided him by every means in our power. Our lives were already full, and the holidays too short for all the reading, writing, playing, cycling, and talking that we wanted to get through. We resented the appearance of any third party as an infuriating interruption. We resented even more bitterly all attempts (excepting the great and successful attempt made by Mountbracken) to show us hospitality.

Hippodrome. I recognise now that I never had the taste for vaudeville which he shared with my brother. At the time I supposed myself to be enjoying the show, but I was mistaken. All those antics lie dead in my memory and are incapable of rousing the least vibration even of reminiscent pleasure; whereas the pain of sympathy and vicarious humiliation which I felt when a ‘turn’ failed is still vivid.

Here indeed my education really began. The Headmaster, whom we called Tubbs, was a clever and patient teacher; under him I rapidly found my feet in Latin and English and even began to be looked on as a promising candidate for a scholarship at the College.

Wyvern itself healed my quarrel with England. The great blue plain below us and, behind, those green, peaked hills, so mountainous in form and yet so manageably small in size, became almost at once my delight.

ceased to be a Christian. The chronology of this disaster is a little vague, but I know for certain that it had not begun when I went there and that the process was complete very shortly after I left. I will try to set down what I know of the conscious causes and what I suspect of the unconscious.

I made a new friend.

Nevill Coghill.

was a Christian and a thoroughgoing supernaturalist.

All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been as blind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader.

The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed.

with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete—Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire—all

There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books.

Dream of the Rood;

Langland;

D...

Thomas B...

George He...

excel all the authors I had ever read in conveying the very quality of life as we actually li...

mediating it ...

‘the Christian my...

Bacon

enquire a little more closely whether the Christians were, after all, wrong. But I did not take it. I thought I could explain their superiority without that hypothesis.

I thought that ‘the Christian myth’ conveyed to unphilosophic minds as much of the truth, that is of Absolute Idealism, as they were capable of grasping,

Those who could not understand how, as Reasoners, we participated in a timeless and therefore deathless world, would get a symbolic shadow of the truth by believing in a life after death.

When I began teaching for the English Faculty, I made two other friends, both Christians (these queer people seemed now to pop up on every side) who were later to give me much help in getting over the last stile. They were H. V. D. Dyson (then of Reading) and J. R. R. Tolkien.

At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.

first Move

to re-read

the Hippolytus of E...

Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity his theory of ‘Enjoyment’ and ‘Contemplation’. These are technical terms in Alexander’s philosophy; ‘Enjoyment’ has nothing to do with pleasure, nor ‘Contemplation’ with the contemplative life.

It seemed to me self-evident that one essential property of love, hate, fear, hope, or desire was attention to their object.

the enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. You cannot hope and also

think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself.

We do not love, fear, or think without knowing it. Instead of the twofold division into Conscious and Unconscious, we need a threefold division: the Unconscious, the Enjoyed, and the Contemplated.

the mental track left by the passage of Joy—not

not the wave but the wave’s imprint on the sand.

Our intellectual desire (curiosity) to know the true answer to a question is quite different from our desire to find that one answer, rather than another, is true.

It is the object that makes the desire itself desirable or hateful.

Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring.

Inexorably Joy proclaimed, ‘You want—I myself am your want of—something other, outside, not you nor any state of you.’ I did not yet ask, Who is the desired? only What is it?

Far more objective than bodies, for it is not, like them, clothed in our senses; the naked Other, imageless (though our imagination salutes it with a hundred images), unknown, undefined, desired.

Joy was not a deception. Its visitations were rather the moments of clearest consciousness we had, when we became aware of our fragmentary and phantasmal nature and ached for that impossible reunion which would annihilate us or that self-contradictory waking which would reveal, not that we had had, but that we were, a dream.

I distinguished this philosophical ‘God’ very sharply (or so I said) from ‘the God of popular religion’. There was, I explained, no possibility of being in a personal relation with Him.

Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense.

I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive ‘apart from his Christianity’.

Christianity itself was very sensible ‘apart from its Christianity’.

If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of toughs, were not—as I would still have put it—‘safe’, where could I turn? Was there then no escape?

before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice.

I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut;

Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corslet meant the incalculable.