Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

by C.S. Lewis

even no romance, in it. It was almost astonishingly prosaic.

Tegner’s Drapa

will not indulge in futile philippics against enemies I never met in battle.

Gret words tk live by

pay respect to wisdom not to strength.

was sick with desire; that sickness better than health. All this is true, but it does not make the other version a lie. I am telling a story of two lives.

from that moment until the hour of his death did I enter his house without first going through my own pockets and removing anything that I wished to keep private.

not knowing that he cares only for temples building and not at all for temples built.

Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed on something else—whether a distant mountain, or the past, or the gods of Asgard—does the ‘thrill’ arise.

Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.

To such a craven the materialist’s universe had the enormous attraction that it offered you limited liabilities. No strictly infinite disaster could overtake you in it. Death ended all. And if ever finite disasters proved greater than one wished to bear, suicide would always be possible. The horror of the Christian universe was that it had no door marked Exit.

transcendental

materialist

embryonic

sanguine

Hesperides,

Occultist

immemorial

Occult

evocative

debauch

But my best protection was the known nature of Joy.

ravenous

bogies.

rigours

antipathy

rheumatism

sordid

trumpery,

La compagnie, de tant d’hommes vous plaist, nobles, jeunes, actifs; la liberté de cette conversation sans art, et une façon de vie masle et sans cérémonie.

don

sanguine

subaltern

vices.

agog

hansom,

poignantly

odious

cynicism,

raconteur,

misogynist

congenial

currants

disapprobation

apostasy

ignoble

subaltern.

Yeomanry.

introspection

evanescent;

reticence.