THE SPACE TRILOGY - Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra & That Hideous Strength: The Cosmic Trilogy

by C.S. Lewis

They themselves regard space (or “Deep Heaven”) as their true habitat, and the planets are to them not closed worlds but merely moving points—perhaps even interruptions—in what we know as the Solar System and they as the Field of Arbol.

But each moment my opinion about sanity changed. Had it ever been more than a convention—a comfortable set of blinkers, an agreed mode of wishful thinking, which excluded from our view the full strangeness and malevolence of the universe we are compelled to inhabit?

the creature was what we call “good,” but I wasn’t sure whether I liked “goodness” so much as I had supposed.

This is a very terrible experience.

As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can’t eat, and home the very place you ...

a bit of that world from beyond the world, which I had always supposed that I loved and desired, breaking through and appearing to my senses: and I didn’t like it, I wanted it to go away.

Oddly enough

my very sense of helplessness saved me

but if you think they are improbable at such a juncture, I must tell you plainly that you have read neither history nor your own heart to much effect.

“Oh, they’ll put all sorts of things into your head if you let them,” said Ransom lightly. “The best plan is to take no notice and keep straight on.

Don’t try to answer them. They like drawing you into an interminable argument.”

The order comes from much higher up. They all do, you know, in the long run.”

“Don’t imagine I’ve been selected to go to Perelandra because I’m anyone in particular. One never can see, or not till long afterwards, why any one was selected for any job. And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity. Certainly, it is never for what the man himself would have regarded as his chief qualifications.

To say that they made him feel hungry and thirsty would be misleading; almost, they created a new kind of hunger and thirst, a longing that seemed to flow over from the body into the soul and which was a heaven to feel.

As he let the empty gourd fall from his hand and was about to pluck a second one, it came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty. And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do. His

But for whatever cause, it appeared to him better not to taste again. Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity—like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day. As he stood pondering over this and wondering how often in his life on earth he had reiterated pleasures not through desire, but in the teeth of desire and in obedience to a spurious rationalism,

he was once more forbidden by that same inner adviser which had already spoken to him twice since he came to Perelandra.

It was strange that the utter loneliness through all these hours had not troubled him so much as one night of it on Malacandra. He thought the difference lay in this, that mere chance, or what he took for chance, had turned him adrift in Mars, but here he knew that he was part of a plan.

The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished—if it were possible to wish—you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.”

One can conceive a heart which did not: which clung to the good it had first thought of and turned the good which was given it into no good.”

“But are you happy without the King? Do you not want the King?” “Want him?” she said. “How could there be anything I did not want?”

“Oh, Piebald, Piebald,” she said, still laughing. “How often the people of your race speak!”

laughed, Piebald, because you were wondering, as I was, about this law which Maleldil has made for one world and not for another. And you had nothing to say about it and yet made the nothing up into words.”

I am His beast, and all His biddings are joys.

ready, if ever the power is put into its hands, to open a new chapter of misery for the universe. It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God’s quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome.

for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet poison of the false infinite—the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species—a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality, fondled in secret by thousands of ignorant men and hundreds who are not ignorant.

that little black object, now floating beneath him on the sinless waters of Perelandra, looked to Ransom more like the space-ship every moment. “So that,” he thought, “that is why I have been sent here. He failed on Malacandra and now he is coming here. And it’s up to me to do something about it.” A terrible sense of inadequacy swept over him.

their lightest touch could destroy;

till we were older than they—till

Every joy is beyond all others. The fruit we are eating is always the best fruit of all.”

“But the old good would cease to be a good at all if he did that.” “Yes. It has ceased. And still he clings.”

a mere scholar—to

one of those who cling to the wrong good.”

“We shall meet when Maleldil pleases,” she answered, “or if not, some greater good will happen to us instead.”

I always wanted to know in order to achieve utility. At first, that utility naturally appeared to me in a personal form—I wanted scholarships, an income, and that generally recognised position in the world without which a man has no leverage. When those were attained, I began to look farther: to the utility of the human race!”

“That saying of yours is like a tree with no fruit. The King is always older than I, and about all things.”

This time, when you meet the King again, it is you who will have things to tell him. It is you who will be older than he and who will make him older.” “Maleldil would not make a thing like that happen. It would be like a fruit with no taste.” “But it would have a taste for him. Do you not think the King must sometimes be tired of being the older? Would he not love you more if you were wiser than he?”

“I only meant you could become more like the women of my world.” “What are they like?” “They are of a great spirit. They always reach out their hands for the new and unexpected good, and see that it is good long before the men understand it. Their minds run ahead of what Maleldil has told them. They do not need to wait for Him to tell them what is good, but know it for themselves as He does. They are, as it were, little Maleldils. And because of their wisdom, their beauty is as much greater than yours as the sweetness of these gourds surpasses the taste of water.

As there is one Face above all worlds merely to see which is irrevocable joy, so at the bottom of all worlds that face is waiting whose sight alone is the misery from which none who beholds it can recover. And though there seemed to be, and indeed were, a thousand roads by which a man could walk through the world, there was not a single one which did not lead sooner or later either to the Beatific or the Miserific Vision. He himself had, of course, seen only a mask or faint adumbration of it; even so, he was not quite sure that he would live.

as men in war or sickness are surprised to find how much can be borne. “It will drive us mad,” “It will kill us outright,” we say; and then it happens and we find ourselves neither mad nor dead, still held to the task.

you learn much—not from His own voice, but from mine. You are becoming your own.

His way of making you older is to make you make yourself older.

I thought your words had a meaning. But now it seems they have none. To walk out of His will is to walk into nowhere.”

really separate from Him.”

to stand up in its own reason and its own courage even against Him. But

He must have no finger.

He is not weary of seeing nothing but Himself in all that He has made?

the thing whose will is no lon...

In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also.

Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?