The Pilgrim's Regress

by C.S. Lewis

Who told you that the Island was an imagination of yours?’ ‘Well, you would not assure me that it was anything real.’ ‘Nor that it was not.’ ‘But I must think it is one or the other.’ ‘By my father’s soul, you must not—until you have some evidence. Can you not remain in doubt?’ ‘I don’t know that I have ever tried.’ ‘You must learn to, if you are to come far with me. It is not hard to do it. In Eschropolis, indeed, it is impossible, for the people who live there have to give an opinion once a week or once a day, or else Mr. Mammon would soon cut off their food. But out here in the country you can walk all day and all the next day with an unanswered question in your head: you need never speak until you have made up your mind.’

‘Don’t you see what follows if you adopt his own rules?’ ‘No,’ said John, very loudly: for a terrible apprehension was stealing over him. ‘But you must see,’ said Reason, ‘that for him and all his subjects disbelief in the Landlord is a wish-fulfilment dream.’

‘It moves nothing,’ said John. ‘You see that Savage is scalding hot and you are cold. You must get heat to rival his heat. Do you think you can rout a million armed dwarfs by being “not romantic”?’

‘It sounds like raving, but think it over. Supposing there is no Landlord, no mountains in the East, no Island in the West, nothing but this country. A few weeks ago I would have said that all those things made no difference. But now—I don’t know. It is quite clear that all the ordinary ways of living in this country lead to something which I certainly do not choose. I know that, even if I don’t know what I do choose. I know that I don’t want to be a Halfways, or a Clever, or a Sensible. Then there is the life I have been leading myself—marching on I don’t know where. I can’t see that there is any other good in it except the mere fact of imposing my will on my inclinations. And that seems to be good training, but training for what? Suppose after all it was training for battle? Is it so absurd to think that that might be the thing we were born for? A fight in a narrow place, life or death;—that must be the final act of will—the conquest of the deepest inclination of all.’

‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘Suppose there is anything East and West. How can that give me a motive for going on? Because there is something dreadful behind? That is a threat. I meant to be a free man. I meant to choose things because I chose to choose them—not because I was paid for it. Do you think I am a child to be scared with rods and baited with sugar plums? It was for this reason that I never even inquired whether the stories about the Landlord were true; I saw that his castle and his black hole were there to corrupt my will and kill my freedom. If it was true it was a truth an honest man must not know.’

‘And yet . . .’ he said, ‘and yet, Father, I am terribly afraid. I am afraid that the things the Landlord really intends for me may be utterly unlike the things he has taught me to desire.’ ‘They will be very unlike the things you imagine. But you already know that the objects which your desire imagines are always inadequate to that desire. Until you have it you will not know what you wanted.’ ‘I remember that Wisdom said that too. And I understand that.

‘God in His mercy made The fixèd pains of Hell. That misery might be stayed, God in His mercy made Eternal bounds and bade

‘THEN THERE IS, after all,’ said John, ‘a black hole such as my old Steward described to me.’ ‘I do not know what your Steward described. But there is a black hole.’ ‘And still the Landlord is “so kind and good”!’ ‘I see you have been among the Enemy’s people. In these latter days there is no charge against the Landlord which the Enemy brings so often as cruelty. That is just like the Enemy: for he is, at bottom, very dull. He has never hit on the one slander against the Landlord which would be really plausible. Anyone can refute the charge of cruelty. If he really wants to damage the Landlord’s character, he has a much stronger line than that to take. He ought to say that the Landlord is an inveterate gambler. That would not be true, but it would be plausible, for there is no denying that the Landlord does take risks.’

What do you mean by a hole? Something that ends. A black hole is blackness enclosed, limited. And in that sense the Landlord has made the black hole. He has put into the world a Worst Thing. But evil of itself would never reach a worst: for evil is fissiparous and could never in a thousand eternities find any way to arrest its own reproduction. If it could, it would be no longer evil: for Form and Limit belong to the good. The walls of the black hole are the tourniquet on the wound through which the lost soul else would bleed to a death she never reached. It is the Landlord’s last service to those who will let him do nothing better for them.’

‘One thing you may as well know,’ remarked the Guide, ‘whatever virtues you may attribute to the Landlord, decency is not one of them. That is why so few of your national jokes have any point in my country.’

Their labour-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent: their amusements bore them: their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving them have banished leisure from their country.