The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

by Jason M. Baxter

But in An Experiment in Criticism, rather than describing it in negative terms (that is, arguing that learning makes us less likely to be deceived), he describes historical knowledge—especially as experienced through literature—in the positive terms of an “extension of our being”: Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.30 Literature, then, creates worlds of imaginative atmosphere, with vision and weather and smell, an atmosphere we would suffocate without, and that enlarges our being when we read well. The reader, by breathing in, living in its habitat, fixing the eye of his or her heart, becomes “another self,” is “aggrandized,” “healed,” “enlarged”—in short, the reader “transcends” the lim...