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Last autumn, as the earth moved toward rest,
I know you think the whole world is held together
by some math formula.” His voice has an unaccustomed annoyance in it. “But I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think the world is held together by stories, not all those equations you stare at.”
“‘Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills.’”
‘Reason is how we get to the truth, but imagination is how we find meaning.’”
“It’s okay, Megs. It’s part of the story. There’s lots of parts to a story.”
“Good stories introduce the marvelous. The whole story, paradoxically, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion sends
us back with renewed pleasure to the actual world. It provides meaning.” “Yes,” Warnie says. “It takes us out of ourselves and lets us view reality from new angles. It expands our awareness of the world.”
Because even with the dark parts and the light parts and the good parts and the bad parts, dinner must still be served.
walk inside and look about more carefully than I usually do. I want to paint this scene with words George will appreciate. Dark wood surrounds me. In the alcoves, sunlight falls like yellow dust. Stacks of books smell of aged paper and hushed voices sound as if they might know secrets. The furniture is so old and so solid I wonder if it has been there for all time.
It is only for lack of imagination that you are bored.”
“Myths show us the way the world should be, or could be, instead of how it is,” Tollers said, stopping to watch a squirrel scamper up the tree and disappear in the higher branches. “That is why we want more and more of them.”
“The difference,” said Tollers, “is that the story of Jesus Christ is true. It really happened. Christianity is not less than a myth, but more than one. The true one.”
“Even if Christianity isn’t my favorite myth,” he told Warnie, “it’s the only one that is true.”
show George, how our lives unfold in so many different ways. How our individual stories become part of something much bigger.
“Megs, every human interaction is eternally important.”
“George knows you can take the bad parts in a life, all the hard and dismal parts, and turn them into something of beauty. You can take what hurts and aches and perform magic with it so it becomes something else, something that never would have been, except you make it so with your spells and stories and with your life.”
“But all the bits and pieces and scraps of a person’s internal life are the ingredients of a life story.
“The way stories change us can’t be explained,” Padraig says. “It can only be felt. Like love.”
“Maybe . . . maybe Narnia also began when Mr. Lewis sat quietly and paid attention to his heart’s voice. Maybe we are each and every one of us born with our own stories, and we must decide how to tell those stories with our own life, or in a book.” I stop and clear my mind, my heart, and my eyes. “Or . . . could it be that all our stories come from one larger story? Maybe Narnia also began before Mr. Lewis was even born in Belfast, Ireland. Maybe . . . Mr. Lewis’s tale already existed in the bright light where every story, legend, and myth is born.”
Grief is the price I paid for loving fiercely, and that was okay, because there was no other choice but to love fiercely and fully.
“And you’ve allowed me to see that we are enchanted not by being able to explain it all, but by its very mystery. That is—finally, that is—enough.”
C. S. Lewis meant when he said, “Sometimes fairy stories may say best what needs to be said.”
As the Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue once wrote, “A book is a path of words which takes the heart in new directions.”
My editor at Harper Muse, Amanda Bostic, once said to me, “I’ve always believed that if we can find our way to Narnia, we can find our way home.” May it do the same for you.
