C.S. Lewis: Knowing We Are Not Alone

***Yes! Yes! That’s exactly it! He’s captured it! My experience exactly! We read to know we are not alone, Lewis taught us. Very often I pause when reading Lewis and let the book drop to my lap or I turn from the open book to gaze out the window to savor what has just happened. Lewis has captured in words some personal experience I have known and has nailed it so exactly that to simply read past it would be unseemly, ungrateful. I do not think I am alone in this. And then it dawns upon us that Lewis has probably come close to the apprehension of a common or even universal human experience; and so, we are not alone. Here is an example from a 1931 letter to Arthur Greeves:

"I, like you, am worried by the fact that the spontaneous appeal of the Christian story is so much less to me than that of Paganism . . . I think the thrill of the pagan stories and of romance may be due to the fact that they are mere beginnings―the first, faint whisper of the wind from beyond the world―while Christianity is the thing itself: and no thing, when you have really started on it, can have for you then and there just the same thrill as the first hint. For example, the experience of being married and bringing up a family, cannot have the old bittersweet for first falling in love. But it is futile (and, I think wicked) to go on trying to get the old thrill again: you must go forward and not backward. . . . Delight is a bell that rings as you set your foot on the first step of a new flight of stairs leading upwards. Once you have started climbing you will notice only the hard work: it is when you have reached the landing and catch sight of the new stair that you may expect the bell again."

A remarkable passage to appear in a letter to a friend, don’t you think? Lewis wrote this fresh from his conversion to Christianity. He was almost 33 years of age. Much that accounts for Lewis’ prolific writing and sustained appeal manifests itself here: careful perception of common human experience and emotion together with power to capture it all with language. Lewis goes further though. He is not content to describe. He presses on to instruction. But, make no mistake, the convincing and penetrating description is crucial to Lewis’ freedom to instruct. Accurate description of our deepest often most elusive experiences weakens our defenses against instruction and leaves us docile. And the next thing you know, we not only allow but thank someone for using the word “wicked,” even if we are the offender.