The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy

[soso]

Today's Reading

On joy

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness.

I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you

—the secret //which hurts so much /that you take your revenge on it /by calling it names /like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence:

the secret also //which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves:

the secret () we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.

We cannot tell it /because it is a desire for something //that has never actually appeared in our experience.

We cannot hide it /because our experience is constantly suggesting it,

and we betray ourselves /like lovers at the mention of a name.

Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter.

* expident; (of an action) convenient and practical, although possibly improper or immoral.

Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it /with certain moments /in his own past. But all this is a cheat.

If Wordsworth had gone back /to those moments /in the past, he would not have found the thing itself,

but only the reminder of it; [what he remembered] would turn out to be [itself a remembering].

[The books or the music //in which we thought () the beauty was located] will betray us if we trust to them;

it was not in them, it only came through them, and [what came through them] was longing.

These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire;

but if they are mistaken /for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.

For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower () we have not found, the echo of a tune () we have not heard, news from a country () we have never yet visited. . . .

Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe //from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door //which we have always seen from the outside,

is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.

And [to be at last summoned inside] would be both glory and honour /beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache. . . . The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy.

From The Weight of Glory
Compiled in Words to Live By

The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses. Copyright © 1949, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1976, revised 1980 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.