C. S. Lewis | This page:
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A Grief Observed
Copyright © 1961 by N. W. Clerk | ||
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I |
One thing, however, marriage has done for me. I can never again believe that religion is manufactured out of our unconscious, starved desires and is a substitute for sex. For those few years H. and I feasted on love; every mode of itsolemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Whod bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isnt what happens. We both knew we wanted something besides one anotherquite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers have one another they will never want to read, or eator breathe. | Topics: |
I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do. | ||
One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call the thing itself. But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea. | ||
It is hard to have patience with people who say, There is no death, or, Death doesnt matter. There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesnt matter. | Topic: | |
II | Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Founded on fact, no doubt. [...] But wont the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me. | |
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. | Topic: | |
Talk to me about the truth of religion and Ill listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and Ill listen submissively. But dont come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you dont understand. | ||
If Gods goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it. | ||
III |
What do people mean when they say, I am not afraid of God because I know He is good? Have they never even been to a dentist? | |
And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a meeting would be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use those words. It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier. | ||
I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string; then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now theres an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once; now so many culs de sac. | Topic: | |
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them. It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry masculine when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them, to describe a mans sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as feminine. But also what poor, warped fragments of humanity most mere men and mere women must be to make the implications of that arrogance plausible. Marriage heals this. Jointly the two become fully human. | ||
God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didnt. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down. | ||
IV | I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I dont stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, theres no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As Ive already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley isnt a circular trench. But it isnt. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesnt repeat. | |
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of themnever become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through? | Topic: | |
Images, whether on paper or in the mind, are not important for themselves. Merely links. Take a parallel from an infinitely higher sphere. Tomorrow morning a priest will give me a little round, thin, cold, tasteless wafer. Is it a disadvantageis it not in some ways an advantagethat it cant pretend the least resemblance to that with which it unites me? | ||
All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead. | ||
Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbor, but my neighbor. For dont we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alivewho are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picturealmost the précisweve made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact. | ||
If youre approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, youre not really approaching Him at all. Thats what was really wrong with all those popular pictures of happy reunions on the further shore; not the simple-minded and very earthly images, but the fact that they make an End of what we can get only as a by-product of the true End. | ||
Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem. | Topic: | |
Poi si tornò all eterna fontana.
Note (Hals): end note | Topic: | |
text checked (see note) Feb 2021
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