a few passages from c.s. lewis' perelandra.
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one can't put the difference into words
the old footing is not easy to recover
the picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. and if you wish - if it were possible to wish - you could keep it there. you could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. you could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other
nothing is great or small, save by position
it surprised him that he could experience so extreme a terror and yet be walking and thinking - as men in war or sickness are surprised by how much can be borne: 'it will drive us mad,' 'it will kill us outright,' we say; and hen it happens and we find ourselves neither mad nor dead, still held to the task
either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. and if something, who could set bounds to it?
ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact with purely terrestrial - was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the fall
the terrible silence went on. it became more and more like a face, a face not without sadness, that looks upon you while you are telling lies, and never interrupts, but gradually you know that it knows, and falter, and contradict yourself, and lapse into silence.
all in a moment of time he perceived that what was, to human philologists, a merely accidental resemblance of two sounds, was in truth no accident. the whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial. the pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can.
and then, without any apparent movement of the will, as objective and unemotional as the reading on a dial, there had arisen before him, with perfect certitude, the knowledge 'about this time tomorrow you will have done the impossible'
except for the song it was all very still
nay, the very beauty of it lay in the certainty that it was a copy, like and not the same, an echo, a rhyme, an exquisite reverberation of the uncreated music prolonged in a created medium.
we have learned better than that, and know it more, for it is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking
'i do not call it the beginning,' said tor the king. 'it is but the wiping out of a false start in order that the world may then begin
as soon as we think we see one it melts away into nothing, or into some other plan that we never dreamed of, and what was the centre becomes the rim, till we doubt if any shape or plan or pattern was ever more than trick of our own eyes
the old footing is not easy to recover
the picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. and if you wish - if it were possible to wish - you could keep it there. you could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. you could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other
nothing is great or small, save by position
it surprised him that he could experience so extreme a terror and yet be walking and thinking - as men in war or sickness are surprised by how much can be borne: 'it will drive us mad,' 'it will kill us outright,' we say; and hen it happens and we find ourselves neither mad nor dead, still held to the task
either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. and if something, who could set bounds to it?
ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact with purely terrestrial - was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the fall
the terrible silence went on. it became more and more like a face, a face not without sadness, that looks upon you while you are telling lies, and never interrupts, but gradually you know that it knows, and falter, and contradict yourself, and lapse into silence.
all in a moment of time he perceived that what was, to human philologists, a merely accidental resemblance of two sounds, was in truth no accident. the whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial. the pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can.
and then, without any apparent movement of the will, as objective and unemotional as the reading on a dial, there had arisen before him, with perfect certitude, the knowledge 'about this time tomorrow you will have done the impossible'
except for the song it was all very still
nay, the very beauty of it lay in the certainty that it was a copy, like and not the same, an echo, a rhyme, an exquisite reverberation of the uncreated music prolonged in a created medium.
we have learned better than that, and know it more, for it is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking
'i do not call it the beginning,' said tor the king. 'it is but the wiping out of a false start in order that the world may then begin
as soon as we think we see one it melts away into nothing, or into some other plan that we never dreamed of, and what was the centre becomes the rim, till we doubt if any shape or plan or pattern was ever more than trick of our own eyes
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