Surprised By Joy Quotes

I'm finally reading C.S. Lewis' Surprised By Joy all the way through for the first time. Granted, I'm only in the middle of the second chapter, but it's farther than where I was the last time I picked it up (first chapter). And I've got my American Scholar HB 2 pencil with me. Not as cool as Dixon Ticonderoga, but hey, it's got a lead and an eraser, along with the added bonus of that cheerful yellow colour.

And so, without further ado, I give you the words of Clive Staples Lewis.

"From a very early age I could draw movement - figures that looked as if they wre really running or fighting - and the perspective is good. But nowhere, either in my brother's work or my own, is there a single line drawn in obedience to an idea, however crude, of beauty. . . . Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did."

"The charm of tradition and the verbal beauty of Bible and Prayer Book (all of them for me late and acquired tastes) were [my father's] natural delight, and it would have been hard to find an equally intelligent man who cared so little for metaphysics."

"As Owen Barfield once said to me, "The trouble about insects is that they are like French locomotives - they have all the works on the outside." The works - that is the trouble. Their angular limbs, their jerky movements, their dry, metallic noises, all suggest either machines that have come to life or life degenerating into mechanism. You may add that in the hive and the anthill we see fully realized the two things that some of us most dread for our own species - the dominace of the female and the dominace of the collective."

"My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them."

On praying for a miracle to save his dying mother: "I had approached God, or my idea of God, without love, without awe, even without fear. He was, in my mental picture of this miracle, to appear neither as Savior nor as Judge, but merely as a magician; and when He had done what was required of Him I supposed He would simply - well, go away."

At his school in Hertfordshire: "I was already doing Latin exercises (as taught by my mother) when I went there in 1908, and I was still doing Latin exercises when I left there in 1910; I had never got in sight of a Roman author."

I can feel the frustration of this last sentence coming through. My father has always said the point and purpose of going through Latin grammar (or the grammar of ANY language, in this case) is to read an author in his native tongue, to understand his words.