His spiritual life was confined to seeking the experience of Joy. He resisted this draw strenuously: He thought of God as a sort of divine meddler, getting in his business, when what he wanted most of all was to be left alone. Through these years, he found himself drawn uncomfortably toward a belief in God.
He was only there for a term before enlisting in the Army.Īfter his service in World War I, Lewis returned to Oxford, finished his degree, and began teaching. Lewis loved and respected the Great Knock, and under his tutelage was prepared to go on to Oxford University. Kirkpatrick and nicknamed “the Great Knock.” The Great Knock educated Lewis in Greek, Latin, and intense logical reasoning, refusing to let any vagueness or imprecision of thought pass even in casual conversation. His father at last took him out of the boarding schools and put him under the tutelage of his father’s own former tutor, a wonderful and eccentric old man called Mr. The feeling of “Northernness,” like the feeling of the miniature garden, woke up the old longing. Though his feelings of Joy went underground for a while, he remembers them resurging intensely when he fell in love with Norse mythology through a beautiful edition illustrated by Arthur Rackham. In spite of going through all the travails of early-20th-century schools-beatings, bullying, bad education-Lewis had a few great teachers and established a love of the fantastical and the romantic in literature. His father was loving but not well attuned to the personalities and needs of his sons and sent them to a series of terrible boarding schools. Lewis’s idyllic early years ended abruptly when his mother died of cancer. He frames the rest of his narrative around his pursuit of this feeling-and his eventual understanding that it can’t be pursued for its own sake it is, in fact, pointing to something better than itself.
Surges of Joy followed Lewis throughout his life. It was a longing not for the miniature garden for itself, but for something just beyond it-and the feeling was its own reward. Looking at a miniature garden his brother once made in the lid of a biscuit tin, his young self was overcome with a longing that was at once painful and delicious. It was through another game with his brother that Lewis first got the feeling that he calls “Joy”-the theme around which this book centers.
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