I was so excited to see this on the library book cart at Ele's Place! I have heard a lot about it and wanted to read it. I actually had to read through it twice because of the old language it used and the odd style, but it was so good. I have so many C.S. Lewis quotes that I have written down all over the place.
At first, I was thrown off, because the book started off as, what I felt, was disrespectful to God. But it was just his journey. It all turns out in the end. That's what I am counting on too!
"I want her back as a restoration of my past."
"And suddenly at that 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 had removed a barrier.
Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation? I might have said, "He's got over it. He's forgotten his wife," when the truth was, "He remembers her better because he has partly got over it."
Such was the fact. And I believe I can make sense out of it. You can't see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can't, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can't get the best out of it. (Some examples)
"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 my bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once; now so many culs de sac."
"'It was too perfect to last," so I am tempted to say of our marriage. But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic--as if God no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He stopped it ("None of that here!). As if He were like the Hostess at the sherry-party that separates two guests the moment they show signs of having got into a real conversation. But it could also mean "This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged." As if God said, "Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next." When you have learned to do quadratics and enjoy doing them you will not be set them much longer. The teacher moves you on."
"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 didn't. "
"For, as I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This becomes clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow--getting into my morning bath is usually one of them--that H. rushed upon my mind her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my miseries, but as she is in her own right. This is good and tonic."
"I seem to remember--though I couldn't quote one at the moment--all sorts of ballads and folk-tales in which the dead tell us that our mourning does them some kind of wrong. They beg us to stop it. There may be far more depth in this than I thought. If so, our grandfather's generation went very far astray. All that (sometimes lifelong) rituals of sorrow--visiting graves, keeping anniversaries, leaving the empty bedroom exactly as "the departed" used to keep it, mentioning the dead either not at all or always in a special voice, or even (like Queen Victoria) having the dead man's clothes put out for dinner every evening--this was like mummification. It made the dead far more dead."
"The less I mourn her the nearer I seem to her."
I found some more notes that I had from reading this book:
"Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything."
"You never know how much you believe anything unless its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you."
"I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get."
"The exact same thing is never taken away and given back."
"If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren't."
"If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe the she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild."
No comments:
Post a Comment