I hesitated over the title because the man himself would probably have thought it rather ridiculous. However, I’d like to run a thread in which people can post their favourite bits from Lewis’s writings, favourite stories, etc. Only one rule - no mention of Walter Hooper. Not because I dislike the man - in fact, I’ve corresponded with him a couple of times over the years and he’s been very helpful - but because I want the thread to focus on the man himself. Stuff about the Greshams also I’m not really keen to be included. I want the focus to be on what he wrote. Hence, Cafe Society.
In that vein, I’ll kick off with some observations on verbicide in his Introduction to Studies in Words:
“Verbicide, the murder of a word, happens in many ways. Inflation is one of the commonest; those who taught us to say awfully for ‘very’, tremendous for ‘great’, sadism for ‘cruelty’, and unthinkable for ‘undesirable’ were verbicides. Another way is verbiage, by which I here mean the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of, is an example…But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them…Rotten, paradoxically has become so completely a synonym for ‘bad’ that we now have to say ‘bad’ when we mean ‘rotten’.”
Since you’ve already given a quotation from Studies in Words, which is one of my favorite Lewis books, I’ll quote something from Surprised by Joy instead, another of my favorites:
[This book is a memoir of his early life. He’s speaking here of all the books in the “New House,” which his family moved into when he was seven.] In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass. Where all these books came from before we came to the New House is a problem that never occurred to me until I began writing this paragraph. I have no idea of the answer.
I believe this is my favorite opening line of any book:
“There was a boy called Eusatace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)
I think I could fill many pages with my favorite Lewis quotations. Indeed, I could just write out the entirety of Till We Have Faces. But I won’t. Just a little.
“But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understand why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was - not at all that it blotted out those sorrows - but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and reverend for feeling them. I was a great, sad queen in a song. I did not check the big tears that rose in my eyes. I enjoyed them.”
“The softness did not last. I have seen something like this happen in battle. A man was coming at me, I at him, to kill. Then came a sudden great gust of wind that wrapped our cloaks over our swords and almost over our eyes, so that we could do nothing to one another but must fight the wind itself. And that ridiculous contention, so foreign to the business we were on, set us both laughing, face to face - friends for a moment - and then at once enemies again and forever.”
“The cardinal difficulty,” said MacPhee, "in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, “Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl wchich you’ll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.” The female for this is, “Put this one in the other one in there.” And if you ask them, “in where?”, they say, “in there, of course.” There is consequently a phiatic hiatus.
-That Hideous Strength
A few quotes from his underappreciated An Experiment in Criticism:
“Entertainment, in this sense, is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide even that, we may be excused from inquiry into its higher qualities.”
“The prima facie probability that anything which has ever been truly read and obstinately loved by any reader has some virtue in it is overwhelming. To condemn such a book is therefore, on my system, a very serious matter.”
“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.”
I’m at work right now, and don’t have any Lewis works to quote available, but I wanted to note that the above paragraph is dead on. I’m the only man who works in an office full of women, and the constant use of pronouns–usually without any antecedant–drives me up the wall. The old man knew what he was talking about!
In addition to a slew of passages from The Chronicles of Narnia, I remember a section in The Four Loves wherein Lewis told the story of a woman, a wife and mother of distinctly harrassing quality, who died, leaving behind a family whose happiness increased thereafter (because they were no longer harried by her so much). Lewis pointed out that though the family did love her (properly so, to feel the familial bond for a mother and a wife), their loss of her–though ostensibly a sorrowful event–actually made their lives better. I always thought it was an interesting observation, about how loving relationships can sometimes have greater negative than positive impacts, and what seems to be a tragedy can often have benefits. Kind of counterintuitive, which makes it a keen observation. Or maybe I’m not accurately remembering the passage (it’s been well over a decade since I read the book).
I’ll heartily second LL’s quote, and I also like (too long to reiterate) the scene in Out of the Silent Planet in which Weston makes a fine speech about the onward march of progress, colonisation, and the supplanting of weaker species by stronger… and it loses a lot in the translation, as Ransom has to render it in rather unpoetic Martian for him. So for instance
becomes
The end result is that all of Weston’s high-flown justifications as to why he advocates the extermination of the native Martians to make way for Earthmen are shown up as empty rhetoric devoid of sense.
‘[S]ince a text is “but a cheverel glove” to a determined critic – since everything can be a symbol, or an irony, or an ambiguity – we shall easily find what we want…We are so busy doing things with the work that we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves.’
Just from memory, the passage in THE GREAT DIVORCE where the Narrator sees a great lady attended by children & angels & animals, “Is she…?” (thinking she must be Mother Mary)
The Guide (George MacDonald) replies “No, she’s someone you’ve never heard of…”, explaining that she was an ordinary person overflowing with God’s Love,
and empowering those who loved her to love others more devotedly.
O.K., so we know that “Orual” is from Till We Have Faces, that “Malacandra” is Mars, and that Aslan is “Not a Tame Lion”, while “roger thornhill”, “Dr. Rieux”, and “Lissla Lissar” come from the Hitchcock movie North by Northwest, the Camus novel The Plague, and the McKinley novel Deerskin, respectively. But what novels do “FriarTed” or “Thudlow Boink” come from? And did any writer ever use as ridiculous a name as “Wendell Wagner” in a novel?
Not A Tame Lion, I think the section from the Four Loves ends something like “The minister says she’s finally at rest. What is certain is that her family are.”
There’s a character much like that in The Great Divorce who’s going crazy in Hell because no one will let her guilt trip them. Her need to be needed, and to make everyone concious of her importance has become her whole being.
Pardon if this is a little confused. My husband is watching bad cartoons behind me.
The harridan was quite a theme of Lewis’s. I think it is in The Screwtape Letters that he pens the immortal line: “She was a woman who lived for others. You could tell the others by their hunted look”.
“Wendell Wagner”. Hmm. Sounds kind of too weird to go to the trouble of inventing!
I picked up an old notebook of mine (from the mid-80s) earlier today, and the first page contains this quote which, as an artist, I take to heart:
“Many modern novels, poems, and pictures, which we are brow-beaten into ‘appreciating,’ are not good work because they are not work at all. They are mere puddles of spilled sensibility or reflection. When an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing tastes, interests, and capacity of his audience. … Haughty indifference to them is not genius nor integrity; it is laziness and incompetence. You have not learned your job. Hence, real honest-to-God work, so far as the arts are concerned, now appears chiefly in low-brow art… These are often sound structures; seasoned wood, accurately dovetailed, the stresses all calculated; skill and labour successfuly used to do what is intended. Do not misunderstand. The high-brow productions may, of course, reveal a finer sensibility and profounder thought. But a puddle is not a work, whatever rich wines or oils or medicines have gone into it.”
~ from “Good Work and Good Works” in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays.
I second the line from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader about Eustace. Always loved that one.
Oh yes, I remember and have used that one. Great quote. The Screwtape Letters contain many more. (For those who don’t know the book, it is a collection of “letters” from an older, experienced devil, to his new-fledged devil nephew, with detailed advice on how to best ruin the life of his “client”, an ordinary Englishman during WW2. The fun thing in reading is to reverse the advice.)
I remember two more quotes (poorly worded, I’m sure) from the Screwtapeletters:
“We have to fight honest innocent preferences whenever we can. I have known a man who resisted my appeal to his social vanity, because he liked baked onions with his dinner even more.”
“She vaguely, unconsciously believes that people who use a different fishknife then her parents did, are somehow slightly inferior. We can use that.”
I think the exact line is this: “She’s the kind of woman who lives for others – you can tell the others by their hunted expressions.”
I reread TSL recently. I was surprised to see that Screwtape puts it in quotes and attributes it to a “popular writer”, IIRC. So apparently Lewis is not claiming he wrote that line. I’m wondering who did.
Can I just say that I’ve always loved your username.
I could quote the entirety of “The Weight of Glory” – for my money the definitive Lewis essay – but I’ll settle on:
Hmm. I did a little Googling and only ever found it attributed to Lewis. Perhaps the “popular writer” that Screwtape is quoting is Lewis himself, and it’s something Lewis said or wrote on a previous occasion?
Aha! After opening the reply box and fiddling around with Of This And Other Worlds for a few minutes I’ve found another quote.
I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled powers over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it to both rulers and to subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows that what he is doing is wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us indefinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations…
-A Reply to Professor Haldane, Of This and Other Worlds