# The C.S. Lewis Appreciation Thread **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [September 22, 2005, 1:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816 "2005-09-22T01:27:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![roger\_thornhill](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/d9b06d/32.png) [@roger\_thornhill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/roger_thornhill)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2005, 1:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/1 "2005-09-22T01:27:52Z")
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’.” His examples were always good. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2005, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/2 "2005-09-22T03:14:28Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Orual](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/779978/32.png) [@Orual](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Orual)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2005, 1:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/3 "2005-09-22T13:09:08Z")
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.” ---
**Author:** ![Lissla\_Lissar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8491ac/32.png) [@Lissla\_Lissar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lissla_Lissar)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2005, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/4 "2005-09-22T16:31:55Z")
“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 ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2005, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/5 "2005-09-22T16:43:14Z")
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.” ---
**Author:** ![Not\_A\_Tame\_Lion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/e36b37/32.png) [@Not\_A\_Tame\_Lion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Not_A_Tame_Lion)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2005, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/6 "2005-09-22T18:46:30Z")
> [@Lissla Lissar](#): > > “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 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). ---
**Author:** ![Malacandra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2005, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/7 "2005-09-22T21:56:13Z")
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 > [@Edward Weston](#): > > To you I may seem a vulgar robber, but I bear on my shoulders the destiny of the human race. becomes > [@Elwin Ransom](#): > > Among us, Oyarsa, there is a kind of **hnau** who will take other **hnaus’** food and – and things, when they are not looking. He says he is not an ordinary one of that kind. He says that what he does now will make very different things happen to those of our people who are not yet born. 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. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Rieux](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@Dr.Rieux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Rieux)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2005, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/8 "2005-09-22T22:15:41Z")
“When I became a man, I put away childish things–including the fear of being thought childish.” ---
**Author:** ![roger\_thornhill](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/d9b06d/32.png) [@roger\_thornhill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/roger_thornhill)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/9 "2005-09-23T01:28:24Z")
From An Experiment in Criticism: ‘[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.’ ---
**Author:** ![FriarTed](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/friarted/32/1052_2.png) [@FriarTed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FriarTed)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 1:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/10 "2005-09-23T01:39:00Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/11 "2005-09-23T03:11:49Z")
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? ---
**Author:** ![Lissla\_Lissar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8491ac/32.png) [@Lissla\_Lissar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lissla_Lissar)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/12 "2005-09-23T03:33:30Z")
**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. ---
**Author:** ![roger\_thornhill](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/d9b06d/32.png) [@roger\_thornhill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/roger_thornhill)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 4:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/13 "2005-09-23T04:24:02Z")
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! ---
**Author:** ![SparrowHawk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ac8455/32.png) [@SparrowHawk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SparrowHawk)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/14 "2005-09-23T05:14:10Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![roger\_thornhill](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/d9b06d/32.png) [@roger\_thornhill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/roger_thornhill)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 8:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/15 "2005-09-23T08:44:33Z")
My favourite, which I included as a tagline to a chapter in a book\*: “Courage is not simply \*one \* of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” - As the great man also wrote, “Perfect humility dispenses with modesty”! ---
**Author:** ![Maastricht](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a88e57/32.png) [@Maastricht](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maastricht)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 11:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/16 "2005-09-23T11:06:31Z")
> [@roger thornhill](#): > > 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”. Oh yes, I remember and have used that one. Great quote. The [Screwtape Letters](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0451626109/103-8712564-2526266?%5Fencoding=UTF8) 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.” ---
**Author:** ![rowrrbazzle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rowrrbazzle/32/414_2.png) [@rowrrbazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rowrrbazzle)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/17 "2005-09-23T21:23:20Z")
> [@roger thornhill](#): > > 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”. 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. ---
**Author:** ![furt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/439d5e/32.png) [@furt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furt)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/18 "2005-09-23T21:46:13Z")
> [@Orual](#): > > 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. 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: > [@](#): > > I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both . . . Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/19 "2005-09-23T23:22:32Z")
> [@rowrrbazzle](#): > > 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. 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? ---
**Author:** ![Lissla\_Lissar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8491ac/32.png) [@Lissla\_Lissar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lissla_Lissar)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 11:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816/20 "2005-09-23T23:46:28Z")
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_ [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-c-s-lewis-appreciation-thread/322816.md?page=2)