I’ve just finished reading C.S. Lewis’s account of his boyhood ‘Surprised by Joy’. There are some startlingly beautiful and surprising passages:
“Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man’s life than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself.”
“Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.”
I felt a little of both of these emotions while reading this short book.
What animates the narrative and C. S. Lewis’s life as a whole, is a search to find and then find again moments of ‘joy’. But such moments are as mysterious and fleeting as they are deeply felt:
“It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?…Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse… withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased… In a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else…”
These longed for moments cannot be willed – in fact, they come when you are least looking – triggered by a picture in a book, or the certain way a tree looks under rain.
I loved this book because it put its finger on something that I have felt but not articulated to myself, conveying something just under, or perhaps beyond, the visible world.
This is why I chose to start with a picture by the artist Paul Klee, whose famous quote is: “Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.” And why I finish this letter with a link to Nick Cave’s new song ‘Wild God’ – a celebration, it seems to me, of a search for joy.
