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Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life is a partial autobiography describing Lewis' conversion to Christianity. The book overall contains less detail concerning specific events than typical autobiographies. This is because his purpose in writing wasn't primarily historical. His aim was to identify & describe the events surrounding his accidental discovery of & consequent search for the phenomenon he labelled "Joy". This word was the best translation he could make of the German idea of Sehnsucht, longing. That isn't to say the book is devoid of information about his life. He recounts his early years with a measure of amusement sometimes mixed with pain.
However, while he does describe his life, the principal theme of the book is Joy as he defined it. This Joy was a longing so intense for something so good & so high up it couldn't be explained with words. He's struck with "stabs of joy" throughout life. He finally finds what it's for at the end. He writes about his experiences at Malvern College in 1913, aged 15. Though he described the school as "a very furnace of impure loves" he defended the practice as being "the only chink left thru which something spontaneous & uncalculating could creep in." The book's last two chapters cover the end of his search as he moves from atheism to theism & then from theism to Christianity. He ultimately discovers the true nature & purpose of Joy & its place in his own life.
The book isn't connected with his unexpected marriage in later life to Joy Gresham. The marriage occurred long after the period described, though not long after the book was published. His friends were quick to notice the coincidence, remarking he'd really been "Surprised by Joy". "Surprised by Joy" is also an allusion to Wordsworth's poem, "Surprised by Joy-Impatient As The Wind", relating an incident when Wordsworth forgot the death of his beloved daughter.
However, while he does describe his life, the principal theme of the book is Joy as he defined it. This Joy was a longing so intense for something so good & so high up it couldn't be explained with words. He's struck with "stabs of joy" throughout life. He finally finds what it's for at the end. He writes about his experiences at Malvern College in 1913, aged 15. Though he described the school as "a very furnace of impure loves" he defended the practice as being "the only chink left thru which something spontaneous & uncalculating could creep in." The book's last two chapters cover the end of his search as he moves from atheism to theism & then from theism to Christianity. He ultimately discovers the true nature & purpose of Joy & its place in his own life.
The book isn't connected with his unexpected marriage in later life to Joy Gresham. The marriage occurred long after the period described, though not long after the book was published. His friends were quick to notice the coincidence, remarking he'd really been "Surprised by Joy". "Surprised by Joy" is also an allusion to Wordsworth's poem, "Surprised by Joy-Impatient As The Wind", relating an incident when Wordsworth forgot the death of his beloved daughter.
185 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1955
About the author
C.S. Lewis
1,221 books42.6k followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Clive Staples Lewis was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954. He was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and been transformed into three major motion pictures.
Lewis was married to poet Joy Davidman.
W.H. Lewis was his elder brother]
Clive Staples Lewis was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954. He was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and been transformed into three major motion pictures.
Lewis was married to poet Joy Davidman.
W.H. Lewis was his elder brother]
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April 6, 2009
C.S. Lewis, the man that "thought his way to God" (according to the back of the book), isn't really all man - he's part reading machine. Everything, every sentence, in his spiritual autobiography is laden with some classical allusion to a work that the normal person hasn't read in Greek or Latin.
After the death of his mother in his youth, Lewis enters a long lasting period of atheism. Although he knew epistemologically that God didn't exist, he still felt that there was something else "out there." This is different from agnosticism though - he believed that the "something else" was not divine, but it was a Romantic quality. Lewis' life was occasionally visited by what he came to call "Joy": "that unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any satisfaction." Not how you would define joy? Me neither, but this operational definition fits into his scheme of finding God. Enamored with Joy, Lewis sought to experience it as often as possible - in reading great books, listening to music, experiencing nature, etc, etc. However, he finally realized he was confusing object with product: these things could not produce joy, they were only vehicles of it from some other source. As the book draws to a close, Lewis is truly surprised by a God who cares, a "true mythology" (the Christian narrative), and the creator of joy. In his thirst for Joy, Lewis had gone to the cups, glasses, and water bottles that had satiated him before - now he had found the well of living water.
After the death of his mother in his youth, Lewis enters a long lasting period of atheism. Although he knew epistemologically that God didn't exist, he still felt that there was something else "out there." This is different from agnosticism though - he believed that the "something else" was not divine, but it was a Romantic quality. Lewis' life was occasionally visited by what he came to call "Joy": "that unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any satisfaction." Not how you would define joy? Me neither, but this operational definition fits into his scheme of finding God. Enamored with Joy, Lewis sought to experience it as often as possible - in reading great books, listening to music, experiencing nature, etc, etc. However, he finally realized he was confusing object with product: these things could not produce joy, they were only vehicles of it from some other source. As the book draws to a close, Lewis is truly surprised by a God who cares, a "true mythology" (the Christian narrative), and the creator of joy. In his thirst for Joy, Lewis had gone to the cups, glasses, and water bottles that had satiated him before - now he had found the well of living water.
January 4, 2012
Okay, I started this today and finished it today, and will probably reread it. This has happened with many of Lewis' books. I've read The Four Loves several times and am getting ready to reread Miracles. There often seems to be a lot that I don't get first time through.
This is a wonderful book with some less than wonderful parts. By that I mean discourses on difficult or unpleasant events and/or topics. I won't try to go over this volume in any kind of detail. I suspect it will "strike" different readers in different ways. The book communicated to me on several levels. From surprise at the details about certain things in the British Public School system (circa early 1900s) and thankfulness that America was spared those parts to a realization that most people in the last 60 years (+or-) could be argued to have received almost no education. The book is valuable simply on the level of a biography and personal account history. (My generation, for example, was the first where Latin and what was then called "foreign languages" became "elective" classes instead of simply being required. In my generation basic math, reading, grammar skills, along with at least rudimentary knowledge of history, and social studies was "required" to pass from grade to grade and then graduate.)
Aside from this however and on deeper levels the book deals with Lewis' rejection of all things spiritual, mystical, metaphysical or religious and decision to become an atheist. It then leads us through his life and reasoning from there to theism and then to Christianity.
I could say a lot more about this book but I can't in this limited space give an account that would come close to doing it justice.
Highly recommended.
This is a wonderful book with some less than wonderful parts. By that I mean discourses on difficult or unpleasant events and/or topics. I won't try to go over this volume in any kind of detail. I suspect it will "strike" different readers in different ways. The book communicated to me on several levels. From surprise at the details about certain things in the British Public School system (circa early 1900s) and thankfulness that America was spared those parts to a realization that most people in the last 60 years (+or-) could be argued to have received almost no education. The book is valuable simply on the level of a biography and personal account history. (My generation, for example, was the first where Latin and what was then called "foreign languages" became "elective" classes instead of simply being required. In my generation basic math, reading, grammar skills, along with at least rudimentary knowledge of history, and social studies was "required" to pass from grade to grade and then graduate.)
Aside from this however and on deeper levels the book deals with Lewis' rejection of all things spiritual, mystical, metaphysical or religious and decision to become an atheist. It then leads us through his life and reasoning from there to theism and then to Christianity.
I could say a lot more about this book but I can't in this limited space give an account that would come close to doing it justice.
Highly recommended.
August 14, 2020
Many of us are familiar with The Chronicles Of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and perhaps even Mere Christianity, but I suspect few readers are acquainted with their author, C. S. Lewis, often regarded as one of the most influential writers of his day. In fact, I never knew what the initials in his name stood for. I spent three invigorating days getting re-acquainted with the early life that shaped the literary talent of Lewis, indisputably an intellectual giant of the twentieth century. This is a re-read and yet it was as if I was reading this partial autobiography for the very first time.
Clive Staples Lewis (1898 – 1963) was born in Belfast to a solicitor and a clergyman’s daughter. He had an older brother with whom he shared a close relationship. His parents were bookish people, and Lewis developed an early love of reading. It was interesting to trace the beginnings of his literary gift. Lewis took to writing stories when he was just a child. He said, “You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.” and ”... in mapping and chronicling Animal-Land I was training myself to be a novelist.” Lewis had the privilege of access to excellent tutors in boarding school who provided prodigious exposure to the classics and cultivated in him a love of good literature. His happiest school years were spent under the tutelage of Kirk, affectionately known as ‘The Great Knock’, who taught him Homer, German, and Italian. That Kirk recognized Lewis’ talent was evident in this communication to the latter’s father, ”You may make a writer or a scholar of him, but you’ll not make anything else. You may make up your mind to that.” (Apparently, Lewis was appalling at Math.) Kirk was right. In 1917, Lewis went on a scholarship to University College, Oxford, graduated with a First in Greek and Latin Literature (1920), a First in Philosophy and Ancient History (1922), and a First in English (1923). He eventually became a distinguished writer and a professor at Oxford University and later at Cambridge University.
The heart of this memoir is Lewis’ conversion to Christianity and his lifelong search for Joy. It was fascinating to read about his conversion, his apostasy, and his conversion again. Lewis became a believer when he went to boarding school in Belsen for the very first time. His tutor, Oldie was a pupil-spanking tyrant and a bit insane. In his recollection, ”Life in a vile boarding school is in this way a good preparation for the Christian life, that is, it teaches one to live by hope.” Poor child. He attended a high Anglo-Catholic church. Here, he ’heard the doctrines of Christianity…taught by men who obviously believed them.’ Then followed a period of apostasy in the Preparatory School years at Wyvern when he gave up the faith and became an atheist at age 15. You have to read and find out why. Years later, his friendship with chiefly J.R.R. Tolkien and several others led him to critically examine his life and beliefs before his conversion to Theism in 1929. In Lewis’ own words, he was "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." I have to admit that the systematic process in which Lewis read, argued, and figured out the existence of the Absolute and the true definition of Joy is one I could not fully fathom. His training in philosophy and dialectics seemed to have led him logically and soundly to not just Theism but eventually Christianity.
More enjoyable than the chapters that described his faith journey are those that depicted life in British Public Schools. Lewis wrote about fagging, a traditional practice whereby younger pupils were required to act as personal servants to the oldest boys. Then there were the Tarts (not dessert served at tea) at Wyvern College, which I found quite shocking. Lewis was bored and fatigued in school, the stress coming from fagging and having to pretend to like the things the in-group enjoyed like clubs and sports. His being clumsy meant he was not involved in sports and could never gain popularity. His sanctuary was the Gurney, the school library, wherein ”the meanest boy was ‘unfaggable’ once he was inside the Gurney.” Loveliest of all was the tribute Lewis paid to his teachers. I love what he said of his form master at Wyvern College, Smewgy:
”He was honey-tongued. Every verse he read turned into music on his lips: something between speech and song... He first taught me the right sensuality of poetry, how it should be savoured and mouthed in solitude.’ ‘... to be in Smewgy’s form was to be in a measure ennobled. Amidst all the banal ambition and flashy spendours of school life he stood as a permanent reminder of things more gracious, more humane, larger, and cooler. But his teaching, in the narrower sense, was equally good. He could enchant but he could also analyse. An idiom or a textual crux, once expanded by Smewgy, became clear as day.”
I would be remiss if I did not at least mention Joy since it featured so prominently in the title of this autobiography. Here are a few quotes on Joy:
”Joy.. must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again...But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.”
”Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.”
”I had been... wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. And that object, quite clearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all.”
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life is unlikely to be everyone's cup of tea. However, if you have a penchant for elegant writing (even grandiloquent writing), a wide esoteric sweep of the classics (the references to them were astounding), or if you are interested in how an atheist with one of the most formidable minds became a convert, then this book may just turn out to be a fountain of joy.
Clive Staples Lewis (1898 – 1963) was born in Belfast to a solicitor and a clergyman’s daughter. He had an older brother with whom he shared a close relationship. His parents were bookish people, and Lewis developed an early love of reading. It was interesting to trace the beginnings of his literary gift. Lewis took to writing stories when he was just a child. He said, “You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.” and ”... in mapping and chronicling Animal-Land I was training myself to be a novelist.” Lewis had the privilege of access to excellent tutors in boarding school who provided prodigious exposure to the classics and cultivated in him a love of good literature. His happiest school years were spent under the tutelage of Kirk, affectionately known as ‘The Great Knock’, who taught him Homer, German, and Italian. That Kirk recognized Lewis’ talent was evident in this communication to the latter’s father, ”You may make a writer or a scholar of him, but you’ll not make anything else. You may make up your mind to that.” (Apparently, Lewis was appalling at Math.) Kirk was right. In 1917, Lewis went on a scholarship to University College, Oxford, graduated with a First in Greek and Latin Literature (1920), a First in Philosophy and Ancient History (1922), and a First in English (1923). He eventually became a distinguished writer and a professor at Oxford University and later at Cambridge University.
The heart of this memoir is Lewis’ conversion to Christianity and his lifelong search for Joy. It was fascinating to read about his conversion, his apostasy, and his conversion again. Lewis became a believer when he went to boarding school in Belsen for the very first time. His tutor, Oldie was a pupil-spanking tyrant and a bit insane. In his recollection, ”Life in a vile boarding school is in this way a good preparation for the Christian life, that is, it teaches one to live by hope.” Poor child. He attended a high Anglo-Catholic church. Here, he ’heard the doctrines of Christianity…taught by men who obviously believed them.’ Then followed a period of apostasy in the Preparatory School years at Wyvern when he gave up the faith and became an atheist at age 15. You have to read and find out why. Years later, his friendship with chiefly J.R.R. Tolkien and several others led him to critically examine his life and beliefs before his conversion to Theism in 1929. In Lewis’ own words, he was "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." I have to admit that the systematic process in which Lewis read, argued, and figured out the existence of the Absolute and the true definition of Joy is one I could not fully fathom. His training in philosophy and dialectics seemed to have led him logically and soundly to not just Theism but eventually Christianity.
More enjoyable than the chapters that described his faith journey are those that depicted life in British Public Schools. Lewis wrote about fagging, a traditional practice whereby younger pupils were required to act as personal servants to the oldest boys. Then there were the Tarts (not dessert served at tea) at Wyvern College, which I found quite shocking. Lewis was bored and fatigued in school, the stress coming from fagging and having to pretend to like the things the in-group enjoyed like clubs and sports. His being clumsy meant he was not involved in sports and could never gain popularity. His sanctuary was the Gurney, the school library, wherein ”the meanest boy was ‘unfaggable’ once he was inside the Gurney.” Loveliest of all was the tribute Lewis paid to his teachers. I love what he said of his form master at Wyvern College, Smewgy:
”He was honey-tongued. Every verse he read turned into music on his lips: something between speech and song... He first taught me the right sensuality of poetry, how it should be savoured and mouthed in solitude.’ ‘... to be in Smewgy’s form was to be in a measure ennobled. Amidst all the banal ambition and flashy spendours of school life he stood as a permanent reminder of things more gracious, more humane, larger, and cooler. But his teaching, in the narrower sense, was equally good. He could enchant but he could also analyse. An idiom or a textual crux, once expanded by Smewgy, became clear as day.”
I would be remiss if I did not at least mention Joy since it featured so prominently in the title of this autobiography. Here are a few quotes on Joy:
”Joy.. must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again...But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.”
”Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.”
”I had been... wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. And that object, quite clearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all.”
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life is unlikely to be everyone's cup of tea. However, if you have a penchant for elegant writing (even grandiloquent writing), a wide esoteric sweep of the classics (the references to them were astounding), or if you are interested in how an atheist with one of the most formidable minds became a convert, then this book may just turn out to be a fountain of joy.
June 8, 2009
There's not much to say about this book, as it is famous, and has been reviewed many times. It's about C. S. Lewis' conversion from atheism to Christianity. He identifies a quality which he calls "Joy," which occurs in what he describes as "a stab of joy." This is the a moment of perfect happiness occasioned by . . . well, it differs. Lewis explains that he got three stabs of joy in his youth: once from the a model garden in a biscuit-tin lid that his brother had made, once while reading Beatix Potter's Squirrel Nutkin, and once catching a phrase from Longfellow's poem The Saga of King Olaf. Lewis contends that these stabs of Joy are glimpses of the divine, and that they guided him inevitably to the Christian belief that characterized his later life.
What's truly amazing about this book, to me, is how closely it follows my own life. If I could identify three stabs of Joy that I've experienced, I'd say, first of all, from Lewis' own Narnia books, particularly the episode when Lucy is reading from the magical book in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; second, oddly enough, from the James Bond movies--I know that sounds weird, but something about the atmosphere of Goldfinger, especially encapsulated in the music, really caught me; and thirdly, from Star Wars--the 1977 film, not any of the subsequent movies.
Like Lewis, I subsequently fancied myself an atheist, and for much the same reasons. Lewis explains that he received a mature stab of Joy from the idea of Northernness that he got from the Norse mythology in Wagner; I, on the other hand, got that stab of Joy from T. H. White's book The Once and Future King. Lewis followed up on this by investigating Norse mythology more closely, and subsequently stopped receiving stabs of Joy from it when it became an academic investigation isntead of something he did for pure pleasure. Likewise with me and the Arthurian legend.
Like Lewis, I struggled against becoming a Christian but, like Lewis, books (in his case Chesterton and MacDonald, in mine the medieval Arthurian romances) and friends (in Lewis' case, a plethora of friends including Owen Barfield, J. R. R. Tolkien and other college friends, in my case, my wife) prevailed.
So, what really made me enjoy this book was recognizing the truth of what Lewis was saying in it. And I recognized this truth, because his story pretty closely resembled my own.
What's truly amazing about this book, to me, is how closely it follows my own life. If I could identify three stabs of Joy that I've experienced, I'd say, first of all, from Lewis' own Narnia books, particularly the episode when Lucy is reading from the magical book in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; second, oddly enough, from the James Bond movies--I know that sounds weird, but something about the atmosphere of Goldfinger, especially encapsulated in the music, really caught me; and thirdly, from Star Wars--the 1977 film, not any of the subsequent movies.
Like Lewis, I subsequently fancied myself an atheist, and for much the same reasons. Lewis explains that he received a mature stab of Joy from the idea of Northernness that he got from the Norse mythology in Wagner; I, on the other hand, got that stab of Joy from T. H. White's book The Once and Future King. Lewis followed up on this by investigating Norse mythology more closely, and subsequently stopped receiving stabs of Joy from it when it became an academic investigation isntead of something he did for pure pleasure. Likewise with me and the Arthurian legend.
Like Lewis, I struggled against becoming a Christian but, like Lewis, books (in his case Chesterton and MacDonald, in mine the medieval Arthurian romances) and friends (in Lewis' case, a plethora of friends including Owen Barfield, J. R. R. Tolkien and other college friends, in my case, my wife) prevailed.
So, what really made me enjoy this book was recognizing the truth of what Lewis was saying in it. And I recognized this truth, because his story pretty closely resembled my own.
January 19, 2018
Great. Finished yet again in November of 2017. And again in January of 2018.
July 11, 2016
"Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back....everything is different."
I can easily mark this as my favorite autobiography. It didn't drone on and on as most others do. Starting out in his childhood, spreading through his years at Oxford and when he served as professor, and ending shortly after his conversion to Christianity, there was insight for almost every season of life. I've been a long-time reader of many of the classic Lewis works (Mere Christianity, Narnia, etc.) and even some lesser known works (Till We Have Faces). But after I read this intuitive book, His novels shine with a new light, and it brought my enjoyment of them to a whole new level.
FACTS ABOUT C. S. LEWIS:
-He had a certain condition as a child where he couldn't move either of his thumbs. Because of this, he wasn't able to do many things normal children do, such as using scissors, painting, building with blocks, etc. It's this condition that drove him to read.
-One of his favorite authors as a child (and adult) was George MacDonald. He was one of the very few Christian authors he read. He realized early on that there was something in MacDonald's writing that all the other books were missing. Ultimately, this author played a large part in his conversion.
See the full review (with pictures!) at my blog, Literary Cafe: http://literarycafe.weebly.com/home/s...
I can easily mark this as my favorite autobiography. It didn't drone on and on as most others do. Starting out in his childhood, spreading through his years at Oxford and when he served as professor, and ending shortly after his conversion to Christianity, there was insight for almost every season of life. I've been a long-time reader of many of the classic Lewis works (Mere Christianity, Narnia, etc.) and even some lesser known works (Till We Have Faces). But after I read this intuitive book, His novels shine with a new light, and it brought my enjoyment of them to a whole new level.
FACTS ABOUT C. S. LEWIS:
-He had a certain condition as a child where he couldn't move either of his thumbs. Because of this, he wasn't able to do many things normal children do, such as using scissors, painting, building with blocks, etc. It's this condition that drove him to read.
-One of his favorite authors as a child (and adult) was George MacDonald. He was one of the very few Christian authors he read. He realized early on that there was something in MacDonald's writing that all the other books were missing. Ultimately, this author played a large part in his conversion.
See the full review (with pictures!) at my blog, Literary Cafe: http://literarycafe.weebly.com/home/s...
February 19, 2015
This was interesting, but considering the very lengthy and detailed set-up, the denouement was hasty and disappointing. It barely brought together any of the varied strands he'd investigated; especially, his final treatment of “Joy” is relegated to one brief paragraph on the final page, and he fails to explain how Christianity satisfies/fulfills this feeling.
He believes it does, as he says in Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
But he could better have explained what N. T. Wright calls "signposts" and "places where heaven and earth meet." Or, as Van Til says so well: “Christianity stands...in antithetical relation to the religions of the world, but it also offers itself as the fulfillment of that of which the nations have unwittingly had some faint desire.”
He believes it does, as he says in Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
But he could better have explained what N. T. Wright calls "signposts" and "places where heaven and earth meet." Or, as Van Til says so well: “Christianity stands...in antithetical relation to the religions of the world, but it also offers itself as the fulfillment of that of which the nations have unwittingly had some faint desire.”
November 16, 2023
📚 This slim and beautifully written volume will engage you with the beginnings of his lifelong love for books, his embrace of Anglican Christianity, and his early teaching of literature and theology - “the Queen of the Sciences”👸👑
May 6, 2021
Second book down of my 2020 reading challenge: read all of C.S. Lewis's published works.
I chose Surprised By Joy as one of the first to read this year as it is, in many aspects, essentially an autobiography. I was hoping to learn more about the author to see how his life and upbringing influenced his writing.
Jack, Jack, Jack. The more I read about him, and from him, the more I feel a connection in my soul. This dude says, in the simplest ways, things I feel personally. Even things I never realized I felt personally. He notices it, and he pins it down with ease. Lewis has an intraspection that challenges me to practice the same. And he has a bluntness I absolutely love. He wasn't given to beating around the bush- no small talk here. Again, the more I find out about him, the more I adore him.
His self-deprecation and reasoning skills are second to none. He loved God in a way that was authentic, vibrant, and organic.
"I was at this time living like so many atheists or anti-theists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry at God for not existing. I was equally angry with him for creating the world...I was, as you may well remember, one whose negative demands were far more violent than his positive, far more ready to escape pain than achieve happiness, and feeling it something of an outrage that I had been created without my permission."
"But a drop of disturbing doubt fell into my Materialism; it was merely a "Perhaps." Perhaps (oh joy!) there was, after all, a "something else."
"I sometimes wonder if not all pleasures are substitutes for Joy."
"For the first time I examined myself with a seriously, practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was Legion."
"The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation."
He had an incredibly understated sense of humor.
"We debated whether the future was like a line you can't see or like a line that has not yet been drawn. I have forgotten which side I took although I know I took it with great zeal."
'In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere-- "Bibles laid open, millions of surprises" as Herbert says, "fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.'
In case you didn't catch that, yes. Lewis was, at one time, an atheist. He also admitted to having a fascination with the occult before he fell in love with the Lord.
He wasn't without his quirks. He attended a boarding school where he was essentially physically and emotionally abused. He hated Disney. He had a tense relationship with his father. He loved skyscapes (which makes so much sense when you read Out of the Silent Planet, in particular). He was brutally hard on himself. And he's relatable. Books thrilled him. Tea was a simple luxury. He loved walking through the country and taking in comforting scenes.
"Some of my purchases [books] proved disappointments, and some went beyond my hopes, but the undoing of the parcel always proved a delicious moment."
"Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably."
"Where I had expected gravel drives and iron gates and interminable laurels and monkey puzzlers, I saw crooked paths running up or down hills from wicket gates, between fruit trees and birches. By a severer taste than mine, these houses would all be mocked perhaps. Yet I cannot help thinking those who designed them and their gardens achieved their object, which was to suggest happiness."
I'd rate this book a PG.
I chose Surprised By Joy as one of the first to read this year as it is, in many aspects, essentially an autobiography. I was hoping to learn more about the author to see how his life and upbringing influenced his writing.
Jack, Jack, Jack. The more I read about him, and from him, the more I feel a connection in my soul. This dude says, in the simplest ways, things I feel personally. Even things I never realized I felt personally. He notices it, and he pins it down with ease. Lewis has an intraspection that challenges me to practice the same. And he has a bluntness I absolutely love. He wasn't given to beating around the bush- no small talk here. Again, the more I find out about him, the more I adore him.
His self-deprecation and reasoning skills are second to none. He loved God in a way that was authentic, vibrant, and organic.
"I was at this time living like so many atheists or anti-theists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry at God for not existing. I was equally angry with him for creating the world...I was, as you may well remember, one whose negative demands were far more violent than his positive, far more ready to escape pain than achieve happiness, and feeling it something of an outrage that I had been created without my permission."
"But a drop of disturbing doubt fell into my Materialism; it was merely a "Perhaps." Perhaps (oh joy!) there was, after all, a "something else."
"I sometimes wonder if not all pleasures are substitutes for Joy."
"For the first time I examined myself with a seriously, practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was Legion."
"The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation."
He had an incredibly understated sense of humor.
"We debated whether the future was like a line you can't see or like a line that has not yet been drawn. I have forgotten which side I took although I know I took it with great zeal."
'In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere-- "Bibles laid open, millions of surprises" as Herbert says, "fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.'
In case you didn't catch that, yes. Lewis was, at one time, an atheist. He also admitted to having a fascination with the occult before he fell in love with the Lord.
He wasn't without his quirks. He attended a boarding school where he was essentially physically and emotionally abused. He hated Disney. He had a tense relationship with his father. He loved skyscapes (which makes so much sense when you read Out of the Silent Planet, in particular). He was brutally hard on himself. And he's relatable. Books thrilled him. Tea was a simple luxury. He loved walking through the country and taking in comforting scenes.
"Some of my purchases [books] proved disappointments, and some went beyond my hopes, but the undoing of the parcel always proved a delicious moment."
"Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably."
"Where I had expected gravel drives and iron gates and interminable laurels and monkey puzzlers, I saw crooked paths running up or down hills from wicket gates, between fruit trees and birches. By a severer taste than mine, these houses would all be mocked perhaps. Yet I cannot help thinking those who designed them and their gardens achieved their object, which was to suggest happiness."
I'd rate this book a PG.
March 29, 2022
My favorite work of non-fiction by C.S.Lewis used to be Mere Christianity because it played such a huge role in my conversion from Agnosticism to Christianity years ago, and I really found it fascinating how Lewis wrote about the harmony between reason, faith, imagination, and one's own personal experience all coming together by grace.
I recently re-read Surprised by Joy for the fifth time, and it has become my favorite work of non-fiction by Lewis- his personal story is more of a powerful book to me than Mere Christianity, which is a classic, and it still deeply moves me every time I read it.
Lewis writing poignantly about his childhood in Northern Ireland, the sad loss of his Mother, hellish experiences in WWI, embracing of atheism, his friendships at Oxford, intense experience of the 'Sehnshuct' mystical joy roused by Celtic and Norse mythology, George MacDonald's writings, landscape, music, and art, and his journey to embracing faith in Christ from atheism , is such a fascinating story. My favorite part in the book is when Lewis writes about his mystical experience of joy when reading the great Scottish writer MacDonald's book Phantastes, which is a very strange and beautiful fantasy book, and another favorite part is when Lewis states that his experiences as a literary scholar convinced him that the first century Gospels were historical, and the story of Jesus of Nazareth's Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection is "the true myth."
The book reminded me of my own experiences of Sehnshuct- the music of Jon Foreman, Frederic Chopin, Celtic and Nordic music, the mountain landscape of my native state North Carolina, the landscape of Oxford, England, the season of Autumn, memories made in coffee shops, bookstores, and pubs; the poetry of John Keats, Wendell Berry, the writings of J.R.R.Tolkien, Neil Gaiman, Madeleine L'Engle, George MacDonald, and Lewis of course, and rich memories I made in Oxford, England. I already want to re-read this book again. I thank The Great Artist for giving the world such an amazing Irish writer!
I recently re-read Surprised by Joy for the fifth time, and it has become my favorite work of non-fiction by Lewis- his personal story is more of a powerful book to me than Mere Christianity, which is a classic, and it still deeply moves me every time I read it.
Lewis writing poignantly about his childhood in Northern Ireland, the sad loss of his Mother, hellish experiences in WWI, embracing of atheism, his friendships at Oxford, intense experience of the 'Sehnshuct' mystical joy roused by Celtic and Norse mythology, George MacDonald's writings, landscape, music, and art, and his journey to embracing faith in Christ from atheism , is such a fascinating story. My favorite part in the book is when Lewis writes about his mystical experience of joy when reading the great Scottish writer MacDonald's book Phantastes, which is a very strange and beautiful fantasy book, and another favorite part is when Lewis states that his experiences as a literary scholar convinced him that the first century Gospels were historical, and the story of Jesus of Nazareth's Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection is "the true myth."
The book reminded me of my own experiences of Sehnshuct- the music of Jon Foreman, Frederic Chopin, Celtic and Nordic music, the mountain landscape of my native state North Carolina, the landscape of Oxford, England, the season of Autumn, memories made in coffee shops, bookstores, and pubs; the poetry of John Keats, Wendell Berry, the writings of J.R.R.Tolkien, Neil Gaiman, Madeleine L'Engle, George MacDonald, and Lewis of course, and rich memories I made in Oxford, England. I already want to re-read this book again. I thank The Great Artist for giving the world such an amazing Irish writer!
August 9, 2021
82nd book of 2021.
Told by the lady at the desk that purchasing only the small and rather beaten Oxford Dictionary in my hands was not enough to use my card, I picked up Lewis' Surprised by Joy. At times, I've been intrigued by some of his non-fiction work such as Mere Christianity or more pressingly, Grief Observed, but this one gave itself up to me. That day, with more urgent things on my list, I began reading it.
Lewis writes surprisingly: in place of the dogmatic prose I imagined, I found warmth. The books middling rating from me is mostly reflecting its problem with proportions. Lewis uses a great deal of the book's length to describe his early years; he writes importantly on the death of his mother and a physically defective thumb which narrowed his talents in sports, but also spends a great deal of time describing the schools he attended, the boarding, the teachers, etc. Having attended English schools my whole life (including an all-boys high school), these held little charm for me. I also felt cheated by Tolkien's name being mentioned only 3 times in the 277 pages, for I am a Tolkien fan far, far above I'm a Lewis fan. In fact, I'd hardly identify myself as a Lewis fan.
What I know of him has come from reading Narnia as a boy, though I can't remember which ones, watching the movies that were about in my boyhood and more recently, hearing P. Quinn at C. University lecturing on him. Quinn being the master of fairy stories, sarcasm and tangents (he would give footnotes to his own sentences, turning his head away and speaking like Gollum to Smeagol, most of the time inaudibly to all those but the front row), a man of great cynicism, no doubt, though I didn't know him well, didn't appear to care for Lewis (though liked him better than Rowling). True or not, he berated the supposed philosophy that surfaces at the end of the Narnia books to do with Susan and Heaven. So I suppose it is down to Quinn that I entered Lewis' memoir here with caution, expecting a barrage of didactic rambling. And partly by my own feelings, having been raised a loose Christian of sorts, becoming a little more serious around my early teenage years before then turning away from it.
The little more serious manifested in my attendance of TGIF, a church youth-group. Thank God It's Friday, meetings held on Fridays. It was a fairly easy-going social construct, so I remember it, with moments to sit down and read the Bible and discuss. Anyway, tonight, finishing the last pages of Surprised by Joy in the garden, in the dark, and reading Lewis' description of the "moment", I was reminded of a moment(?) of my own one night with the TGIF group. We were at someone's house for a BBQ and it was freezing cold. I was without layers and sat in my chair shivering. However, surrounded by the bustling group, eating, talking, laughing, I felt suddenly far bigger and at the same time far smaller: being part of something bigger than myself but understanding that the thing bigger than myself was in turn still tiny compared to the universe, reality, whatever. So reading Lewis I was thinking back and asking myself if younger me felt that shiver (of both cold and of epiphany) was something religious, some understanding of Him, or simply one of those profound moments that comes from the self without any need/recognition of God. I won't count this as a spoiler because we know that Lewis becomes a Christian, but if you wish to keep his "moment" unknown, don't read the following which is Lewis' own epiphany of sorts:
Frankly, the best chapter in the memoir recounts, briefly, Lewis' time in the army from 1917 around the time he had started at Oxford. There were small and sad reflections that I found profound, 'In my own battalion also I was assailed. Here I met one Johnson (on whom be peace) who would have been a lifelong friend if he had not been killed', or, 'I think it was that day I noticed how a great terror overcomes a less: a mouse that I met (and a poor shivering mouse it was, as I was a poor shivering man) made no attempt to run from me.' But even when Lewis turned his attention to belief and to 'Joy' (by his own definition), he never changes his tone, perhaps because he would be a hypocrite if he did considering he was once a young atheist, and claimed, 'I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.'
I won't spoil much more of Lewis' own thoughts. A fairly dull middle, sandwiched between an interesting start and an interesting end. I'll be reading his other works now. What I find so appealing about him is how he accepts his long and hard-lined atheism but also shares his "conversion" with as much interest and intrigue as we read about it. Lewis himself appears, still, surprised. Surprised by it, surprised by Joy. At one point in the book he writes, 'A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.' I wonder if he is warning us here or if he is almost daring us.
Told by the lady at the desk that purchasing only the small and rather beaten Oxford Dictionary in my hands was not enough to use my card, I picked up Lewis' Surprised by Joy. At times, I've been intrigued by some of his non-fiction work such as Mere Christianity or more pressingly, Grief Observed, but this one gave itself up to me. That day, with more urgent things on my list, I began reading it.
Lewis writes surprisingly: in place of the dogmatic prose I imagined, I found warmth. The books middling rating from me is mostly reflecting its problem with proportions. Lewis uses a great deal of the book's length to describe his early years; he writes importantly on the death of his mother and a physically defective thumb which narrowed his talents in sports, but also spends a great deal of time describing the schools he attended, the boarding, the teachers, etc. Having attended English schools my whole life (including an all-boys high school), these held little charm for me. I also felt cheated by Tolkien's name being mentioned only 3 times in the 277 pages, for I am a Tolkien fan far, far above I'm a Lewis fan. In fact, I'd hardly identify myself as a Lewis fan.
What I know of him has come from reading Narnia as a boy, though I can't remember which ones, watching the movies that were about in my boyhood and more recently, hearing P. Quinn at C. University lecturing on him. Quinn being the master of fairy stories, sarcasm and tangents (he would give footnotes to his own sentences, turning his head away and speaking like Gollum to Smeagol, most of the time inaudibly to all those but the front row), a man of great cynicism, no doubt, though I didn't know him well, didn't appear to care for Lewis (though liked him better than Rowling). True or not, he berated the supposed philosophy that surfaces at the end of the Narnia books to do with Susan and Heaven. So I suppose it is down to Quinn that I entered Lewis' memoir here with caution, expecting a barrage of didactic rambling. And partly by my own feelings, having been raised a loose Christian of sorts, becoming a little more serious around my early teenage years before then turning away from it.
The little more serious manifested in my attendance of TGIF, a church youth-group. Thank God It's Friday, meetings held on Fridays. It was a fairly easy-going social construct, so I remember it, with moments to sit down and read the Bible and discuss. Anyway, tonight, finishing the last pages of Surprised by Joy in the garden, in the dark, and reading Lewis' description of the "moment", I was reminded of a moment(?) of my own one night with the TGIF group. We were at someone's house for a BBQ and it was freezing cold. I was without layers and sat in my chair shivering. However, surrounded by the bustling group, eating, talking, laughing, I felt suddenly far bigger and at the same time far smaller: being part of something bigger than myself but understanding that the thing bigger than myself was in turn still tiny compared to the universe, reality, whatever. So reading Lewis I was thinking back and asking myself if younger me felt that shiver (of both cold and of epiphany) was something religious, some understanding of Him, or simply one of those profound moments that comes from the self without any need/recognition of God. I won't count this as a spoiler because we know that Lewis becomes a Christian, but if you wish to keep his "moment" unknown, don't read the following which is Lewis' own epiphany of sorts:
I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armour, as if I were a lobster. I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armour or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corslet meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional.
Frankly, the best chapter in the memoir recounts, briefly, Lewis' time in the army from 1917 around the time he had started at Oxford. There were small and sad reflections that I found profound, 'In my own battalion also I was assailed. Here I met one Johnson (on whom be peace) who would have been a lifelong friend if he had not been killed', or, 'I think it was that day I noticed how a great terror overcomes a less: a mouse that I met (and a poor shivering mouse it was, as I was a poor shivering man) made no attempt to run from me.' But even when Lewis turned his attention to belief and to 'Joy' (by his own definition), he never changes his tone, perhaps because he would be a hypocrite if he did considering he was once a young atheist, and claimed, 'I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.'
I won't spoil much more of Lewis' own thoughts. A fairly dull middle, sandwiched between an interesting start and an interesting end. I'll be reading his other works now. What I find so appealing about him is how he accepts his long and hard-lined atheism but also shares his "conversion" with as much interest and intrigue as we read about it. Lewis himself appears, still, surprised. Surprised by it, surprised by Joy. At one point in the book he writes, 'A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.' I wonder if he is warning us here or if he is almost daring us.
July 10, 2012
Considering all the things we’ve studied at New Saint Andrews—and the way it keeps coming back to one thing—I find it highly interesting that it was essentially C.S. Lewis’ love of story that brought him to Christ. If you think about it, story is what all of his experiences of Sehnsucht have in common. Most of the Sehnsucht took place while reading poetry or literature, and if not, it was because it transported him to the places in those stories. For example, looking up at the night sky took him to the great northern expanse of Norse Mythology and Balder the god.
But why story? Our parents read us stories as children, and, once we’re old enough, we read them for ourselves. And before you know it—sometimes even before we can read or write—we’re making our own stories. There must be something fundamental about it that modern man has difficultly grasping. (Incidentally, this may explain why my generation seems to hate reading so much and why modern culture as a whole is striving to recover a love for reading in children.)
I think Lewis hit upon it when he described myths as “lies breathed through silver.” We all long for stories and enjoy them so much because we are looking for that One Story in which we are all players. That is why when Lewis realized that Christianity is a true myth—the one story that is completely and utterly true—his heart was won over and the rest of him promptly followed.
This is why Lewis is “surprised” by Joy. All his life he believed the lies too good to be true, and then finally found the truth to be even better.
But why story? Our parents read us stories as children, and, once we’re old enough, we read them for ourselves. And before you know it—sometimes even before we can read or write—we’re making our own stories. There must be something fundamental about it that modern man has difficultly grasping. (Incidentally, this may explain why my generation seems to hate reading so much and why modern culture as a whole is striving to recover a love for reading in children.)
I think Lewis hit upon it when he described myths as “lies breathed through silver.” We all long for stories and enjoy them so much because we are looking for that One Story in which we are all players. That is why when Lewis realized that Christianity is a true myth—the one story that is completely and utterly true—his heart was won over and the rest of him promptly followed.
This is why Lewis is “surprised” by Joy. All his life he believed the lies too good to be true, and then finally found the truth to be even better.
May 8, 2013
This book wasn't what I was expecting. At first, I had expected it to be the story of how Lewis met his wife, Joy, as was portrayed in the movie SHADOWLANDS with Anthony Hopkins. Upon learning that such was not the case, I then expected it to be a straight-forward autobiographical account of Lewis' life. Wrong again. Actually, SURPRISED BY JOY is a memoir about Lewis' formative years. More specifically, it deals with Lewis' early rejection of Christianity and the manner in which he eventually returned to the fold. Most of the book, however, is given to childhood reminiscences and reflections on various books that had an impact on him as a young man. All that is well and good, but I found it a bit dull. Early on in SURPRISED BY JOY, Lewis states that the best part of any biography is the stuff at the beginning, the stuff that deals with the subject in his or her youth. This is where Lewis and I differ. I'm generally not all that interested in people's childhoods and would much prefer them to get on with talking about their life's work and accomplishments. SURPRISED BY JOY doesn't really give us a glimpse into Lewis' professional life, and that was what disappointed me about it. That certainly doesn't make it a bad book--just not my style. As for the quality of the writing and the degree of insight throughout, it's every bit as brilliant as you'd expect from a writer of Lewis' caliber.
August 6, 2020
The life of C S Lewis is edifying and such a delight to read. He has substance and that's wonderful!
September 8, 2022
Lewis's autobiography is almost always a starting point when looking into his life, and I was even surprised at the level of sincerity in some places.
August 9, 2019
Such a wonderful read! A few thoughts and quotes:
-I was delighted to see that Edith Nesbit and Beatrix Potter had a significant impact on Lewis’ childhood.
-I appreciate Lewis’ discussion of the difference between “wonder” fantasy, and “fantasy” that’s focused on wish-fulfillment. “When the boy passes from nursery literature to school-stories he is going down, not up. Peter Rabbit pleases a disinterested imagination, for the child does not want to be a rabbit. . . but the story of the unpromising boy who became captain of the First Eleven exists precisely to feed his real ambitions.” When it comes to modern fantasy novels, some fall in one category and some in the other--many of them definitely appeal to the reader’s inner desire for power.
-Wow. The HORRIBLE things that happened in British prep schools! I wouldn’t have believed in them all if they showed up in a modern novel. No wonder the British upper class had a reputation for being a little dysfunctional.
-When discussing the things that caused him to doubt Christianity as a youth, Lewis says, “One came from reading the classics. Here, especially in Virgil, one was presented with a mass of religious ideas; and all teachers and editors took it for granted from the outset that these religious ideas were sheer illusion. No one ever attempted to show in what sense Christianity fulfilled Paganism or Paganism prefigured Christianity. The accepted position seemed to be that religions were normally a mere farrago of nonsense, though our own, by a fortunate exception, was exactly true. The other religions were not even explained, in the earlier Christian fashion, as the work of devils. That I might, conceivably, have been brought to believe. But the impression I got was that religion in general, though utterly false, was a natural growth, a kind of endemic nonsense into which humanity tended to blunder. In the midst of a thousand such religions stood our own, the thousand and first, labelled True. But on what grounds could I believe in this exception?”
-This quote struck me: “It is difficult for parents (and more difficult, perhaps, for schoolmasters) to realize the unimportance of most masters in the life of a school. Of the good and evil which is done to a schoolboy masters, in general, do little, and know less.” Honestly, I think this is a good argument against putting one’s child in a school just because the teachers are Christians/Lutherans. The other students and their families matter quite a bit, too.
-“The greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.” I agree, but how are we to do this? Which subjects should be tabled or cut?
-It’s startling to realize that Lewis would not have been able to attend Oxford if it weren’t for a law exempting ex-Service men from having to pass the mathematics test!
This is another book I will want to re-read in the future.
-I was delighted to see that Edith Nesbit and Beatrix Potter had a significant impact on Lewis’ childhood.
-I appreciate Lewis’ discussion of the difference between “wonder” fantasy, and “fantasy” that’s focused on wish-fulfillment. “When the boy passes from nursery literature to school-stories he is going down, not up. Peter Rabbit pleases a disinterested imagination, for the child does not want to be a rabbit. . . but the story of the unpromising boy who became captain of the First Eleven exists precisely to feed his real ambitions.” When it comes to modern fantasy novels, some fall in one category and some in the other--many of them definitely appeal to the reader’s inner desire for power.
-Wow. The HORRIBLE things that happened in British prep schools! I wouldn’t have believed in them all if they showed up in a modern novel. No wonder the British upper class had a reputation for being a little dysfunctional.
-When discussing the things that caused him to doubt Christianity as a youth, Lewis says, “One came from reading the classics. Here, especially in Virgil, one was presented with a mass of religious ideas; and all teachers and editors took it for granted from the outset that these religious ideas were sheer illusion. No one ever attempted to show in what sense Christianity fulfilled Paganism or Paganism prefigured Christianity. The accepted position seemed to be that religions were normally a mere farrago of nonsense, though our own, by a fortunate exception, was exactly true. The other religions were not even explained, in the earlier Christian fashion, as the work of devils. That I might, conceivably, have been brought to believe. But the impression I got was that religion in general, though utterly false, was a natural growth, a kind of endemic nonsense into which humanity tended to blunder. In the midst of a thousand such religions stood our own, the thousand and first, labelled True. But on what grounds could I believe in this exception?”
-This quote struck me: “It is difficult for parents (and more difficult, perhaps, for schoolmasters) to realize the unimportance of most masters in the life of a school. Of the good and evil which is done to a schoolboy masters, in general, do little, and know less.” Honestly, I think this is a good argument against putting one’s child in a school just because the teachers are Christians/Lutherans. The other students and their families matter quite a bit, too.
-“The greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.” I agree, but how are we to do this? Which subjects should be tabled or cut?
-It’s startling to realize that Lewis would not have been able to attend Oxford if it weren’t for a law exempting ex-Service men from having to pass the mathematics test!
This is another book I will want to re-read in the future.
February 10, 2017
C. S. Lewis, one of J. R. R. Tolkien's best friends and creator of the Narnia Chronicles, among others. Pure genius. Period.
September 30, 2022
absolutely glorious. gently flowing and winding, and coming right back to the source that feeds it.
October 8, 2018
Libro autobiografico in cui C.S. Lewis racconta la storia del suo passaggio dall'ateismo al cristianesimo. La sua fu una conversione lenta, sofferta, tormentata, e quando infine giunse all’ammissione dell’esistenza di Dio definì se stesso il “convertito più riluttante di tutta l’Inghilterra”.
Qui C.S. Lewis descrive il suo itinerario spirituale ripercorrendo la lunga strada della sua vita.
Affascinante, sorprendente.
Qui C.S. Lewis descrive il suo itinerario spirituale ripercorrendo la lunga strada della sua vita.
Affascinante, sorprendente.
May 6, 2023
"Me Jacksie." From a young age, C.S. Lewis had a way with words, a persuasive way with words. He knew he didn't want to go through life having everybody call him "Clive," so he came up with that simple but effective sentence, no doubt startling his parents. Yet that bold communication still worked.
An intrepid communicator Jack Lewis continued to be... for the rest of his life.
To this reader of "Surprised by Joy," and also demonstrated in many other brilliant books that he wrote, C.S. Lewis had a magnificent gift for putting sacred experience into language.
Have you ever tried that, fellow Goodreaders? Then you may have learned the hard way, how difficult that is to do successfully, given the private and deeply personal nature of such experiences.
My biggest takeaway from this memoir was how Lewis described his life moving forward on two separate, unrelated tracks: Human life events on one track, spiritual life on an entirely different track.
Lewis used this distinction almost as a literary device, giving a memorable shape to his life story (technically, two life stories). What impressed me most, however, was the very process of alternation, especially the non-correspondence between outer, human events and the stirrings of sacred recognition within.
What a magnificent spiritual-and-religious reporter, that Jacksie became!
An intrepid communicator Jack Lewis continued to be... for the rest of his life.
To this reader of "Surprised by Joy," and also demonstrated in many other brilliant books that he wrote, C.S. Lewis had a magnificent gift for putting sacred experience into language.
Have you ever tried that, fellow Goodreaders? Then you may have learned the hard way, how difficult that is to do successfully, given the private and deeply personal nature of such experiences.
My biggest takeaway from this memoir was how Lewis described his life moving forward on two separate, unrelated tracks: Human life events on one track, spiritual life on an entirely different track.
Lewis used this distinction almost as a literary device, giving a memorable shape to his life story (technically, two life stories). What impressed me most, however, was the very process of alternation, especially the non-correspondence between outer, human events and the stirrings of sacred recognition within.
What a magnificent spiritual-and-religious reporter, that Jacksie became!
January 28, 2023
sometimes, a book reaches inside your heart, finds the deepest part of you--the part you were scared to tell anyone about--and rips it out, revealing it to the world. i find this most often in the memoirs of authors. The God of the Garden by Andrew Peterson is another.
but surprised by joy. i knew i loved Lewis for his children's books, but what i did not know was that he is so very like me. i see myself in every single page of this book. i never took my journey of wandering as far as Lewis, but the questions. the answers. the heartache. the temporal answers. the sadness and loneliness, the swells of excitement.
this is his story. this is my story.
i too want to seek the Blue Flower.
but surprised by joy. i knew i loved Lewis for his children's books, but what i did not know was that he is so very like me. i see myself in every single page of this book. i never took my journey of wandering as far as Lewis, but the questions. the answers. the heartache. the temporal answers. the sadness and loneliness, the swells of excitement.
this is his story. this is my story.
i too want to seek the Blue Flower.
August 4, 2015
Not quite an autobiography
24 May 2014
It is a little difficult to categorise this book since while in part it is an autobiography, Lewis goes to great pains to exclaim otherwise. One could also suggest that it falls into a category of Christian literature known as a testimony: a story that is told by the author as to how they became a Christian. However this particular book sort of does not follow the two forms that that type of literature takes, which are:
1) I was a really, really, really bad person, but then God came along and now I am not; or
2) I became a Christian and this is how God has had an impact in my life.
As I have suggested this book does not necessarily follow either of these forms because while it is closer to the first form, normally the writer of that style of testimony goes to great pains to emphasis how bad and evil they were so that the contrast of their current lives acts as evidence of God having worked in them (and the problem with that form is that the author tends to spend so much time emphasising their bad aspects, they have have little to no time to outline how God has changed them, as well as the statements about how they have changed being quite subjective, and as such need to rely upon other people as references to their changed life).
The reason that I suggest this this particular book differs from the standard testimony is that Lewis does not emphasise his wickedness, and in fact he does not seem to suggest that he really was all that wicked – or at least no less bad than the next person (for as the Bible says in the book of Romans: all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God).
So, the question that is then raised is what is it with this book and what does it teach us about its author. Well, what I would have to say is that in a way it takes us on Lewis' journey through life to that point in time when he came to discover the joy of life, and in another way it also chronicles his intellectual development through not just his learning and his reading, but also through his life experiences. From what I discovered from this book, it appears that Lewis was one of those 'large' boys that is always picked on at school because while they are large, they are not necessarily strong, nor are they all that popular. We also learn that C.S. Lewis was in the trenches for the last part of World War I and came to experience the nature of war first hand. However, while he does state 'this is war, this is what Homer wrote about' I get a completely different idea of war from his description: modern warfare was nothing like the warfare of the Ancient Greeks in that the war Homer describes is a war where the fighting is not only up close and personal, but it also has the generals and leaders getting into the thick of the actions. In contrast, there was nothing personal about World War I; in fact it seemed that the entire war was the end point of industrialisation in which it was little more than a machine that simply existed to destroy people in the most bloody and painful ways possible.
His story about his time at Wyvern (which when I first read the book, I believed it was a name that was made up so as to protect the guilty, but I have since, after quickly performing an internet search, discovered otherwise) is also quite interesting as he seems to pull the cover off what goes on in these exclusive English Public Schools. Mind you, I have never been to a boarding school, nor have I studied at a boys school, so I am unable to authenticate whether there was homosexuality going on between what Lewis calls the 'Bloods' and those known as the 'tarts'. However, it is interesting to note his comments on the topic as I do not believe it is mentioned elsewhere. However, let us take note that:
1) It occurred in Edwardian England, and enough for it to be noticeable;
2) If you were caught it would result in gaol time;
3) Lewis does not seem to think that the reason people do not like it has anything to do with any Biblical prohibition but rather because of its criminal nature, and anybody that is caught in a homosexual relationship is no doubt going to be treated the same as anybody else committing a crime;
4) Lewis believes that there are much greater sins that are accepted and does not understand why it is that homosexuals are punished while proud and greedy people get away with their actions;
5) He does not believe that he has any right to comment on it or speaking out against it.
After Lewis returns home from war the book, for some reason, seems to drift into some sort of esoteric form of writing as he outlines how he meets believers at Oxford (including Tolkien) and how he fights and riles against Christianity only to, in the end, reluctantly concede, at first, that there is a God, and then, as he begins to investigate spirituality, comes to accept that Christianity is the one religion that he can call authentic. In a sense the joy that he comes to discover through Christianity is a type of joy that he had not encountered elsewhere, such as the joy of reading a good book, or the joy that one gets out of pleasurable activity. In fact, as Lewis suggests, humanities desire for pleasure arises from that desire to find joy and to fill oneself with that joy due to the fact that one's life seems empty without it. It is not that pleasure gives joy, but rather it creates a short terms satisfaction that must be continually met because once the initial rush has worn off then the crash comes, and when one crashes, it tends to end up being much, much harsher than the initial rush (though that is always very subjective because while one tends to crash after the rush, when the crash comes, the rush is suddenly a distant memory).
What Lewis is suggesting (and what many other Christians also suggest) is that what God provides is that sense of joy and contentment that, well, may not be as intense and as strong as say ecstasy, but is a type and form of joy that gives one strength to continue. Personally, I would suggest otherwise because Christianity is not all beer and skittles (just ask a martyr, if you could because, well, martyrs end up being, well, dead), but what Christianity gives you (that, well, ecstasy doesn't) is not just a sense of hope, but a hope that all of this bad stuff will simply not last forever.
24 May 2014
It is a little difficult to categorise this book since while in part it is an autobiography, Lewis goes to great pains to exclaim otherwise. One could also suggest that it falls into a category of Christian literature known as a testimony: a story that is told by the author as to how they became a Christian. However this particular book sort of does not follow the two forms that that type of literature takes, which are:
1) I was a really, really, really bad person, but then God came along and now I am not; or
2) I became a Christian and this is how God has had an impact in my life.
As I have suggested this book does not necessarily follow either of these forms because while it is closer to the first form, normally the writer of that style of testimony goes to great pains to emphasis how bad and evil they were so that the contrast of their current lives acts as evidence of God having worked in them (and the problem with that form is that the author tends to spend so much time emphasising their bad aspects, they have have little to no time to outline how God has changed them, as well as the statements about how they have changed being quite subjective, and as such need to rely upon other people as references to their changed life).
The reason that I suggest this this particular book differs from the standard testimony is that Lewis does not emphasise his wickedness, and in fact he does not seem to suggest that he really was all that wicked – or at least no less bad than the next person (for as the Bible says in the book of Romans: all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God).
So, the question that is then raised is what is it with this book and what does it teach us about its author. Well, what I would have to say is that in a way it takes us on Lewis' journey through life to that point in time when he came to discover the joy of life, and in another way it also chronicles his intellectual development through not just his learning and his reading, but also through his life experiences. From what I discovered from this book, it appears that Lewis was one of those 'large' boys that is always picked on at school because while they are large, they are not necessarily strong, nor are they all that popular. We also learn that C.S. Lewis was in the trenches for the last part of World War I and came to experience the nature of war first hand. However, while he does state 'this is war, this is what Homer wrote about' I get a completely different idea of war from his description: modern warfare was nothing like the warfare of the Ancient Greeks in that the war Homer describes is a war where the fighting is not only up close and personal, but it also has the generals and leaders getting into the thick of the actions. In contrast, there was nothing personal about World War I; in fact it seemed that the entire war was the end point of industrialisation in which it was little more than a machine that simply existed to destroy people in the most bloody and painful ways possible.
His story about his time at Wyvern (which when I first read the book, I believed it was a name that was made up so as to protect the guilty, but I have since, after quickly performing an internet search, discovered otherwise) is also quite interesting as he seems to pull the cover off what goes on in these exclusive English Public Schools. Mind you, I have never been to a boarding school, nor have I studied at a boys school, so I am unable to authenticate whether there was homosexuality going on between what Lewis calls the 'Bloods' and those known as the 'tarts'. However, it is interesting to note his comments on the topic as I do not believe it is mentioned elsewhere. However, let us take note that:
1) It occurred in Edwardian England, and enough for it to be noticeable;
2) If you were caught it would result in gaol time;
3) Lewis does not seem to think that the reason people do not like it has anything to do with any Biblical prohibition but rather because of its criminal nature, and anybody that is caught in a homosexual relationship is no doubt going to be treated the same as anybody else committing a crime;
4) Lewis believes that there are much greater sins that are accepted and does not understand why it is that homosexuals are punished while proud and greedy people get away with their actions;
5) He does not believe that he has any right to comment on it or speaking out against it.
After Lewis returns home from war the book, for some reason, seems to drift into some sort of esoteric form of writing as he outlines how he meets believers at Oxford (including Tolkien) and how he fights and riles against Christianity only to, in the end, reluctantly concede, at first, that there is a God, and then, as he begins to investigate spirituality, comes to accept that Christianity is the one religion that he can call authentic. In a sense the joy that he comes to discover through Christianity is a type of joy that he had not encountered elsewhere, such as the joy of reading a good book, or the joy that one gets out of pleasurable activity. In fact, as Lewis suggests, humanities desire for pleasure arises from that desire to find joy and to fill oneself with that joy due to the fact that one's life seems empty without it. It is not that pleasure gives joy, but rather it creates a short terms satisfaction that must be continually met because once the initial rush has worn off then the crash comes, and when one crashes, it tends to end up being much, much harsher than the initial rush (though that is always very subjective because while one tends to crash after the rush, when the crash comes, the rush is suddenly a distant memory).
What Lewis is suggesting (and what many other Christians also suggest) is that what God provides is that sense of joy and contentment that, well, may not be as intense and as strong as say ecstasy, but is a type and form of joy that gives one strength to continue. Personally, I would suggest otherwise because Christianity is not all beer and skittles (just ask a martyr, if you could because, well, martyrs end up being, well, dead), but what Christianity gives you (that, well, ecstasy doesn't) is not just a sense of hope, but a hope that all of this bad stuff will simply not last forever.
March 16, 2023
This man is my spiritual uncle, I love him. Sometimes when I read certain parts of his books I feel like a greedy little gremlin… like I want more, I wish I could live in them and not just read them. I first felt this when I read the Screwtape Letters, then the Great Divorce and Mere Christianity, and now this, but in a different way. Hard to describe. But maybe it’s Joy :)
December 10, 2019
3,5
Cautivado por la Alegría: La historia de mi conversión (1955) pertenece a una serie de ensayos que escribió Clive Staples Lewis durante su madurez y vejez. Entre estos ensayos apologéticos cristianos destaco Mero cristianismo, Los milagros, Dios en el banquillo, El problema del dolor y Una pena en observación y, por supuesto, este. Lewis trataría en estos títulos distintas cuestiones de índole teológica.
En Cautivado por la Alegría Lewis no entra directamente a la cuestión teológica. Me gustó mucho el planteamiento de este ensayo porque el autor empieza narrándonos su infancia y la relación con sus padres y su hermano, el prematuro fallecimiento de su madre y las diferentes educaciones que recibió en tres colegios privados. En unas vacaciones escolares entraría en contacto con la mitología nórdica, y a través de Asgard nacería lo que Lewis denomina “Alegría”. La Alegría de Lewis no deja de ser, bajo mi punto de vista, lo que los románticos y góticos clásicos llamaron lo sublime. Es un placer estético que parte del terror controlado que nos provoca un elemento que supera el entendimiento humano. En las literaturas de principios del siglo XIX sería un entorno indómito mientras que en la literatura gótica moderna es invocado por seres venidos espacio exterior, los vacíos siderales o incluso la naturaleza oculta del ser humano.
Leí este libro esperando respuestas, unas respuestas que en realidad no he encontrado. Creo que puedo decir abiertamente que tengo más preguntas que antes. Eso no me desagrada, pues quiere decir que el ensayo ha cumplido su cometido. Pero tampoco me satisface del todo, pues pensaba encontrar otro tipo de planteamientos.
Tras leer a Lewis siento más que, como él, jamás seré una buena creyente. Mi acto de fe no es tan fuerte como yo creo que debería ser.
Cuando comencé a cuestionarme si Dios existía o no, allá por 2016, me arrojé a los brazos del materialismo primitivo, el monismo y los presocráticos. En realidad, lo hice más por admiración que por un sincero convencimiento. Investigué un poco más, busqué el impacto de la filosofía presocrática y llegué al enfrentamiento entre los epicúreos y los estoicos. De ahí no llegué a pasar nunca, ya que en aquel momento me definí como una estoica, pero en el fondo de mí deseaba con todas mis fuerzas ser una epicúrea. Y es que hasta que leí a Dostoyevski he visto que mi ser buscaba el amparo de la filosofía epicúrea bien entendida. En la actualidad, si un individuo elige abismarse en placeres físicos con la intención puramente egoísta de “vivir el momento” ya es un epicúreo; eso está muy lejos de la filosofía de Epicuro.
Sin embargo, tuvo que venir Dostoyevski a desbaratarlo todo. Epicuro dejó de tener sentido. La felicidad solo se podría alcanzar aplicando las leyes del cristianismo más primitivo y, de pronto, tal vez por las circunstancias de aquel momento y mis sentimientos, experimenté la certeza que realmente era así. Como Lewis, llegó un día en el que me hinqué de rodillas y le pedí a Dios que me acogiera y me diera fuerzas. Pero yo para entonces era una incrédula y no le tenía miedo ni respeto a Dios. El único ser que me causaba verdadero temor era yo. Volví a creer en Dios, sí, pero para protegerme de mi misma.
En esa época de dudas conocí a Christina Rossetti, y ver cómo una mujer estaba sometida a los mismos conflictos que yo en una época mucho más inclemente con este tipo de juicios me ayudó mucho a aceptar mis visiones. La verdad, no siento que ella fuera tampoco una gran creyente. Buscó el ala de Dios para protegerse de sus pensamientos y su angustia vital, un sentimiento que poco a poco se hacía más fuerte en ella.
Estoy en el proceso de un aprendizaje que no creo que concluya nunca. Debo aprender mucho todavía para afirmar que estoy dentro de una escuela de pensamiento o de otra. Y me alegro de que sea así, porque mientras mi mente se mantenga ocupada no tengo nada que temer. Mientras Dios, o lo divino, esté dentro de mí no temeré.
Mi mayor agradecimiento con Lewis es que haya creado en mí una insana curiosidad por toda la filosofía, incluso por aquella que no me representa en absoluto como es toda la tradición idealista. Ese sentimiento de curiosidad que creí que el sistema educativo aniquiló vuelve a mí de una nueva forma. Todo en el Universo está sujeto a ciclos.
Cautivado por la Alegría: La historia de mi conversión (1955) pertenece a una serie de ensayos que escribió Clive Staples Lewis durante su madurez y vejez. Entre estos ensayos apologéticos cristianos destaco Mero cristianismo, Los milagros, Dios en el banquillo, El problema del dolor y Una pena en observación y, por supuesto, este. Lewis trataría en estos títulos distintas cuestiones de índole teológica.
En Cautivado por la Alegría Lewis no entra directamente a la cuestión teológica. Me gustó mucho el planteamiento de este ensayo porque el autor empieza narrándonos su infancia y la relación con sus padres y su hermano, el prematuro fallecimiento de su madre y las diferentes educaciones que recibió en tres colegios privados. En unas vacaciones escolares entraría en contacto con la mitología nórdica, y a través de Asgard nacería lo que Lewis denomina “Alegría”. La Alegría de Lewis no deja de ser, bajo mi punto de vista, lo que los románticos y góticos clásicos llamaron lo sublime. Es un placer estético que parte del terror controlado que nos provoca un elemento que supera el entendimiento humano. En las literaturas de principios del siglo XIX sería un entorno indómito mientras que en la literatura gótica moderna es invocado por seres venidos espacio exterior, los vacíos siderales o incluso la naturaleza oculta del ser humano.
Leí este libro esperando respuestas, unas respuestas que en realidad no he encontrado. Creo que puedo decir abiertamente que tengo más preguntas que antes. Eso no me desagrada, pues quiere decir que el ensayo ha cumplido su cometido. Pero tampoco me satisface del todo, pues pensaba encontrar otro tipo de planteamientos.
Tras leer a Lewis siento más que, como él, jamás seré una buena creyente. Mi acto de fe no es tan fuerte como yo creo que debería ser.
Cuando comencé a cuestionarme si Dios existía o no, allá por 2016, me arrojé a los brazos del materialismo primitivo, el monismo y los presocráticos. En realidad, lo hice más por admiración que por un sincero convencimiento. Investigué un poco más, busqué el impacto de la filosofía presocrática y llegué al enfrentamiento entre los epicúreos y los estoicos. De ahí no llegué a pasar nunca, ya que en aquel momento me definí como una estoica, pero en el fondo de mí deseaba con todas mis fuerzas ser una epicúrea. Y es que hasta que leí a Dostoyevski he visto que mi ser buscaba el amparo de la filosofía epicúrea bien entendida. En la actualidad, si un individuo elige abismarse en placeres físicos con la intención puramente egoísta de “vivir el momento” ya es un epicúreo; eso está muy lejos de la filosofía de Epicuro.
Sin embargo, tuvo que venir Dostoyevski a desbaratarlo todo. Epicuro dejó de tener sentido. La felicidad solo se podría alcanzar aplicando las leyes del cristianismo más primitivo y, de pronto, tal vez por las circunstancias de aquel momento y mis sentimientos, experimenté la certeza que realmente era así. Como Lewis, llegó un día en el que me hinqué de rodillas y le pedí a Dios que me acogiera y me diera fuerzas. Pero yo para entonces era una incrédula y no le tenía miedo ni respeto a Dios. El único ser que me causaba verdadero temor era yo. Volví a creer en Dios, sí, pero para protegerme de mi misma.
En esa época de dudas conocí a Christina Rossetti, y ver cómo una mujer estaba sometida a los mismos conflictos que yo en una época mucho más inclemente con este tipo de juicios me ayudó mucho a aceptar mis visiones. La verdad, no siento que ella fuera tampoco una gran creyente. Buscó el ala de Dios para protegerse de sus pensamientos y su angustia vital, un sentimiento que poco a poco se hacía más fuerte en ella.
Estoy en el proceso de un aprendizaje que no creo que concluya nunca. Debo aprender mucho todavía para afirmar que estoy dentro de una escuela de pensamiento o de otra. Y me alegro de que sea así, porque mientras mi mente se mantenga ocupada no tengo nada que temer. Mientras Dios, o lo divino, esté dentro de mí no temeré.
Mi mayor agradecimiento con Lewis es que haya creado en mí una insana curiosidad por toda la filosofía, incluso por aquella que no me representa en absoluto como es toda la tradición idealista. Ese sentimiento de curiosidad que creí que el sistema educativo aniquiló vuelve a mí de una nueva forma. Todo en el Universo está sujeto a ciclos.
January 19, 2016
Interesting to read immediately after The Pilgrim's Regress. I could see how the latter was an allegorical representation of his own conversion. I only wish he'd written a regular autobiography as well, for I'm very interested to hear of his later life in his own words.
Recommended for: Ages 15 to Adult (mentions of sinful behavior by the other boys at school, and mentions of certain temptations)
Many years ago, I read the first few chapters of this book as research for a speech on C.S. Lewis. I simply didn't have time to read the whole thing then, but I think I'm glad I waited until now. I don't think I would have quite understood the purpose of the book in the frame of mind I was in at the time, and without having read The Pilgrim's Regress.
Lewis covers his childhood much in the way that any man might cover his childhood in an autobiography, relating the general atmospheres of his home and schools, notable events, and particular memories. But he also has a slightly different focus. He always tells of the flashes of what he called Joy, sharply distinguished from both Happiness and Pleasure, a thing which becomes more apparent as the book progresses. Having just come out of The Pilgrim's Regress, an allegorical representation of Lewis's journey to Christianity, I recognized his Joy as the real life basis for John's Island. I would recommend reading those two books one right after the other, though I'm not sure if the way I happened to do it is best, or if you'd be better going the other way around.
His school experience was interesting. His first boarding school was terrible in basically every way, his second not so bad, though he was bullied somewhat, and his time at that school did not last long. Wyvern is why I give an age caution on the book. While he was never involved himself, he does address the fact that there was some homosexuality between the older and younger boys. Yet during his time at Wyvern, despite how horrible it was, he managed to find Joy through the books he discovered.
Post school is really where he starts focusing on the specifics that affected his religion. He called himself a reluctant convert, and it's easy to see throughout this book how that was so. But it's also easy to see how inescapable God's calling is. Lewis resisted, but it is impossible to ignore that God was calling him. Even which authors he discovered point back to God's calling.
What I find interesting is how logical Lewis was. He really thought things through. It may be more difficult to see in his fiction, but it's very apparent in his nonfiction. And logically, he could not make himself adhere to his teenage and young adult atheism. "A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading." This was certainly true in Lewis's case. And it was very interesting to see how someone with Lewis's background could grow to become one of the most influential Christian writers of his time.
For more reviews from me and my sisters, visit www.shirereviews.blogspot.com
Recommended for: Ages 15 to Adult (mentions of sinful behavior by the other boys at school, and mentions of certain temptations)
Many years ago, I read the first few chapters of this book as research for a speech on C.S. Lewis. I simply didn't have time to read the whole thing then, but I think I'm glad I waited until now. I don't think I would have quite understood the purpose of the book in the frame of mind I was in at the time, and without having read The Pilgrim's Regress.
Lewis covers his childhood much in the way that any man might cover his childhood in an autobiography, relating the general atmospheres of his home and schools, notable events, and particular memories. But he also has a slightly different focus. He always tells of the flashes of what he called Joy, sharply distinguished from both Happiness and Pleasure, a thing which becomes more apparent as the book progresses. Having just come out of The Pilgrim's Regress, an allegorical representation of Lewis's journey to Christianity, I recognized his Joy as the real life basis for John's Island. I would recommend reading those two books one right after the other, though I'm not sure if the way I happened to do it is best, or if you'd be better going the other way around.
His school experience was interesting. His first boarding school was terrible in basically every way, his second not so bad, though he was bullied somewhat, and his time at that school did not last long. Wyvern is why I give an age caution on the book. While he was never involved himself, he does address the fact that there was some homosexuality between the older and younger boys. Yet during his time at Wyvern, despite how horrible it was, he managed to find Joy through the books he discovered.
Post school is really where he starts focusing on the specifics that affected his religion. He called himself a reluctant convert, and it's easy to see throughout this book how that was so. But it's also easy to see how inescapable God's calling is. Lewis resisted, but it is impossible to ignore that God was calling him. Even which authors he discovered point back to God's calling.
What I find interesting is how logical Lewis was. He really thought things through. It may be more difficult to see in his fiction, but it's very apparent in his nonfiction. And logically, he could not make himself adhere to his teenage and young adult atheism. "A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading." This was certainly true in Lewis's case. And it was very interesting to see how someone with Lewis's background could grow to become one of the most influential Christian writers of his time.
For more reviews from me and my sisters, visit www.shirereviews.blogspot.com
March 14, 2020
Surprised by Tedium! Wow.....that’s 7 hours of my life I’ll never get back! As a teen I read and reread the Chronicles of Narnia...... wonderful books everyone should read........later on I read and enjoyed the Screwtape Letters. But this tedious, boring and over inflated autobiography was painful to read. If it wasn’t a book club pick I definitely would not have finished it!
Perhaps I’m just not smart enough to get all the dropped obscure literature references. I also didn’t understand the point of droning on ad nauseam about his childhood at boarding school. His long explanation of “bloods” and “fags” and his weird relationship with his father.
I found no joy whatsoever in this book. Would not recommend.
Perhaps I’m just not smart enough to get all the dropped obscure literature references. I also didn’t understand the point of droning on ad nauseam about his childhood at boarding school. His long explanation of “bloods” and “fags” and his weird relationship with his father.
I found no joy whatsoever in this book. Would not recommend.
September 28, 2018
'I never read an autobiography in which the parts devoted to the earlier years were not far the most interesting.' C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy
'This book is written partly in answer to requests that I would tell how I passed from Atheism to Christianity […] The book aims at telling the story of my conversion and is not a general autobiography, still less 'Confession' like those of Augustine or Rousseau. This means in practice that it gets less like a general autobiography as it goes on.' C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy
'A spiritual thriller' – The Sunday Times
For an atheist, unfamiliar with the experience of God, this does not read much like a conversion story at all. Indeed, it's hard to see anything much to do with religion in the first 80% of the book, and I probably would have missed all of it if I hadn't been clued in by the front cover which has the title 'Surprised by Joy' and the quote 'A spiritual thriller'. If you want to read the book as a thriller then my explaining how the extended childhood description is laying clues for the final spiritual epiphany will be a massive spoiler. So I'll leave that to the end.
If, like me, you have a morbid fascination with Edwardian English school stories then you'll probably find this a very interesting book, as it does cover a lot of Lewis's childhood. I find it astonishing how much casual cruelty was perpetrated as a matter of course.
I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that what was common practise a hundred years ago, we now see as obvious abuse which ought to get the perpetrator imprisoned in a mental facility. And that's before you get to the horrors inflicted by children on children, encouraged by their teachers: the utter servility of the fagging system; the open and ubiquitous quasi-prostitution; the hysterical devotion to teams, houses, and sports; the endless bullying. Lewis is particularly interesting as someone who hated every moment of it, thinks it counter-productive, and yet still feels the shame at having failed to thrive in such a system.
And the oddest thing about it is that so many of the people involved seem to have been otherwise completely decent. Like the teacher Smewgy (yes, absolutely everyone in this book has a ridiculously English name or nick-name) of whom Lewis says:
And stranger yet, that so many of the people who passed through this sadistic house of horrors should be so admirable; consider the stoicism and decency that you find in early 20th century literature: Ford Madox Ford or Tolkien or Orwell (Orwell has also written a very good description of the hell of boarding school).
So on the one hand Lewis is suffering greatly at school, and on the other he's experiencing flashes of joy that he finds at first in Norse mythology, then in Celtic and Roman myth, in Wagner's music, in the contemplation of distant mountains. He strives after joy, frustratingly finding that he cannot hold onto it. The more he studies mythology the less joy it brings him. The more he carefully sets up the correct conditions for joy, the less likely it is to appear.
None of this seems to relate to Christianity, and the small amount of text given over to religion describes how his failure at childhood prayer was a contributing factor in giving up Christianity. This is interesting and insightful, especially considering the sort of Atheism that is so common nowadays (and the sort that Lewis held when he was an atheist): angry and resentful of the demands of religion. Little Lewis was told as a child 'one must not only say one's prayers but think about what one was saying.' And consequently 'I set myself a standard. No clause of my prayer was to be allowed to pass muster unless it was accompanied by what I called a 'realisation', by which I meant a certain vividness of the imagination and the affections.' Needless to say he soon leads himself into an insomniac cycle of trying to force a sincere feeling in every prayer, which is about as useful as trying to grasp joy, and soon leads him to feel his religion as an intolerable burden. This was combined with a natural pessimism which felt that the world was a bit rubbish really, as Lucretius says:
Which Lewis seems to think is the strongest argument for atheism – I find that a bit odd. It seems a bit presumptuous to imagine that we could reliably guess what God would or wouldn't create and draw conclusions about his existence from our assumptions about what he would do if he existed.
Anyway, that's most of the book: the story of his schooldays, and his home in Ireland, interspersed with the love of mythology and nature. And then all of a sudden he converts in the final few chapters. These pass with bewildering speed, and a great deal of it went over my head. Some parts of the conversion seem utterly mystical, and I find myself shrugging and thinking, 'I guess you had to be there.' And other parts are intensely philosophical and I find myself shrugging and thinking, 'I guess you need a post-grad degree in philosophy to understand this.'
The mystical part begins when Lewis reads George Macdonald's Phantastes. His experience while reading the book:
There's two more pages like this. I would like to review it – I would like to have an opinion – but I have just absolutely no idea what's going on here. I know no bright shadows or siren voices, near or far. Clearly something profound is happening to Lewis, but it's incomprehensible to me.
The philosophy is even further beyond me. Indeed, it makes me wonder who it was that requested Lewis tell how he passed from Atheism to Christianity. I suspect it was someone who was already familiar with all his terms, or else surely he would have explained them better? Suffice to say, if you want to follow the philosophy them you had better already have some understanding of the Noumenal and the Phenomenal self; what Bergson can tell us about Nothing, what 'life' means to Shelley compared to Goethe; what is a Steinerite; what Lewis means by Anthroposophy, Theosophy, Yoga, Spiritualism, Psychoanalysis, Pantheism, the new Psychology, Rationalism, Idealism, Realism, Materialist philosophy, Fantasy (in the Coleridgean sense, as distinct from Fantasy as psychologists understand the term); stoical monism; Hegel, Bradley and Berkeley; or Wordsworth and his lost glory.
To give some idea of how swiftly Lewis takes up and dismisses these arguments:
This is all bewilderingly fast for me. There is too much implied information, too many skips over steps of reasoning. What does it mean that science is in quotation marks? Why does believing that rock-bottom reality is the one we sense lead to behaviouristic aesthetics? How does one get from rejecting behaviourism to accepting that the whole universe is mental? And what does that even mean? I'm floundering – never has a book in such clear prose made me feel so stupid and ignorant.
I can in part see that an argument is being made here. Each time Lewis rejects one of these philosophies, he must also reject a strut in the argument against God, and so he is innocently and unwittingly drawing closer and closer to his conversion as he casually demolishes his way through philosophy, with no idea what corner he is backing into. As he says: 'A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.' This is thrillerish – but would probably be a lot more thrilling if one could understand the implication of each column crumbling.
He does slow down to offer some explanation when it comes to Alexander's Space, Time, and Deity*, which had some profound implications for Lewis's understanding of Joy. The idea is this: you can experience 'enjoyment' and 'contemplation'. These are technical terms which roughly mean experiencing and thinking about. In Lewis's words:
The implications of this are that you cannot enjoy something at the same time as contemplating it. You enjoy your love while you contemplate your beloved. As soon as you start contemplating your love then you are enjoying your introspection. As Lewis says: 'The surest means of disarming an anger or a lust was to turn your attention from the girl or the insult and start examining the passion itself. The surest way of spoiling a pleasure was to start examining your satisfaction.'
This gave me a little frisson of recognition, because it reminded me of Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book in which he says that if one meditates to a high level then one eventually begins to perceive how our direct experience of the world is actually not the same thing as our perception of it – but our attention moves so rapidly that we don't notice the difference between sensation and interpretation. Lewis never mentions Buddhism once, I wonder if he didn't know about it, or if he just didn't have much of an opinion of it.
Anyway, what does this have to do with God and joy? Firstly, he at last understood why he could never hold onto joy: 'I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, 'This is it' had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed.' But it is the next step in his reasoning that brings it all together:
Even an atheist like me can see where this is going. So this is the thriller – sorry for spoiling it. All of Lewis's childhood flashes and darts of joy were clues leading him along the path to God. He felt joy in those things because 'all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth', wherever he perceived that reflection he felt the stab of joy. Joy is the signpost, the indication that our attention is finally fixed on the utter reality.
So there it is, and I'm still unsure how to feel about it. It was an interesting and enjoyable read. It didn't quite give me what I wanted – which was to understand how and why Lewis became a Christian, so that I might either be persuaded along with him, or allowed to be comfortably certain that it was not true. Instead I'm left with a dozen clues for further reading, and the headachy feeling that the whole subject is a lot more complicated than my youthful atheism would have allowed.
*I have no idea how to feel about the fact that Alexander's book, which had such a profound influence on Lewis, is totally unreviewed on Goodreads and most often shelved under 'abandoned', and so neglected that it appears to have been credited to a completely different Samuel Alexander.
'This book is written partly in answer to requests that I would tell how I passed from Atheism to Christianity […] The book aims at telling the story of my conversion and is not a general autobiography, still less 'Confession' like those of Augustine or Rousseau. This means in practice that it gets less like a general autobiography as it goes on.' C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy
'A spiritual thriller' – The Sunday Times
For an atheist, unfamiliar with the experience of God, this does not read much like a conversion story at all. Indeed, it's hard to see anything much to do with religion in the first 80% of the book, and I probably would have missed all of it if I hadn't been clued in by the front cover which has the title 'Surprised by Joy' and the quote 'A spiritual thriller'. If you want to read the book as a thriller then my explaining how the extended childhood description is laying clues for the final spiritual epiphany will be a massive spoiler. So I'll leave that to the end.
If, like me, you have a morbid fascination with Edwardian English school stories then you'll probably find this a very interesting book, as it does cover a lot of Lewis's childhood. I find it astonishing how much casual cruelty was perpetrated as a matter of course.
I have seen Oldie make that child bend down at one end of the school-room and then take a run of the room's length at each stroke; but P. was the trained sufferer of countless thrashings and no sound escaped him until, towards the end of the torture, there came a noise quite unlike a human utterance. That peculiar croaking or rattling cry, that, and the grey faces of all the other boys, and their deathlike stillness, are among the memories I could willingly dispense with.'
I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that what was common practise a hundred years ago, we now see as obvious abuse which ought to get the perpetrator imprisoned in a mental facility. And that's before you get to the horrors inflicted by children on children, encouraged by their teachers: the utter servility of the fagging system; the open and ubiquitous quasi-prostitution; the hysterical devotion to teams, houses, and sports; the endless bullying. Lewis is particularly interesting as someone who hated every moment of it, thinks it counter-productive, and yet still feels the shame at having failed to thrive in such a system.
And the oddest thing about it is that so many of the people involved seem to have been otherwise completely decent. Like the teacher Smewgy (yes, absolutely everyone in this book has a ridiculously English name or nick-name) of whom Lewis says:
'Nor had I ever met before perfect courtesy in a teacher. It had nothing to do with softness; Smewgy could be very severe, but it was the severity of a judge, weighty and measured, without taunting. [He said] 'You will have to be whipped if you don't do better at your Greek Grammar next week, but naturally that has nothing to do with your manners or mine.' The idea that the tone of conversation between one gentleman and another should be altered by a flogging (any more than by a duel) was ridiculous. His manner was perfect: no familiarity, no hostility, no threadbare humour; mutual respect, decorum. 'Never let us live with amousia' was one of his favourite maxims.'
And stranger yet, that so many of the people who passed through this sadistic house of horrors should be so admirable; consider the stoicism and decency that you find in early 20th century literature: Ford Madox Ford or Tolkien or Orwell (Orwell has also written a very good description of the hell of boarding school).
So on the one hand Lewis is suffering greatly at school, and on the other he's experiencing flashes of joy that he finds at first in Norse mythology, then in Celtic and Roman myth, in Wagner's music, in the contemplation of distant mountains. He strives after joy, frustratingly finding that he cannot hold onto it. The more he studies mythology the less joy it brings him. The more he carefully sets up the correct conditions for joy, the less likely it is to appear.
None of this seems to relate to Christianity, and the small amount of text given over to religion describes how his failure at childhood prayer was a contributing factor in giving up Christianity. This is interesting and insightful, especially considering the sort of Atheism that is so common nowadays (and the sort that Lewis held when he was an atheist): angry and resentful of the demands of religion. Little Lewis was told as a child 'one must not only say one's prayers but think about what one was saying.' And consequently 'I set myself a standard. No clause of my prayer was to be allowed to pass muster unless it was accompanied by what I called a 'realisation', by which I meant a certain vividness of the imagination and the affections.' Needless to say he soon leads himself into an insomniac cycle of trying to force a sincere feeling in every prayer, which is about as useful as trying to grasp joy, and soon leads him to feel his religion as an intolerable burden. This was combined with a natural pessimism which felt that the world was a bit rubbish really, as Lucretius says:
Had God designed the world, it would not be,
A world so frail and faulty as we see.
Which Lewis seems to think is the strongest argument for atheism – I find that a bit odd. It seems a bit presumptuous to imagine that we could reliably guess what God would or wouldn't create and draw conclusions about his existence from our assumptions about what he would do if he existed.
Anyway, that's most of the book: the story of his schooldays, and his home in Ireland, interspersed with the love of mythology and nature. And then all of a sudden he converts in the final few chapters. These pass with bewildering speed, and a great deal of it went over my head. Some parts of the conversion seem utterly mystical, and I find myself shrugging and thinking, 'I guess you had to be there.' And other parts are intensely philosophical and I find myself shrugging and thinking, 'I guess you need a post-grad degree in philosophy to understand this.'
The mystical part begins when Lewis reads George Macdonald's Phantastes. His experience while reading the book:
'It is as if I were carried sleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and could never remember how I came alive in the new. For in one sense the new country was exactly like the old. I met there all that had already charmed me in Malory, Spenser, Morris, and Yeats. But in an other sense all was changed. I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travels of Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness. For the first time in my life the song of the sirens sounded like the voice of my mother or my nurse. Here were old wives tales, there was nothing to be proud of in enjoying them. It was as though the voice which had called to me from the world's end were now speaking at my side. It was with me in the room, or in my own body, or behind me. If it had once eluded me by its distance, it now eluded me by proximity – something too near to see, too plain to be understood, on this side of knowledge. It seemed to have been always with me; if I could ever have turned my head quick enough I should have seized it.'
There's two more pages like this. I would like to review it – I would like to have an opinion – but I have just absolutely no idea what's going on here. I know no bright shadows or siren voices, near or far. Clearly something profound is happening to Lewis, but it's incomprehensible to me.
The philosophy is even further beyond me. Indeed, it makes me wonder who it was that requested Lewis tell how he passed from Atheism to Christianity. I suspect it was someone who was already familiar with all his terms, or else surely he would have explained them better? Suffice to say, if you want to follow the philosophy them you had better already have some understanding of the Noumenal and the Phenomenal self; what Bergson can tell us about Nothing, what 'life' means to Shelley compared to Goethe; what is a Steinerite; what Lewis means by Anthroposophy, Theosophy, Yoga, Spiritualism, Psychoanalysis, Pantheism, the new Psychology, Rationalism, Idealism, Realism, Materialist philosophy, Fantasy (in the Coleridgean sense, as distinct from Fantasy as psychologists understand the term); stoical monism; Hegel, Bradley and Berkeley; or Wordsworth and his lost glory.
To give some idea of how swiftly Lewis takes up and dismisses these arguments:
'If one kept (as rock-bottom reality) the universe of the senses, aided by instruments and co-ordinated so as to form 'science', then one would have to go much further – as many have since gone – and adopt a Behaviouristic theory of logic, ethics, and aesthetics. But such a theory was, and is, unbelievable to me. […] Unless I were to accept an unbelievable alternative, I must admit that mind was no late-come epiphenomenon; that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos.
This is all bewilderingly fast for me. There is too much implied information, too many skips over steps of reasoning. What does it mean that science is in quotation marks? Why does believing that rock-bottom reality is the one we sense lead to behaviouristic aesthetics? How does one get from rejecting behaviourism to accepting that the whole universe is mental? And what does that even mean? I'm floundering – never has a book in such clear prose made me feel so stupid and ignorant.
I can in part see that an argument is being made here. Each time Lewis rejects one of these philosophies, he must also reject a strut in the argument against God, and so he is innocently and unwittingly drawing closer and closer to his conversion as he casually demolishes his way through philosophy, with no idea what corner he is backing into. As he says: 'A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.' This is thrillerish – but would probably be a lot more thrilling if one could understand the implication of each column crumbling.
He does slow down to offer some explanation when it comes to Alexander's Space, Time, and Deity*, which had some profound implications for Lewis's understanding of Joy. The idea is this: you can experience 'enjoyment' and 'contemplation'. These are technical terms which roughly mean experiencing and thinking about. In Lewis's words:
'In bereavement you contemplate the beloved and the beloved's death, and, in Alexander's sense, 'enjoy' the loneliness and grief; but a psychologist, if he were considering you as a case of melancholia, would be contemplating your grief and enjoying psychology'.
The implications of this are that you cannot enjoy something at the same time as contemplating it. You enjoy your love while you contemplate your beloved. As soon as you start contemplating your love then you are enjoying your introspection. As Lewis says: 'The surest means of disarming an anger or a lust was to turn your attention from the girl or the insult and start examining the passion itself. The surest way of spoiling a pleasure was to start examining your satisfaction.'
This gave me a little frisson of recognition, because it reminded me of Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book in which he says that if one meditates to a high level then one eventually begins to perceive how our direct experience of the world is actually not the same thing as our perception of it – but our attention moves so rapidly that we don't notice the difference between sensation and interpretation. Lewis never mentions Buddhism once, I wonder if he didn't know about it, or if he just didn't have much of an opinion of it.
Anyway, what does this have to do with God and joy? Firstly, he at last understood why he could never hold onto joy: 'I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, 'This is it' had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed.' But it is the next step in his reasoning that brings it all together:
There was no doubt that Joy was a desire (and, in so far as it was also simultaneously a good, it was also a kind of love). But a desire is turned not to itself but to its object. Not only that, but it owes all its character to its object. Erotic love is not like desire for food, nay, a love for one woman differs from a love for another woman in the very same way and the very same degree as the two women differ from one another. […] I had been wrong in supposing that I really desired the Garden of the Hesperides, so also I had been equally wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. And that object, quite clearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all. […] I thus understood that in deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, a commerce with something which, by refusing to identify itself with any object of the senses, or anything whereof we have biological or social need, or anything imagined, or any state of our own minds, proclaims itself sheerly objective. Far more objective than bodies, for it is not, like them, clothed in our senses; the naked Other, imageless (though our imagination salutes it with a hundred images), unknown, undefined, desired.'
Even an atheist like me can see where this is going. So this is the thriller – sorry for spoiling it. All of Lewis's childhood flashes and darts of joy were clues leading him along the path to God. He felt joy in those things because 'all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth', wherever he perceived that reflection he felt the stab of joy. Joy is the signpost, the indication that our attention is finally fixed on the utter reality.
So there it is, and I'm still unsure how to feel about it. It was an interesting and enjoyable read. It didn't quite give me what I wanted – which was to understand how and why Lewis became a Christian, so that I might either be persuaded along with him, or allowed to be comfortably certain that it was not true. Instead I'm left with a dozen clues for further reading, and the headachy feeling that the whole subject is a lot more complicated than my youthful atheism would have allowed.
*I have no idea how to feel about the fact that Alexander's book, which had such a profound influence on Lewis, is totally unreviewed on Goodreads and most often shelved under 'abandoned', and so neglected that it appears to have been credited to a completely different Samuel Alexander.
November 11, 2018
That was an epic read! I feel as though I come away with a much greater understanding of C. S. Lewis, and therefore am better suited to understand the Chronicles of Narnia (which I have still not finished...)
The theme woven through this book, bringing harmony to Lewis's autobiography, is a recurring experience he referred to as Joy. Here is his description of it:
"It is...an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is." [p. 19]
This elusive desire followed him throughout life, at its best and its worst, resurfacing at the most unlikely moments. That's just the first of a whole host of ways I can relate to him. Who hasn't experienced just what he described? I know I have. I know all about how infuriating it is, and how wonderful. Now I also more fully understand it.
There are so many "You mean, someone else feels this way too?!" moments. For example, his reaction to the events surrounding his mother's funeral:
"Against all the subsequent paraphernalia of coffin, flowers, hearse, and funeral I reacted with horror. I even lectured one if my aunts on the absurdity of mourning clothes in a style which would have seemed to most adults both heartless and precocious.... To my hatred for what I already felt to be all the fuss and flummery of the funeral I may perhaps trace something in me which I now recognise as a defect but which I have never fully overcome --- a distaste for all that is public, all that belongs to the collective; a boorish inaptitude for formality." [p.22]
What can I say? Or consider this:
"It took me years to make the discovery that any real human intercourse could take place at a mixed assembly of people in their good clothes." [p. 59]
Guess I just need to give it a few more years...
The real pinnacle of my relatability to him comes after a discourse on his atheism/antitheism and pessimism.
"I now see that my view was closely connected with a certain lopsidedness of temperament. I had always been more violent in my negative than in my positive demands. Thus in personal relations, I could forgive much neglect more easily than the least degree of what I regarded as interference. At table I could forgive much insipidity in my food more easily than the least suspicion of what seemed to me excessive or inappropriate seasoning. In the course of life I could put up with any amount of monotony far more patiently than even the smallest disturbance, bother, bustle, or what the Scotch call kerfuffle. Never at any age did I clamor to be amused; always and at all ages (when I dared) I hotly demanded not to be interrupted." [p. 142]
That's what I call hitting the nail on the head. Ouch, is it ever accurate!
Another thing that kept me reading, and greatly enjoying what I read, is his unique sense if humor. He often gently pokes fun at his previous atheistic standpoint:
"I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world." [pp. 140, 141]
"In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be to careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere --- 'Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,' as Herbert says, 'fine nets and stratagems.' God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous." [p. 234]
While many incidents are related humorously, they are also perfectly sober. Lewis doesn't minimalise the gravity of a situation, but he does display 'great good humor' in the telling of it. That's just the way his descriptions of people are handled: humorous, but also tasteful and always respectful.
Naturally, I appreciate the fact that my very favorite author is mentioned! George MacDonald played an important role in Lewis's conversion. The young atheist picked up Phantastes in perfect innocence, not having the least idea of how it would eventually affect his life (As he later observed, atheists must be very careful in their literary choices). MacDonald's influence on him is evident in many areas. Some of his statements sounded so familiar...such as:
"You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to 'know of the doctrine.'"
In conclusion, I definitely plan to read more of C. S. Lewis's nonfiction. This is a great first impression and leaves me anxious for more.
The theme woven through this book, bringing harmony to Lewis's autobiography, is a recurring experience he referred to as Joy. Here is his description of it:
"It is...an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is." [p. 19]
This elusive desire followed him throughout life, at its best and its worst, resurfacing at the most unlikely moments. That's just the first of a whole host of ways I can relate to him. Who hasn't experienced just what he described? I know I have. I know all about how infuriating it is, and how wonderful. Now I also more fully understand it.
There are so many "You mean, someone else feels this way too?!" moments. For example, his reaction to the events surrounding his mother's funeral:
"Against all the subsequent paraphernalia of coffin, flowers, hearse, and funeral I reacted with horror. I even lectured one if my aunts on the absurdity of mourning clothes in a style which would have seemed to most adults both heartless and precocious.... To my hatred for what I already felt to be all the fuss and flummery of the funeral I may perhaps trace something in me which I now recognise as a defect but which I have never fully overcome --- a distaste for all that is public, all that belongs to the collective; a boorish inaptitude for formality." [p.22]
What can I say? Or consider this:
"It took me years to make the discovery that any real human intercourse could take place at a mixed assembly of people in their good clothes." [p. 59]
Guess I just need to give it a few more years...
The real pinnacle of my relatability to him comes after a discourse on his atheism/antitheism and pessimism.
"I now see that my view was closely connected with a certain lopsidedness of temperament. I had always been more violent in my negative than in my positive demands. Thus in personal relations, I could forgive much neglect more easily than the least degree of what I regarded as interference. At table I could forgive much insipidity in my food more easily than the least suspicion of what seemed to me excessive or inappropriate seasoning. In the course of life I could put up with any amount of monotony far more patiently than even the smallest disturbance, bother, bustle, or what the Scotch call kerfuffle. Never at any age did I clamor to be amused; always and at all ages (when I dared) I hotly demanded not to be interrupted." [p. 142]
That's what I call hitting the nail on the head. Ouch, is it ever accurate!
Another thing that kept me reading, and greatly enjoying what I read, is his unique sense if humor. He often gently pokes fun at his previous atheistic standpoint:
"I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world." [pp. 140, 141]
"In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be to careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere --- 'Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,' as Herbert says, 'fine nets and stratagems.' God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous." [p. 234]
While many incidents are related humorously, they are also perfectly sober. Lewis doesn't minimalise the gravity of a situation, but he does display 'great good humor' in the telling of it. That's just the way his descriptions of people are handled: humorous, but also tasteful and always respectful.
Naturally, I appreciate the fact that my very favorite author is mentioned! George MacDonald played an important role in Lewis's conversion. The young atheist picked up Phantastes in perfect innocence, not having the least idea of how it would eventually affect his life (As he later observed, atheists must be very careful in their literary choices). MacDonald's influence on him is evident in many areas. Some of his statements sounded so familiar...such as:
"You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to 'know of the doctrine.'"
In conclusion, I definitely plan to read more of C. S. Lewis's nonfiction. This is a great first impression and leaves me anxious for more.
February 20, 2015
"Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side." C.S. Lewis should know, he was one.
It is a rare thing to find a book that speaks to you so thoroughly and on so many levels. This was a complete surprise, something I rather stumbled upon because of a reference to it in another book. And what a surprise! Reading each chapter, each paragraph, each sentence, felt much like catching up with an old and dear friend, someone who understands your thoughts and perspectives like few others ever could.
This book reads also much like a bibliography of important books which affected the author most as a youth during his unwitting journey to faith and enlightenment. He tells of an upbringing in northern Ireland and touches upon such sad episodes as losing his mother early in life, and the subsequent unraveling of his relationship with a more mercurial father. Lewis describes the two like ships passing parallel to one another but in opposite directions, with his father never quite able to grasp or identify with his thoughts and motivations.
I love C.S. Lewis's gift for conjuring imagery, and now have clearer insight into the foundations for his writings rooted in an early love for Norse and Celtic mythology as well as for Wagner. I resonated with his account of a public school education, what with its inexplicable emphasis on "playing games" (sport) and the social stratifying hierarchy preparing youth for the exact same thing that awaits them in public adult life. I admire his ability to have navigated through those exhausting years with a stoicism that enabled him to face the shenanigans of adolescence (such as the "fagging" system, in his case, with elder Bloods at the English boarding schools) all while retreating into a fertile and robust imagination where ideas could be cultivated and a keen intellect refined largely unscathed.
The primary subject of the autobiography, of course, is the author's faith journey from early encounters with religion to a decided godlessness following his mother's death, then an eventual acquiescence to theism and in time a full embrace of Christianity. All throughout these early years Lewis seems to have maintained intellectual honesty which allowed him to experience epiphanies and recognize the shortfalls of a life governed by doubt. With nothing either sentimental or sophomoric about his account, the expression of depth and sincerity of thought ring true and are refreshing.
This book was not only a surprise, it was also a joy!
It is a rare thing to find a book that speaks to you so thoroughly and on so many levels. This was a complete surprise, something I rather stumbled upon because of a reference to it in another book. And what a surprise! Reading each chapter, each paragraph, each sentence, felt much like catching up with an old and dear friend, someone who understands your thoughts and perspectives like few others ever could.
This book reads also much like a bibliography of important books which affected the author most as a youth during his unwitting journey to faith and enlightenment. He tells of an upbringing in northern Ireland and touches upon such sad episodes as losing his mother early in life, and the subsequent unraveling of his relationship with a more mercurial father. Lewis describes the two like ships passing parallel to one another but in opposite directions, with his father never quite able to grasp or identify with his thoughts and motivations.
I love C.S. Lewis's gift for conjuring imagery, and now have clearer insight into the foundations for his writings rooted in an early love for Norse and Celtic mythology as well as for Wagner. I resonated with his account of a public school education, what with its inexplicable emphasis on "playing games" (sport) and the social stratifying hierarchy preparing youth for the exact same thing that awaits them in public adult life. I admire his ability to have navigated through those exhausting years with a stoicism that enabled him to face the shenanigans of adolescence (such as the "fagging" system, in his case, with elder Bloods at the English boarding schools) all while retreating into a fertile and robust imagination where ideas could be cultivated and a keen intellect refined largely unscathed.
The primary subject of the autobiography, of course, is the author's faith journey from early encounters with religion to a decided godlessness following his mother's death, then an eventual acquiescence to theism and in time a full embrace of Christianity. All throughout these early years Lewis seems to have maintained intellectual honesty which allowed him to experience epiphanies and recognize the shortfalls of a life governed by doubt. With nothing either sentimental or sophomoric about his account, the expression of depth and sincerity of thought ring true and are refreshing.
This book was not only a surprise, it was also a joy!
July 9, 2021
This book definitely isn't for everybody, but to me at least it was brilliant. Lewis' recounts the comings and goings of his imaginative and intellectual life in deeply personal and lucid prose. Different phases of his thoughts, convictions and temperament unravel and entwine like a tapestry, with the thread of Joy in the center.
The many references to literary works might put off some people and for me many went over my head as well, though some spoke vaguely to memory and others to imagination. If I was ever confused by them, it was nothing a Google search couldn't fix. I for one am not prone to get mad at an author for being much more well-read than myself and this fact showing in his texts, especially one about a life that simply included a lot of reading.
Other than the fact that it's simply a well-written book, part of my enjoyment stemmed from the recognition of a surprising amount of experiences Lewis describes in my own life. The mechanistic faith in God he describes having as a child, the stab of Joy at reading an incredible work of literature, the seemingly oxymoronic combination of an overactive imagination fed by the excursions into feary and myth and a deeply rational perspective on the world, the joy at finding and befriending a kindred spirit, even the character of his father and the struggle of communication with him, all of it was eerily familiar to the extent that reading it felt like fate or rather, the hand of God at work. Not sure what to make of that, other than the conviction that I should take its lessons to heart.
The many references to literary works might put off some people and for me many went over my head as well, though some spoke vaguely to memory and others to imagination. If I was ever confused by them, it was nothing a Google search couldn't fix. I for one am not prone to get mad at an author for being much more well-read than myself and this fact showing in his texts, especially one about a life that simply included a lot of reading.
Other than the fact that it's simply a well-written book, part of my enjoyment stemmed from the recognition of a surprising amount of experiences Lewis describes in my own life. The mechanistic faith in God he describes having as a child, the stab of Joy at reading an incredible work of literature, the seemingly oxymoronic combination of an overactive imagination fed by the excursions into feary and myth and a deeply rational perspective on the world, the joy at finding and befriending a kindred spirit, even the character of his father and the struggle of communication with him, all of it was eerily familiar to the extent that reading it felt like fate or rather, the hand of God at work. Not sure what to make of that, other than the conviction that I should take its lessons to heart.
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