Hedonics: Pleasure In Unlikely Places (C.S. Lewis)

I noted a couple of weeks ago that I would write some posts as I read through Present Concerns (a collection of articles by C.S. Lewis). This is my first attempt.

The article entitled Hedonics recounts a particular trip to London taken by C.S. Lewis. As one who never lived in London, much of the city remained a mystery to him. With this being the case, on this particular trip, he was unexpectedly swept away, as it were, by the simple romance of travel.

As he rode on the underground train, observing his fellow-passengers, he writes,

If anyone had asked me whether I supposed them to be specially good people or specially happy or specially clever, I should have replied with a perfectly truthful No. I knew quite well that perhaps not ten per cent of the homes they were returning to would be free, even for that one night, from ill temper, jealousy, weariness, sorrow or anxiety, and yet – I could not help it – the clicking of all those garden gates, the opening of all those front doors, the unanalysable home smell in all those little halls, the hanging up of all those hats, came over my imagination with all the caress of a half-remembered bit of music.

Lewis’ imagination had come under the spell of the mysteriousness and magic of…the human race – other people. He continues,

There is an extraordinary charm in other people’s domesticities. Every lighted house, seen from the road, is magical: every pram or lawn-mower in someone else’s garden: all smells or stirs of cookery from the windows of alien kitchens.

Lewis describes other experiences from this trip, but I can’t spoil the whole thing. Let me comment on the above quotes.

As I read this article, I found myself agreeing with Lewis. But I also found myself amazed that I had never seen it in quite this way. We all know what it is like to walk into a strange home. When you walk into a house in which you have never been, there is a certain magic about it – only we don’t recognize it as magic. There are so many memories stored in such houses, such life has been, and is, lived there. So many stories, so many smells, so many relics are present. It can be, and often is, like walking into a new world. We are like Alice or Dorothy. Or, more appropriately, we are like the Pevensies, only instead of walking through a wardrobe, we are simply walking through the front door. Perhaps we would care more for fellowship in unknown houses if we saw the front door as a door to another world.

To those on the other side of the door, the house is simply home. The smell is always the same. But to those on the outside, it is a different story.’ Every lighted house,’ he says, ‘seen from the road, is magical.’ Every lighted house marks the portal into an unknown world. It is like the technicolor of Oz in the midst of a black night, if we have eyes to see.

And to think that our own homes are unknown worlds to those on the outside. Yet we don’t invite them in. But I digress.

Lewis concludes the article the by asserting that pleasure in the ‘little things’ of life, such as a visit to a strange city, or a strange house, though perhaps small pleasures, are pleasures nonetheless. And these are pleasures that should be valued. Lewis believed that the hardness of the world, and the pompous desire to be ‘grown up’ could fight off such pleasures. Our job therefore is to accept the offer of such small pleasures. He wrote of the joy he had experienced that night:

They did not actually impose this happiness; they offered it. I was free to take it or not as I chose – like distant music which you need not listen to unless you wish, like a delicious faint wind on your face which you can easily ignore. One was invited to surrender to it. And the odd things is that something inside me suggested that it would be ‘sensible’ to refuse the invitation; almost that I would be better employed in remembering that I was going to do a job I do not greatly enjoy and that I should have a very tiresome journey back to Oxford. Then I silenced this inward wiseacre. I accepted the invitation – threw myself open to this feathery, impalpable, tingling invitation. The rest of the journey I passed in a state which can be described only as joy.

We would all find much more joy on our journey if we did the same more often.

On a side note, this is one of the most moving bits of Lewis I have ever read. I would suggest that you pick up Present Concerns for this article alone. It is little nuggets like this short essay that make me continue to read him. It seems that every time I read him his words cause me to wake up to the life that is all around me.

Chesterton, Orthodoxy, and the Cumulative Effect of Reading Fairy Tales

The above title has is the result of a great struggle of mind. For minutes, literally minutes, I pondered, ‘Is it Effect, or Affect?’ I’ll go with ‘Effect.’

I’m not quite ready to put my thoughts on Orthodoxy down in writing, but I do want to record one particular line of thought. Chesterton, in his wondrous way with words, said something that helped me make sense of something I had been thinking for a while. I’ll write more of this later, but his ‘The Ethics of Elfland’ chapter is quite riveting.

In that chapter he makes a statement something to this effect (I’m sure it’s ‘Effect’ this time): In Fairy Land trees are purple (or whatever color) to remind us that trees are actually green. Likewise, in Fairy Land apples are gold to remind us that apples are really green or red. And again, rivers run with wine in Fairy Land to remind us that they actually consist of water. In other words, rather than causing us to escape reality, such stories, when we are reading them correctly, actually remind us of, or point us to, reality.

My own experience in reading has led me to the same conclusion, but I didn’t know how to say it until I read Chesterton (Tolkien’s Essay on Fairie Stories makes much the same point as well). Just yesterday, in my post on the Tale of One who Traveled to Learn what Shivering Meant, I remarked that seeing a boy who couldn’t shiver in a magical land filled with death and hauntings was precisely what I needed to remind me that I have plenty to shiver about here. And this sort of thing has happened many times.

It is because of this that the cumulative effect of reading fairy tales, at least for me, is to remind us subtly, over time, that we live in a magical world. I believe it was somewhere in C.S. Lewis’ writings that I read something to this effect (there’s that word again) that drives this point home: he said that a child who reads of magical forests doesn’t start to despise real forests, but begins to see the real ones as a bit enchanted. In other words, the stimulation of the imagination caused by such reading brings life and vitality to what we otherwise, in our scientific age might see simply as natural processes.

I recently listened to a sermon by Douglas Wilson on the story of the Witch at Endor in 1 Samuel 28. In his observations on this passage he very briefly made the point that this story reminds us we live in a magical world – if we believe what God says about the world. This is a world with witches and giants (have you watched any NBA games lately?). This is a world with voodoo and mumbojumbo. But it is also a world with pure, good, clean miracles.

Miracles are all around us. I believe the biblical accounts of miracles – those of Moses, of Elijah and Elisha, certainly of Jesus. I believe in the resurrection of the dead. Why shouldn’t I?

Fairy stories only serve to remind me that we witness miracles regularly, and often without noticing: Take a magic pill and be healed – that’s not a fairy tale, that’s the modern pharmaceutical industry. Remove his impure heart and give him a new one – that’s not only the Bible (and I do not, of course, think the Bible is a fairy tale or even remotely comparable to a fairy tale), that’s the modern heart transplant. A man detaches his heart from himself and entrusts its care to a creature for safe keeping with the end result being his ultimate destruction- that’s not only a fairy tale, that’s modern idolatry at its finest! How many men to do have given their heart completely to a woman or a job only to have it crushed in the end?

Caterpillars really turn into butterflies. You can explain it scientifically, but it’s the stuff of fairy tales. Plants turn green because of air. You can explain photosynthesis scientifically, but at bottom, when you ask what makes them green, it’s something invisible. This is also the stuff of fairy tales.

Scienticism (I’m not criticizing science, but Scientism)would rob us of all awe and wonder. Fairy Land would remind us that there is plenty to be in awe of in every back yard and plenty to wonder at in the sky above us at all times. Scientism would explain the galaxies. But Fairy Land reminds us that there is awe and wonder in a bunch of balls made of dirt and gas that float in mid air.

To me, the cumulative effect of spending time reading stories of enchanted lands is that it makes the enchantment of our own world come to life. It’s been said before by lovers of such stories, but I’m just now figuring it out. And so I write…