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” (170-171). “The woodland journeyings in that story, the ghostly enemies, the ladies both good and evil, were close enough to my habitual imagery to lure me on without the perception of a change. I can still remember the voice of the porter calling out the village names Saxon and sweet as a nut-‘Bookham, Effingham, Horsley train.’ That evening I began to read my new book. “Turning to the bookstall, I picked out an Everyman in a dirty jacket, Phantastes, a Faerie Romance, George MacDonald. In Surprised by Joy (1955), Lewis shares the moment of his first encounter with MacDonald, when he was 18, just before WWI: The chief offender was George MacDonald, the 19 th century preacher and writer of faerie tales. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed.” ( Surprised by Joy, 201-202). Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly curiously enough, he had the same kink. Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together bating, of course, his Christianity. George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer of course it was a pity he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. Indeed, I must have been as blind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. “All the books were beginning to turn against me. The pre-Christian Lewis, however, was besieged not just by the philosophical proofs for the existence of God, but by the spiritually infused worldviews of the writers he most admired.
Hidden in this 20 th century tweet is the idea that serious study will bring an intelligent and engaged thinker to a belief in God. “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading” ( Surprised by Joy, 182).
Lewis’ more famous-or infamous-quotations is this:
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