Once again C.S. Lewis shows that honesty and truth, even in the depths of sorrow, anger, despair, results in transcendent knowledge about life. How brave to let the world see into the soul of someone struggling to find meaning in the depth of grief over his wife's death. Yet because he does he honors her and helps us understand the meaning of suffering and the love of God. There is a reason why C.S. Lewis is constantly quoted; I could read this book through a hundred times and find new truths to think about.
We have seen the faces of those we know best so variously, from so many angles, in so many lights, with so many expressions—waking, sleeping, laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking—that all the impressions crowd into our memory together and cancel out into a mere blur.
Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night—little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her.
The real shape will be quite hidden in the end.
What’s left? A corpse, a memory, and (in some versions) a ghost. All mockeries or horrors.
As if I wanted to fall in love with my memory of her, an image in my own mind! It would be a sort of incest.
The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable. But the image has the added disadvantage that it will do whatever you want. It will smile or frown, be tender, gay, ribald, or argumentative just as your mood demands. It is a puppet of which you hold the strings.
One flesh. Or, if you prefer, one ship. The starboard engine has gone. I, the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour.
Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector.
I want her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past.
They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn’t Lazarus the rawer deal?
The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless.
And then one babbles—‘ If only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.’ But one can’t tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But is it ever allowed? It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be so done. He replies to our babble, ‘You cannot and you dare not. I could and dared.’
You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can’t get the best out of it.
Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst.
Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.
After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.
If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.
It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure.
God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t.
make a map of sorrow.
My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.
All reality is iconoclastic.
That’s what was really wrong with all those popular pictures of happy reunions ‘on the further shore’; not the simple-minded and very earthly images, but the fact that they make an End of what we can get only as a by-product of the true End.
Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not?
The First Mrs. Rothschild by Sara Aharoni
