Quote:
Originally Posted by Sno-White
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheByzantine
" Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable."
~C.S. Lewis
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When I was a teenager, the Simon and Garfunkel song, "I am a rock" was kind of my theme song-- or at least one of them. This quote epitomizes why it was so attractive.... I have mostly gotten over this particular malady, but I can't say I'm much in the mood to go out and fall in love again.
(Epitomizes why, with the exception of the irredeemable part... I would never have admitted that.) |
Sno-White, I don't blame you for having some reservations about the "irredeemable" part of the Lewis quote. It jumped out for me, too, and the first thing I wondered was, "How did Lewis know that? -- if he even knew it." I think of that quote as not the truth but at best a steppingstone to the truth, along the lines of a story you tell yourself to make yourself feel better and/or to scare you away from making some choice that you believe will be bad for you. Did Lewis "irredeemably" harden his own heart and then come back to write about it? I doubt it. It sounds to me as if he was telling himself (and his readership) the story, not necessarily true, that he found it most useful to believe at the time: "I feel like hardening my heart but I know I mustn't, so I'll just remind myself how awful it'll be if I do." Paul Simon may or may not have been speaking for himself (and may or may not have had the Lewis quote in mind) when wrote his song about being a rock/island; it's certainly on the same theme.
I personally prefer a very different statement of that same theme:
Quote:
When I was about six years old I received the essential bodhichitta teaching from an old woman sitting in the sun. I was walking by her house one day feeling lonely, unloved, and mad, kicking anything I could find. Laughing, she said to me, "Little girl, don't you go letting life harden your heart."
-- from Chapter 1 of The Places that Scare You by Pema Chodron
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I haven't seen the book with the original Lewis quote but in
a longer excerpt [Google-cached version -- the original seems to have been moved] Lewis (who was theologically inclined anyway) goes on to compare the hard-heartedness he's warning against to theological hell. Fair enough, and no doubt useful to someone who shares his point of view. I note with amusement in the
C.S. Lewis Wikipedia article that...
Quote:
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Lewis wrote a number of works on Heaven and Hell. One of these, The Great Divorce, is a short novella in which a few residents of Hell take a bus ride to Heaven, where they are met by people who dwell there.... The title is a reference to William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a concept that Lewis found a "disastrous error"
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I've long been very fond of William Blake's writings and consistently found them more useful
(to me personally -- YMMV) than Lewis's. What that suggests to me is that Lewis and I have differing views of what's good, true, and useful. I'd recommend that rather than side with either of us in believing or disbelieving anything about yourself, you consider your options and choose for yourself.