Week 28: Joy

Searching for wonder in an age of distraction

Dear Friends,

I think I’ve been doing Jack a disservice. Not just me, either. I’m beginning to think that the whole way we talk about C. S. Lewis subtly reinforces a false dichotomy that distorts our perception of his work.

Maybe that’s overstating the case. But it’s something I’ve been thinking about this week, as I re-read Surprised by Joy, Jack’s memoir of his conversion. For years, people had asked him to ‘share his testimony,’ in speeches and essay collections, and for years, Jack refused. He thought his journey was too specific to be applicable to others. But at last, in the 1950s, he acquiesced, and Surprised by Joy is the happy result.

The back of my Harvest Book edition features the following blurb: “The intensely intimate and sincere autobiography of a man who thought his way to God.”

A man who thought his way to God. That’s an interesting label, and it’s one commonly applied to Jack. He is known, before almost all else, as a rational defender of Christian faith. I’m just as guilty of this characterisation as anyone else.

I’ve been writing quite a bit of late about the relationship of thinking and feeling, and the more I contemplate the subject, the more I realise that it’s unfair to paint Jack as hyper-rational. He was, without a doubt, a great thinker—and I don’t mean that in the idiomatic sense. He had a gift for argument, for following ideas to their presuppositions and fundamental distinctions. But in his conversion story, feeling and imagination play a prominent role.

That’s clear from the very first lines of Surprised by Joy, when he declares, “How far the story matters to anyone but myself depends on the degree to which others have experienced what I call ‘joy’” (vii). His chronicle of his formation repeatedly returns to this theme.

Readers familiar with Jack’s work won’t be surprised by the mention of joy: it’s a theme that recurs throughout his work. By ‘joy,’ he doesn’t mean extreme happiness. He means a feeling of piercing, overwhelming desire. He recalls the first instance of such a feeling in Chapter 1 of Surprised by Joy:

As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me…. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though it came into it) for my own past…. and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison…. [I]n a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else. (16–17)

It is this delightful pain which Jack terms “Joy.” The story of his conversion is, in a sense, the story of finding the source of that Joy.

Now, I don’t want to oversimplify. Jack termed himself a reluctant convert, and declares at the close of the book that before his conversion, “No slightest hint was vouchsafed me that there ever had been or ever would be any connection between God and Joy” (230). In the end (literally—the final pages of the book) he describes his ultimate conversion to Christianity as a matter of neither emotion nor reason:

I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. “Emotional” is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake…. At that maximum a man is what he does; there is nothing of him left over or outside the act. As for what we commonly call Will, and what we commonly call Emotion, I fancy these usually talk too loud, protest too much, to be quite believed (237)

Faith here is neither a feeling nor even a conscious choice, but something that happens to Jack.

Joy, he confesses, became of less importance to him after his conversion: “It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer…. When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter” (238).

But that doesn’t mean he erases its significance to his journey: longing and delight persist as significant themes of Jack’s writing throughout his career. They’re at the heart of his arguments in “The Weight of Glory” and Mere Christianity, for instance: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world” he writes in the latter volume (120). An eminently rational argument, but one grounded entirely in emotion.

I suppose all I’m trying to say is that, as much as we think of Jack as a hyper-rational figure, emotion is just as important to his way of understanding the world. And sometimes I forget that when I talk about his work. His writing about joy, about longing, is really important to me, but it’s easy to overlook when I think about his emphasis on rational argument.

I want to say two other things about joy. One has to do with my own research: my first scholarly book (which I’m still working to publish) deals with nostalgia in modernist literature. I’m reminded, re-reading Surprised by Joy, how important Jack’s account of joy is for my understanding of nostalgia.

Joy, for Jack, is a longing that exceeds its apparent object. In the example above, he desires, not his childhood home or his brother’s long-discarded ‘toy garden,’ but some unattainable past happiness which those images embody. My own work focuses on how nostalgia can involve longing for things we have never experienced: for the deep past of a place, for belonging in a new culture, for homes that may never have existed. It’s a pretty small step from that sort of nostalgia to Lewisian joy.

Second, even though Jack recalls growing less interested in experiences of joy after his conversion, I see an ongoing value in those moments. (Incidentally, I suspect T. S. Eliot fans might recognise in these fleeting experiences of joy one variety of “timeless moment,” a central theme of Four Quartets. Perhaps more on that some other time.)

Jack’s early letters and diaries reflect a constant hunt for joy. In a 1924 diary entry, he records another such experience:

When I came out of the dark library (at about 4) the air was wonderfully bright and soft in colour. It was like a summer evening at six o’clock. The stone seemed softer everywhere, the birds were singing, the air was deliciously cold and rare. I got a sort of eerie unrest and dropped into the real joy…. Although it is only a few hours old I see that this is already becoming transfigured by memory into something that never was anywhere and never could have been. (All My Road 297–98)

In a 1930 letter, he describes a similar moment to his friend Arthur Greeves:

Indeed to day… I got such a sudden intense feeling of delight that it sort of stopped me in my walk and spun me round. Indeed the sweetness was so great, & seemed so to affect the whole body as well as the mind, that it gave me pause. (Letters I.877)

I found myself trying to recall, as I read those recollections, when I last had such an experience. How often am I even available for such moments of insight? I go on a walk every day, but it’s pretty unusual for me to even attend closely to the changing features of the world around me. I’m always listening to music or a podcast or an audiobook, lost in the winding corridors of my own mind.

There’s something to be said for the young Jack’s relentless search for joy. I suspect such experiences might be more elusive, and more important, now than ever.

May you each encounter ‘the real joy’ this week,

Sarah

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