Surprised by Joy

“With pencil and pen I was handy enough, and I can still tie as good a bow as ever lay on a man’s collar; but with a tool or a bat or a gun, a sleeve link or a corkscrew, I have always been unteachable. It was this that forced me to write. I longed to make things, ships, houses, engines. Many sheets of cardboard and pairs of scissors I spoiled, only to turn from my hopeless failures in tears. As a last resource, a pis aller, I was driven to write stories instead; little dreaming to what a world of happiness I was being admitted. You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.”

Lewis’s early memories of his writing life give us a vivid sense of his personality. He describes his clumsiness with self-effacing humor, but he can also see how this seeming evil led to a greater good: The joy he found in writing far outpaces what he might have gotten out of building a cardboard castle. This theme of a good emerging from an evil will reappear throughout his story.

“As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when by brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. […] It was a sensation, of course, of desire, but of desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss […].”

Lewis’s memory of his first experience of Joy further deepens the import of the miniature garden. Joy seems to strike a chord through memory and experience. Even as a child, Lewis can feel this intense sense of nostos: the longing for a home that seems to be at once in the past and in the future.

“To this day the vision of the world which comes most naturally to me is one in which ‘we two’ or ‘we few’ (and in a sense ‘we happy few’) stand together against something stronger and larger. […] Hence while friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of. Hence, too, a very defective, perhaps culpably defective, interest in large impersonal movements, causes and the like. The concern aroused in me by a battle (whether in story or in reality) is almost in an inverse ration to the number of the combatants.”

Lewis’s fondness for small groups and close allegiances is a quiet thread through Surprised by Joy. He both embraces this side of his nature, reveling in close friendships, and mistrusts it, knowing it can lead to what he calls “priggishness.” The balance between loving what one loves and being open to what one isn’t so sure about underpins much of Lewis’s learning in the book.

“As for the youngest, G., I can only say that she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, perfect in shape and color and voice and every movement—but who can describe beauty? The reader may smile at this as the far-off echo of a precocious calf love, but he will be wrong. There are beauties so unambiguous that they need no lens of that kind to reveal them; they are visible even to the careless and objective eyes of a child.”

Lewis’s acute memory of childhood does away with the idea that children live in a world of fantastical and undiscriminating belief. As one might expect from a man who would go on to write children’s books, Lewis remembers that to be a child is in fact to be a sharp and sometimes dangerously sharp observer, with no pretense standing in the way of your impressions.

“Like everyone else I had been told as a child that one must not only say one’s prayers but think about what one was saying. Accordingly, when (at Oldie’s) I came to a serious belief, I tried to put this into practice. At first it seemed plain sailing. But soon the false conscience (St. Paul’s ‘Law,’ Herbert’s ‘prattler’) came into play. One had no sooner reached ‘Amen’ than it whispered, ‘Yes. But are you sure you were really thinking about what you said?’; then, more subtly, ‘Were you, for example, thinking about it as well as you did last night?’ The answer, for reasons I did not then understand, was nearly always No. ‘Very well,’ said the voice, ‘hadn’t you, then, better try it over again?’ And one obeyed; but of course with no assurance that the second attempt would be any better.”

This distinction between the real and false conscience is a notable part of Lewis’s belief. His intense interest in precision and truth opposes itself to performative, legalistic piety. In examining this past error, he also touches on his continued theme of humility: Trying to will himself to a particular experience only demonstrates the limits of the human will.

“And with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss, which suddenly became one with the loss of the whole experience, which, as I now stared round that dusty schoolroom like a man recovering from unconsciousness, had already vanished, had eluded me at the very moment when I could first say It is. And at once I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to ‘have it again’ was the supreme and only important object of desire.”

Some of the events that Lewis remembers as the most significant of his life might on the surface appear to be the smallest. Here, the resurgence of Joy comes through a newspaper ad for the Arthur Rackham edition of the Norse myths—not even through the book itself, but through a single picture from it. In this rapturous passage, Lewis demonstrates that a huge part of his religious experience is to do with being taken by surprise.

“If the Northernness seemed then a bigger thing than my religion, that may partly have been because my attitude toward it contained elements which my religion ought to have contained and did not. It was not itself a new religion, for it contained no trace of belief and imposed no duties. Yet unless I am greatly mistaken there was in it something very like adoration, some kind of quite disinterested self-abandonment to an object which securely claimed this by simply being the object it was. We are taught in the Prayer Book to ‘give thanks to God for His great glory,’ as if we owed Him more thanks for being what He necessarily is than for any particular benefit He confers upon us; and so indeed we do and to know God is to know this. But I had been far from any such experience; I came far nearer to feeling this about the Norse gods whom I disbelieved in than I had ever done about the true God while I believe. Sometimes I can almost think that I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself.”5

Lewis uses the metaphor of chess in some of his chapter headings to describe the process of his conversion. Here, that metaphor is present in a subterranean way: in life as in chess, a movement backward can be a movement forward. The theme of humility is present here as well. Lewis’s initial experience of religious awe isn’t about the rewards it presents, but about the nature of the thing that is beloved.

“The punishment was a flogging administered by the Head of the Coll in the presence of the assembled Coll Pres. To the Head of the Coll himself—a red-headed, pimply boy with a name like Borage or Porridge—I can bear no grudge; it was to him a routine matter. But I must give him a name because the real point of the story requires it. The emissary (some Blood a little lower than the Head himself) who summoned me to execution attempted to reveal to me the heinousness of my crime by the words, ‘Who are you? Nobody. Who is Porridge? THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON THERE IS.’”

Lewis’s humor—and a little spice of bitterness—often appear in his memories of the appalling Wyvern College, where what he learned was mostly the ways in which people deceive themselves into a belief in their own importance. Where in other places he anonymizes people by using their initials or simply not mentioning their names, in the Wyvern passages he assigns the Bloods mundane and mildly insulting names, driving home the point that, in his view, no human is “THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON THERE IS,” try though society might to persuade one of this.

“I was big for my age, a great lout of a boy, and that sets one’s seniors against one. I was also useless at games. Worst of all, there was my face. I am the kind of person who gets told, ‘And take that look off your face too.’ Notice, once more, the mingled justice and injustice of our lives. No doubt in conceit or ill temper I have often intended to look insolent or truculent; but on those occasions people don’t appear to notice it. On the other hand, the moments at which I was told to ‘take that look off’ were usually those when I intended to be most abject. Can there have been a freeman somewhere among my ancestors whose expression, against my will, looked out?”

Lewis is also quick to be funny at his own expense. Here, he addresses his continued struggle between obedience and rebellion, individualism and community. To imagine “a freeman” looking out of his face also emphasizes the seriousness of his struggles with school: A freeman implies a system of slavery.

“What had been ‘my’ taste was apparently ‘our’ taste (if only I could ever meet the ‘we’ to whom that ‘our’ belonged). And if ‘our’ taste, then—by a perilous transition—perhaps ‘good’ taste or ‘the right taste.’ For that transition involves a kind of Fall. The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost. Even then, however, it is not necessary to take the further downward step of despising the ‘philistines’ who do not share it. Unfortunately I took it.”

In finding real friends who shared his feelings about art, Lewis also lost his innocence about his own abilities and likings. On this point he is clear: It’s wrong to elevate yourself above others on the grounds of taste. Throughout the book, Lewis grapples with this problem of like and dislike; he must allow that his taste is not the only good taste to allow that his perspective is not the only perspective.

“And the world itself—can I have been unhappy, living in Paradise? What keen, tingling sunlight there was! The mere smells were enough to make a man tipsy—cut grass, dew-dabbled mosses, sweet pea, autumn woods, wood burning, peat, salt water. The sense ached. I was sick with desire; that sickness better than health.”

Lewis’s taste for the sensual and the natural is on display in this passage. His analytical turn of mind and down-to-earth writing style often break into these moments of poetry. These moments of full sensory immersion point to the importance of Joy not only to his story, but to his career as a writer of fiction.

“Having analyzed my terms, Kirk was proceeding to deal with my proposition as a whole. On what had I based (but he pronounced it baized) my expectations about the Flora and Geology of Surrey? Was it maps, or photographs, or books? I could produce none. It had, heaven help me, never occurred to me that what I called my thoughts needed to be ‘baized’ on anything. Kirk once more drew a conclusion—without the slightest sign of emotion, but equally without the slightest concession to what I thought good manners: ‘Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject?’”

Lewis’s portrait of the Great Knock is one of the fullest he gives in the book. With a whole chapter dedicated to his ways and his teachings, Mr. Kirkpatrick stands as a singular influence on Lewis (in many senses of the word “singular”). Lewis’s vivid reminiscence of the sound of the Great Knock’s voice, as well as his teaching, preserves his feeling of delight in this love of truth-above-all.

“Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears. Take in what is there and give no thought to what might have been there or what is somewhere else. That can come later, if it must come at all.”

This brief passage spells out one of the most fundamental lessons Lewis learns over the course of his life. The ability to look past one’s own judgments to see what is really there is a prerequisite not only for Lewis’s intellectual and aesthetic life, but for his religious life. This lesson is another spin on the theme of humility.

“Often he recalled my eyes from the horizon just to look through a hole in a hedge, to see nothing more than a farmyard in its mid-morning solitude, and perhaps a gray cat squeezing its way under a barn door, or a bent old woman with a wrinkled, motherly face coming back with an empty bucket from the pigsty. But best of all we liked it when the Homely and the unhomely met in sharp juxtaposition; if a little kitchen garden ran steeply up a narrowing enclave of fertile ground surrounded by outcroppings and furze, or some shivering quarry pool under a moonrise could be seen on our left, and on our right the smoking chimney and lamplit window of a cottage that was just settling down for the night.”

Lewis’s wanderings with Arthur put into practice his developing understanding of how he wishes to take the world in. Here, the meeting of the boys’ two natural preferences (the homely for Arthur, the strange for Lewis) suggests not only the meeting of their two minds, but the deeper kind of meeting that Lewis is interested in. The intense, the numinous, the strange, and the divine often seem to touch the homely, for Lewis: Recall that Joy returns to him through a newspaper ad.

“The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it ‘annihilates space.’ It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from travelling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there.”

This passage recalls to the contemporary reader the distance of Lewis’s world from our own. Those who have never known a world without cars and airplanes perhaps can’t fully imagine what the experience of that world was like. Lewis, at the turning point in the disappearance of distance, almost touches on one of the qualities of Joy here: Longing requires separation.

“It was as though the voice which had called to me from the world’s end were now speaking at my side. It was with me in the room, or in my own body, or behind me. If it had once eluded me by its distance, it now eluded me by proximity—something too near to see, too plain to be understood, on this side of knowledge. It seemed to have been always with me; if I could ever have turned my head quick enough I should have seized it. Now for the first time I felt that it was out of reach not because of something I could not do but because of something I could not stop doing. If I could only leave off, let go, unmake myself, it would be there.”

As is often the case for Lewis, art inspires Joy here—this time, the writings of George MacDonald. Here, however, he finds a new kind of Joy. The transition from finding Joy in what isn’t there to feeling it just behind or just inside what is there is a moment of realization. Here, chance, in the form of picking up a book at random in a train station, meets effort, in the labor of giving up a longing for one’s own idea of the ideal in favor of what’s really there.

“But for the rest, the war—the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E., the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet—all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else. It is even in a way unimportant. One imaginative moment seems now to matter more than the realities that followed. It was the first bullet I heard—so far from me that it ‘whined’ like a journalist’s or a peacetime poet’s bullet. At that moment there was something not exactly like fear, much less like indifference: a little quavering signal that said, ‘This is War. This is what Homer wrote about.’”

This brief, terrifying paragraph on Lewis’s front-line experiences in World War I gestures at one of his major ideas: that the seemingly biggest experiences of one’s life are not always the ones that are most important. However, the reader may wonder if these horrors were quite as insignificant to Lewis as he writes. His description of the suffering of the wounded soldiers touches on two of his deepest fears: the emptiness of corpses and the thoughtless, mechanical movement of insects.

“‘Why—damn it—it’s medieval,’ I exclaimed; for I still had all the chronological snobbery of my period and used the names of earlier periods as terms of abuse.”

“Chronological snobbery” is an enduring idea for Lewis. In his continual striving to get over his own ego, he must recognize the ways in which that ego can reach out to fill a whole era. This idea also fits in with Lewis’s strong sense of nostalgia: The past contains not only what is outgrown but what is lost.

“All the books were beginning to turn against me. 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. 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. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. […] On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete [...] all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called ‘tinny.’”

Lewis records his progress toward his conversion with a combination of awe and humor at his own expense. Here, his marvel at his past blindness is underscored by his use of childhood slang. The "tinny" quality of the atheist writers suggests his feeling that he and they shared a certain unreflecting immaturity.

“I perceived (and this was a wonder of wonders) that just as I had been wrong in supposing that I really desired the garden of the Hesperides, so also I had been equally wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. And that object, quite clearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all. In a way, I had proved this by elimination. I had tried everything in my own mind and body; as it were, asking myself, ‘Is it this you want? Is it this?’ Last of all I had asked if Joy itself was what I wanted; and, labelling it ‘aesthetic experience,’ had pretended I could answer Yes. But that answer too had broken down. Inexorably Joy proclaimed, ‘You want—I myself am your want of—something other, outside, not you nor any state of you.’”

This crux in Lewis’s understanding reveals the importance of intellect to his process of conversion. His realization that Joy is not a quality of the places where he experiences it, and that the mere sensation of Joy is not what he desires, comes through an intellectual distinction between “enjoying” and “contemplating.” The emotive, the sensory, and the intellectual all work together to bring him to his new understanding.

“In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

This famous line again works against expectations. Lewis’s conversion is not a moment of trumpets and delights, or even of Joy. For this romantic logician, conversion is a matter of necessity. Joy, in the end, is merely the thing that helps to get him to where he’s going, even if he isn’t all that happy about going there at first.

“The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

This reading of the words “compel them to come in” points back to Lewis’s earlier mention of St. Paul’s idea of the Law. Taken literally or unsubtly, the tenets of Lewis’s religion have the power to do tremendous harm. The humility he’s learned is essential to the practice of his religion: The compulsion here comes from God, not from humans.

“I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. 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. And it was, like that moment on top of the bus, ambiguous. Freedom, or necessity? Or do they differ at their maximum? 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, and we have a secret suspicion that the great passion or the iron resolution is partly a put-up job.”

The matter-of-factness of this account belies the depth of the experience. Again, Lewis emphasizes the unexpected and often small-scale feelings that come from his tremendous motivating desire to seek and to understand Joy. The understanding that Lewis comes to is of a kind of choice that transcends day-to-day life, and yet appears quietly in the middle of it.