You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound
together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common
quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words:
but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why,
liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before
some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all
your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be
seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you,
and you realise that this landscape means something totally different
to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the
ineffable suggestion by which you are transported.
Even in your hobbies,
has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are
curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but
always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the
workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all
lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another
human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the
best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath
the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the
louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old
age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never
had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have
been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite
fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it
should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did
not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it.
Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing
I was made for."
―
C.S. Lewis
Your blog appeals to me....
ReplyDeleteHmm! First; beautiful Larix Occidentalis, my favorite! No doubt along the Yaak, a wilderness I'm familiar with. Mr Clive Staples is an intelligent Christian man from a land I would love to stamp my passport. My mother, a self proclaimed interpreter of dreams has long prodded me to read Jack's The "Screwtape Letters". I know as fact, Screwtape and Wormwood are real, I have seen them, they come in many forms.
I admire Jacks attempt to speak for all souls.There are those who delve into the soul looking not only for who they are, but to enjoy a barrier they have build from the common man knowing what they have is tantalizing, unique, very Christian, very different, and attractive. They enjoy being their own man, alone from the masses, but yet seek those whom are like them, careful not to disrupt what has been built. When they have scoured the earth and chased the four winds, only the fortunate are able to be fulfilled. Have you found "What you are made for"?