BitterSweetLife

By a strange and wonderful coincidence, I was reading Swann's Way by Marcel Proust while in the process of adding some C.S. Lewis quotes to my collection. In a way, I’m just being redundant by pointing out, on this blog, that authors who can use language to effectively talk about the soul—an elusive, intangible thing to describe—immediately earn my admiration. But it’s true.

Here are a couple enjoyable (and unlikely) instances of correspondence between Lewis and Proust.

For even if we have the sensation of being always surrounded by our own soul, it is not as though by a motionless prison: rather, we are in some sense borne along with it in a perpetual leap to go beyond it, to reach the outside, with a sort of discouragement as we hear around us always that same resonance, which is not an echo from outside but the resounding of an internal vibration. We try to rediscover in things, now precious because of it, the glimmer that our soul projected on them; we are disappointed to find that they seem to lack in nature the charm they derived in our thoughts from the proximity of certain ideas…

- Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

[There is a] secret we cannot hide and tell, though we desire to do both... Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter... But all that is a cheat... The books or music in which we thought beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory