Till We Have Faces





These quotes express a certain feeling of longing that is a hallmark of Lewis’s writing. It is a feeling of an unsatisfied desire—often tied to memories or nostalgia—that is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. Lewis calls it Joy.

In his autobiography, Surprised By Joy, Lewis describes how this feeling—this deep longing—was first awakened in him when his brother brought into the nursery a little biscuit tin filled with moss and twigs so that it looked like a toy forest. Lewis says this was the first beauty he ever knew, that "it made me aware of nature—not, indeed as a storehouse offorms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant. I do not think the impression was very important at the moment, but it soon became important in memory. As long as I live my imagination of paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden."

For Lewis, the unsatiated desire that the toy garden evoked in him—most especially in his memory—was not for the object itself, but for some higher, ineffable beauties and inexhaustible joys that it somehow was a glimpse of. Later in Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes it further:


For me, Lewis's sentiments about longing and Joy ring ever so true. The words of Psyche in Till We Have Faces describe exactly how I feel sometimes when that peculiar blend of happiness, memory, and "there must be more of it" longing combine to make me feel, deeply, that there exists a greater, truer, more perfect reality for which we were all originally created.

Is it nostalgia for Eden? An aching for the part of our nature that sin rendered lost? A desire for a coming cosmic renewal and reconcilation? I don't know. But whatever it is, it's there.

It's there when I think back to the nights in my childhood when, at dusk, a fierce Midwestern thunderstorm would roll in from the western plains. It's there when I remember the first time I went to Disneyworld with all my cousins, or the smell of a campfire in the mountains, or the first time I saw The Thin Red Line.

It was there yesterday when I thought back to five years ago: I was in the car with my best friend Ryan, driving somewhere in the Utah desert as the sun was going down. It was just days after we'd graduated from college, and we were driving out to California for an internship at the C.S. Lewis Foundation. The world was our oyster. Nothing was expected, nothing could be predicted, and yet—in retrospect—everything was in its right place. Or maybe that's just how I remember it. Either way, it's Joy.