Can you remember the first time that you tasted joy? I can.
We have traveled to Missouri to see my aunt Dora and my uncle Fred. Fred was a drill sergeant at Fort Leonard Wood. I came home from our vacation with two unusual gifts: a hand grenade and a turtle we picked up on the road on our way home.
There is something else I remember from all those years ago. I remember that my brother and I played freeze tag with some other kids in a back yard. (I don’t recall if this took place in my aunt and uncle’s yard or one of the neighbors.) I was having such a good time that I wished the sun would stand still. I didn’t want the day to end.
This incident took place over a half century ago. It was the first time that I tasted joy.
Can you recall the first time you tasted it?
Some thirty years ago, I read C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. At the time, it didn’t make much of an impression on me. To put it another way, it wasn’t my cup of tea.
I’m now doing something that I very rarely do. I’m re-reading a book. This summer, I purchased a new copy of Surprised by Joy. Off and on, for the past few months, I’ve been reading a few pages before I go to work. Earlier this morning, I came to chapter XI. I’ve been chewing on this section ever since:
I again tasted Joy. But far more I frightened it away by my greedy impatience to snare it, and, even when it came, instantly destroyed it by introspection, and at all times, vulgarized it by my false assumptions about its nature.
One thing, however, I learned, which has since saved me from many popular confusions of mind. I came to know by experience that it is not a disguise of sexual desire. Those who think that if adolscents were all provided with suitable mistresses we should soon hear no more of ‘immortal longings’ are certainly wrong. I learned this mistake to be a mistake by the simple, if discreditable process of repeatedly making it. From the Northerness one could not have easily slid into erotic fantasies without noticing the difference, but when the world of Morris became the frequent medium of Joy, this transition became possible.
I must take a pause here to interject. At this stage of his young life, Lewis had became enamored with Norse mythology. For better and worse, this love would shaped the rest of his life. Now back to his story.
It was quite easy to think that one desired those forests for the sake of their female inhabitants, the garden of Hesperus for the sake of his daughters, Hylas’ river for the river nymphs. I repeatedly followed that path—to the end. At the end one found pleasure; which immediately resulted in the discovery that pleasure (whether that pleasure or any other) was not what you had been looking for. No moral question was involved; I was at this time as nearly non-moral on that subject as a human creature can be. The frustration did not consist in finding a ‘lower’ pleasure instead of a ‘higher.’ It was the irrelevance of the conclusion that marred it. The hounds had chased the scent. One had caught the wrong quarry. You might as well offer a mutton chop to a man who is dying of thirst as offer sexual pleasure to the desire I am speaking of. I did not recoil from the erotic conclusion with chaste horror, exclaiming, ‘Not that!’ My feelings could rather have been expressed in the words, ‘Quite. I see. But haven’t we wandered from the real point? Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.
At the end of chapter XI, Lewis describes the moment when everthing changed.
I was in the habit of walking over to Leatherhead about once a week and sometimes taking the train back. In summer I did so chiefly because Leatherhead boasted a tiny swimming bath; better than nothing to me who had learned to swim almost before I can remember and who, till middle age and rheumatism crept upon me, was passionately fond of being in water. But I went in winter, too, to look for books and get my hair cut. The evening that I now speak of was in October. I and one porter had the long, timbered platform of Leatherhead station to ourselves. It was getting just dark enough for the smoke of the engine to glow red on the underside with the reflection of the furnace. The hills beyond the Dorking Valley were a blue so intense as to be nearly violet and the sky was green with frost. My ears tingled with the cold. The glorious week-end of reading was before me. Turning to the bookstall, I picked up an Everyman in a dirty jacket, Phantastes, a Faerie Romance, George MacDonald. Then the train came in. I can still remember the voice of the porter calling out the village names, Saxon, and sweet as a nut—’Bookham, Effingham, Horsley train.’ That evening I began to read my new book.
The woodland journeyings in that story, the ghostly enemies, the ladies both good and evil, were close enough to my habitual imagery to lure me on without the perceptions of a change. It is as if I were carried sleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and could never remember how I came alive in the new. For in one sense the new country was exactly like the old. I met there all that had already charmed me in Malory, Spenser, Morris, and Yeats. But in another sense all was changed. I did not yet not know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travels of Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness.
What about you? When is the last time you were surprised by Joy?
Have you ever been surprised by Holiness?
As I write these questions, I can’t help but think of my mom as she nears the end of this life. I also can’t help recalling these telltale words:
Though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and even though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and are filled with an inexpessible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
Lewis would later lose his appetite for Joy; he had developed a taste for something better.