95 Quotes by Philip Zaleski

As is the case with many adolescents, Lewis’s increased command over over the things of the world brought with it a corresponding atrophy of the moral sense.

All images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in a last resort, “It is not high. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?” CS Lewis.

The author observes of the Inklings, “they make a perfect compass rose of faith: talking the Catholic, Lewis the “mere Christian,” Williams the Anglican, Barfield the esotericist.

The authors disclose that in less than a century the word “tension” grew from signifying a literal electric charge to a metaphor for emotional stress between two people. Writes Owen Barfield, “The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another.

And language for Tolkien was also the soil from which his literary garden grew, as he explains in a 1966 interview, referring again to “cellar door”: “Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me – ‘cellar door,’ say. From that, I might think of a name, ‘Selador,’ and from that a character, a situation begins to grow.

Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one.

Recovery is the ability to see things with clarity, “freed from the drab blur of greatness or familiarity – from possessiveness.

A Christian’s duty, Lewis believed, is not simply to tolerate “X” but to make life with “X” an occasion to work on one’s own character flaws.

Like all great readers, he could create for himself a “wall of stillness”.