Perelandra - C.S. Lewis
By far the most influential book I've read this year. The main character, Ransom, is sent to another world where he finds floating islands, beautiful creatures, and a women untainted by sin. Satan, via the body of a science professor, hitches a ride to the same world and finds Ransom and the woman. Predictably the reader finds himself in a Garden of Eden reenactment with a thousand times more detail. The imagery and storytelling is amazing.
Through the course of the events the reader is taken into the mind of Ransom and returns with a better understanding of knowledge, rhetoric, exhaustion, and even predestination. One might also get at Lewis' understanding of the good life, that is, a life untouched by sin and in total dependence to one's Maker.
Lewis writes the following about gluttony and overindulgence.
Concerning normal food consumption Lewis writes this:
As he let the empty gourd fall from his hand and was about to pluck a second one, it came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty. And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do. His reason, or what we commonly take to be reason in our own world, was all in favor of tasting this miracle again. Yet something seemed opposed to this "reason". It is difficult to suppose that this opposition came from desire, for what desire would turn from so much deliciousness? But for whatever cause it appeared to him better not to taste again. Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.
Later Ransom experiences an unearthly refreshing pleasure...
Looking at a fine cluster of the bubbles which hung above his head he thought how easy it would be to get up and plunge oneself through the whole lot of them and to feel, all at once, that magical refreshment multiplied tenfold. But he was restrained by the same sort of feeling which had restrained him overnight from tasting a second gourd. He had always disliked the people who encored a favorite air in the opera that just spoils it, had been his comment. But this now appeared to him as a principle of far wider application and deeper moment. This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards... was it possibly the root of all evil? No; of course the love of money was called that. But money itself - perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defense against chance, a security for being able to have things over again...
Afterwards Ransom finds some "plain food"
It turned out to be good to eat. It did not give the orgiastic and almost alarming pleasure of the gourds, but rather the specific pleasure of plain food. But the meal had its unexpected high lights. Every now and then one struck a berry which had a bright red centre, and these were so savory, so memorable among a thousand tastes, that he would have begun to look for them and to feed on them only, but that he was once more forbidden by that same inner advisor which had already spoken to him twice since he came to Perelandra. "Now on earth", thought Ransom, "they'd soon discover how to breed these redhearts, and they'd cost a great deal more than the others." Money, in fact, would provide the means of saying encore in a voice that could not be disobeyed.
Lewis' insight on common life is breathtaking. I highly recommend this book.
Through the course of the events the reader is taken into the mind of Ransom and returns with a better understanding of knowledge, rhetoric, exhaustion, and even predestination. One might also get at Lewis' understanding of the good life, that is, a life untouched by sin and in total dependence to one's Maker.
Lewis writes the following about gluttony and overindulgence.
Concerning normal food consumption Lewis writes this:
As he let the empty gourd fall from his hand and was about to pluck a second one, it came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty. And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do. His reason, or what we commonly take to be reason in our own world, was all in favor of tasting this miracle again. Yet something seemed opposed to this "reason". It is difficult to suppose that this opposition came from desire, for what desire would turn from so much deliciousness? But for whatever cause it appeared to him better not to taste again. Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.
Later Ransom experiences an unearthly refreshing pleasure...
Looking at a fine cluster of the bubbles which hung above his head he thought how easy it would be to get up and plunge oneself through the whole lot of them and to feel, all at once, that magical refreshment multiplied tenfold. But he was restrained by the same sort of feeling which had restrained him overnight from tasting a second gourd. He had always disliked the people who encored a favorite air in the opera that just spoils it, had been his comment. But this now appeared to him as a principle of far wider application and deeper moment. This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards... was it possibly the root of all evil? No; of course the love of money was called that. But money itself - perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defense against chance, a security for being able to have things over again...
Afterwards Ransom finds some "plain food"
It turned out to be good to eat. It did not give the orgiastic and almost alarming pleasure of the gourds, but rather the specific pleasure of plain food. But the meal had its unexpected high lights. Every now and then one struck a berry which had a bright red centre, and these were so savory, so memorable among a thousand tastes, that he would have begun to look for them and to feed on them only, but that he was once more forbidden by that same inner advisor which had already spoken to him twice since he came to Perelandra. "Now on earth", thought Ransom, "they'd soon discover how to breed these redhearts, and they'd cost a great deal more than the others." Money, in fact, would provide the means of saying encore in a voice that could not be disobeyed.
Lewis' insight on common life is breathtaking. I highly recommend this book.
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