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    Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
    Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
    Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
    Ebook250 pages4 hours

    Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

    By C. S. Lewis

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    About this ebook

    A repackaged edition of the revered author’s spiritual memoir, in which he recounts the story of his divine journey and eventual conversion to Christianity.

    C. S. Lewis—the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and bestselling author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics—takes readers on a spiritual journey through his early life and eventual embrace of the Christian faith. Lewis begins with his childhood in Belfast, surveys his boarding school years and his youthful atheism in England, reflects on his experience in World War I, and ends at Oxford, where he became "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." As he recounts his lifelong search for joy, Lewis demonstrates its role in guiding him to find God.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 14, 2017
    ISBN9780062565440
    Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
    Author

    C. S. Lewis

    Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a fellow and tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954 when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement.

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    Reviews for Surprised by Joy

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    • 5/5
      This book is part of my C.S. Lewis collection. I went through a huge phase where I was just obsessed with anything and everything by him. While I don't agree with all of his theology, I do love his writing style and the things he has to say about faith. He was a good one.
    • 5/5
      In his introduction, Lewis makes it clear that he is not writing your normal autobiography, but is writing specifically about the events leading up to his conversion to Christianity. In some ways, I found it to be the autobiography of a mind and heart, from his early days in boarding school, his interests in mythology, and his growing dissatisfaction with the philosophies he once adhered to.I have difficulty conceiving of anyone enjoying the book unless they agreed with either his particular scholar's mind or his belief in the God of Christianity. I happen to be in the latter camp, and confess that at times his mind eluded me. Whole passages referring either to the books that most moved him or schools of modern thought of his times completely eluded my grasp, and I can only conclude that my mind must work very differently from his or that I must have a longer time on this earth before I can fully grasp his reflections on childhood, boyhood, and young adulthood. Yet then a sentence, a thought, would break through and give me pause or move me to tears. This is a book that I would reread not so much because of any initial enjoyment but because my appreciation would increase, perhaps once I read another biography or some of the classics which molded his thought.
    • 4/5
      Those looking for a "Christian testamony" will be somewhat disappointed. But Lewis, as usual, cuts deeper than most people are prepared to go. This is the story of his conversion to theism, and how JOY, an inconsistent and haunting companion, became a part of his life.
    • 2/5
      The discussion of his early life is interesting, but I didn't find Lewis's reasoning all that compelling. I can see how he moved from a belief in the Absolute into Theism, but it almost seemed that he became a Christian only since it was the latest thing, an argument that (1) applies better to Islam, and (2) is a sort of a sin that he argues against in at least two other books.
    • 5/5
      I am ashamed to say that it took me so long to rinally read this classic. Now, after having read it, I can testify that I was completely captivated by Lewis' journey to Christianity. It is always surprising when we realize that our joy is to be found in God, and that all the "joy" we've experience prior to salvation in Christ was not really joy at all, but rather lesser ideas of pleasure and happiness.
    • 4/5
      Subtitled: The shape of my early life. I compromised on the rating of this book, because I find the authors style distracting; however the message is worth a score of "five."
    • 5/5
      In this book Lewis tells of his search for joy, a spiritual journey that led him from the Christianity of his early youth into atheism and then back to Christianity.
    • 4/5
      Despite having one of the worst covers I've seen in a while, this short account of C.S. Lewis' religious life, culminating in his conversion to Christianity, was worthwhile and enjoyable, though perhaps not as edifying on the topic of religious conversion as I had hoped. Too much of the book is focused on unrelated descriptions and stories which, though the story might be anemic without them, tend to draw away rather than complement the book's central concern. A more serious criticism of the book is that "Joy", which figures so prominently in the book's title, is underanalyzed and underdeveloped so that for Lewis to end on a note about Joy lacks the impact it might have otherwise had. Furthermore, I found that in general the episodes explicitly related to Lewis' religious conversion which punctuated the story were likewise too underdeveloped, the details too sketchy, the experiences too understated. Perhaps that is an inevitable fact when discussing the "mystery" of how such conversion takes place. Perhaps if, as Lewis says, he had been contemplating and reflecting enough to give more specific accounts of such experiences, the experiences themselves would have been thwarted and dulled precisely by such introspection. In any case, the quality of Lewis' prose is practically beyond compare, and whatever the subject matter or disagreements I may have with him, his writing is always a pleasure to read.A key quotation: "What I learned from the Idealists (and still most strongly hold) is this maxim: it is more important that Heaven should exist than that any of us should ever reach it."
    • 2/5
      Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life is an autobiography of C.S. Lewis' childhood to sometime in university.

      The first several chapters of his schoolboy days are quite boring. It's almost as though he feels compelled to record the story for posterity but does not do so with much passion-- I don't think he looks back on his childhood with much enjoyment. His mother dies of cancer when he is young, and his father never fully recovers. His best friend was his slightly older brother. You don't get much of a sense of whether Lewis was affable or awkward; it appears he loved little more than reading.

      Lewis was Irish and he and his brother initially attended a boarding school in England. I have never read any positive accounts of English schools, and this is no exception. All it seems to do is alienate kids from their families, who they see infrequently. The headmaster was likely insane. Later, Lewis attends a public high school and hates it and recounts the social drama. He criticizes current members of Parliament for insisting the English educational tradition continue. Lewis contends all it does is make people "priggish"-- snobbish and bitter. He is thankful that he didn't become as snobbish as others from the experiences.

      Lewis learned Latin at an early age and began reading the classics. He also has an affinity for fantasy type books and enjoys mythology--something he has mixed feelings about. In his adolescence he makes friends with a neighbor boy who shares Lewis love for Norse mythology and other fiction--his first real friendship. Lewis eventually convinces his father to send him to live with a tutor to prepare reading for university exams. He later learns Greek and enjoys reading things like Herodotus' Histories in the original. He learns French and Italian to read classics in those languages, and enough German to get by (I'm rather envious at this point). England enters WWI, and Lewis' brother enters the service while Lewis prepares for university; he later decides to enlist and enter university afterwards. After a relatively mild Army service, Lewis is accepted to Oxford. He recounts his closest friendships, including with J.R. Tolkein, and his first real encounters with English literature, learning to appreciate Bronte and others.

      From an early age, Lewis had decided on atheism. He almost feels guilty with his affinity for books involving mythology, pantheism, and the occult. He develops the typical intellectual elitism of university atheists, wondering how anyone could believe otherwise. But he's troubled by reading other intellectuals who don't hold to atheism, including French philosophers who espouse pantheism. Aren't these all unsatisfying? During his university days he reads G.K. Chesterton and enjoys him, despite his Christianity. Real blows to Lewis steadfast atheism occur when his closest friends become interested in Christianity and begin reading the Bible. He begins to appreciate the consistency of other Christians he meet who actually live out what they believe. He says one of the biggest blows came when an adamant atheist he knew commented on the evidence for historical veracity of the Gospels-- "one can almost believe those things happened." The man never became a Christian, but just the fact that the evidences of real events being behind the writings of Scripture being stronger than other classics that Lewis had read made a real impact. Lewis' lifetime of reading Latin and Greek mythology allowed him to see that the Gospels were not written as myths-- they did not have the same qualities. Lewis contends that the only two valid worldviews could be Christianity or Hinduism, but notes that Hindu mythology lack the historical evidences and basis that Christianity has; hence, he rejects Hinduism. Lewis also had a nagging sense of lack of joy-- something he was unsure whether he wanted. But it seemed Christianity would be the solution-- it would give him a worldview with a finality of how it all comes together. It would free him to love.

      So, on the final pages Lewis decides to become a Christian. No Emmaeus road experiences, just a decision to become a Christian while going to the zoo. Thus the book concludes abruptly.

      I give it 2.5 stars out of 5. If you're a huge C.S. Lewis fan, then you can read this book to understand the man better. If you're just interested in the final events leading Lewis from atheism to Christianity, as many were at the time of his writing, then read the last few chapters.
    • 5/5
      An awesome inspirational book that takes us through the life of C.S. Lewis, but could it could be our own story also. From childhood to the teen years Lewis struggles through many of the same life, spiritual conflicts that everyone goes through. The inspiration comes to those who know what he did with his life later and the lessons he took from his early life. Narnia is often considered his and his brothers play time adventures. These adventures as young child may have been just play, but the depth of his learning and philosophy formed in his early life formed the basis for all his writing. From his falling away to his return to Christianity, it was his early life experience that brought him to the point of being a true man of God.
    • 5/5
      Surprised by joy--impatient as the wind. Lewis tells of his early life. His father came from Welshmen, true Welshmen who were sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily moved to anger and to tenderness; men who laughed and cried a great deal and who had not much of the talent for happiness. The Hamilton's (his mother's people) were a cooler race. Their minds were critical and ironic and they had the talent for happiness in a high degree--went straight to it as experienced travelers go for the best seat in the train. You must have a heart of stone not to read on.
    • 4/5
      In this short memoir, C. S. Lewis describes his spiritual journey from youthful atheist to firm and faithful believer. This isn't so much a memoir of Lewis' life, although it does contain some interesting anecdotes about his school years, he only focuses on incidents in his life that impacted his spiritual development. I have read many spiritual development memoirs, and this one is like the others...only it stands out because it is a classic--It was written when these types of journeys were not as commonly shared in memoirs. (In fact, I suspect that this book inspired so many of the spiritual-journey memoirs that we see today.) One thing I found interesting about this book is it explained to me why so many people retro-diagnose Lewis with Asperger's syndrome. He talked about his difficulties dealing with other students...not knowing how to respond in social situations...being told to "take that look off {his} face" when he was trying very hard to keep an appropriate facial expression. I think it is important to recognize that we can't accurately retro-diagnose people with today's syndromes, but it IS interesting to see how such personality traits were present in Lewis' day, and how he excused them with stories about how childhood events affected his social interactions. It was definitely an interesting read...and anyone who likes to hear about others' spiritual journeys really should start with C. S. Lewis.
    • 2/5
      You will need to be a literary buff or extremely well versed in literature to appreciate this book, for it has numerous literary references to explain his ideas. It is a description of his non-Christian days before conversion which I did not find interesting.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this journey to accept the love of God. Some of my favorite quotes include:
      I was now by no means unhappy; but I had very definitely formed the opinion that the universe was, in the main, a rather regrettable institution.
      A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere
      The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
    • 4/5
      This introduction to the life of C. S. (Jack) Lewis goes into great detail about the imaginary worlds he and his brother created as young children in Belfast and his boarding school experiences. He was not in a particularly religious family but he had unlimited access to the many books his father collected. He valued his solitude and "hours of golden reading." He immersed himself in the world of the Norse gods and developed a dual inner-outer life, although he repeatedly reminds the reader that he never mistook imagination for reality.The turning point in his young life came when his mother died of cancer. He was only 9 years old at the time and his world was further turned upside down when he was sent to boarding school in England only one month after her death. This was the boarding school from hell. It was here that he began to seriously read the Bible and spent hours in prayer, perhaps to get relief from the brutal headmaster who was later declared insane. Prayers were answered and he changed school two years later. It was at Malvern prep school that he dabbled in the occult and dropped his Christian ideals "with the greatest relief" but still struggled with contradictory feelings. While he believed God did not exist, he was angry at Him for not existing and for creating the world in the first place! The purpose of writing this book was to relate his conversion experience. The many influences on Jack's life make for interesting reading, though the time spent in WWI and his early teaching career at Oxford are glossed over. Mostly, this is a book about the friends and "glories of literature" that slowly led him from the early path of his "stabs" of joy that he called an "unsatisfied desire which is more desirable than any other satisfaction" to the point of decision where "the great Angler played His fish and I never dreamed that the hook was in my tongue." It was in 1929 that Jack Lewis finally "gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."
    • 5/5
      I love Lewis, in a way only he can he says how I have always felt but never been intelligent enough to put into words. I finished this book in the quiet of an early morning in my little nephews messy room, tears and hugging the book followed. What a treat!
    • 5/5
      As is typical for a Lewis book, a very, very deep discussion, and at times,very difficult to follow. Perhaps the most difficult parts are Lewis' reference to so many literary classics of his time, most of which someone today would likely have very limited knowledge - so it is difficult to relate to how he is explaining his experience. However, his movement from his childhood days to his eventually embracing Christianity always move forward. It is very interesting to hear him discuss the influences of the early death of his mother, his less than satisfactory relationship with his father afterward, his close relationship with his brother and and the wildly varying relationships with his teachers and adult acquaintances had on his life and coming to Christianity. Despite the difficulty of reading the book at times, I thoroughly enjoyed it and am encouraged to pick up another one of his books in the future.
    • 3/5
      I might not have been surprised by joy as I read this book - it was far to factually autobiographical for me, and not what I expected - but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed parts of it. Both Lewis's description of his childhood education (and the hotbed of homo-eroticism that private boys-only schools were) was brilliant and non-judgemental and his glossed-over, but no less harrowing, account of his experience in WW1, provided an intriguing glimpse into a byone era.Perhaps this was my biggest problem with the book - I expected a deeply inspiring, imaginative and very personal account of his spiritual awakening. Instead, this book is mainly autbiographical with a few paragraphs here and there covering his spiritual journey. Emotion was thin on the ground - intellectual scholarship was densely packed into each sentence.Thanks to my long ago classical studies I could wade through the allusions without getting too lost, but still ... I wanted to be inspired, to feel what Lewis felt as he journeyed back to his God.Instead, it took me nearly two weeks to struggle through it because as a rule, I don't read autobiographies. Ultimately, this was more biographical than it was spiritual and thus SURPRISED BY JOY didn't meet my expectations as a reader.
    • 4/5
      I very nearly loved this book. Lewis's path---although very different from my own---resonates with me in so many ways. Lewis has so many insightful things to say, and I found myself citing this book frequently in conversations. My spouse was very tolerant of this. He did gradually follow up my, "You know, this reminds me of something C.S. Lewis says in his Surprised by Joy..." with a mumbled "Of course it does." But he still listened to what I said next.

      Most of the things Lewis says that I found near mind-blowing, other people didn't seem excited about at all when I relayed them, which was a little frustrating. Throughout the book, Lewis paints himself as a man apart from the crowd, someone misunderstood and largely content to be so. I shouldn't have been surprised that other people didn't share my excitement when I talked about the ways in which I could relate to a fellow who couldn't really relate to other people.

      I do think I understand better some of the anti-Lewis sentiment I hear sometimes. The first thirteen chapters were, I thought, awesome, aside from a few gratuitous judgmental bits he tosses in there without much elaboration (like that one of his friends was nearly as exasperating to talk to as a woman). These were especially annoying because he goes to such lengths to see things from different perspectives and to avoid judgment in most all of the book. These rare moments of judgment seem out of character, like he's trying to be chummy with the reader in a way, tossing out little conversational barbs.

      Or maybe these are rare moments of the true Lewis that he masks the majority of the time, because it does happen with more areas more pertinent to the book's subject. At one point, Lewis defines "chronological snobbery" as "the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited." Later he claims that Paganism is merely a stepping stone to more mature religions, and seems completely oblivious to the fact that this smacks of the very "chronological snobbery" he claims to have sloughed off. The only other proof he offers that Paganism "had been the childhood of religion" is the fact that he embraced it when he was a child, and he later decided it wasn't doing it for him and moved on to something else. It's fine if he's made this personal conclusion so long as he doesn't make it sound as though it's an established truth.

      I understand how Lewis makes the transition from Atheism to Theism, but I don't really get how he goes from a belief in God to belief in a very specific, anthropomorphic God who acts directly and consciously in the universe, and I really don't get how he makes the leap from here to Christianity. (But then, perhaps from "anthropomorphic God" to "anthropomorphic God coming to Earth as a human for the purpose of dying for our sins" it's more a step than a leap.) This might be just because he doesn't understand how he became Christian, either (which he admits in Chapter XV). This is totally fine, except that I thought that was kind of what the book was supposed to be about, and I really wanted to know how he got from Atheism to Christianity. Maybe if I want that, I need to read more of his other writings on Christianity.

      You know, my overall reaction to this book reminds me of two things C.S. Lewis says in his Surprised by Joy:

      "Of course he shares your interests...[b]ut he has approached them all from a different angle. He has read all the right books but has got all the wrong thing out of every one. It is as if he spoke your language but mispronounced it."

      and

      "I was by now a sufficiently experienced reader to distinguish liking from agreement. I did not need to accept what [Lewis] said in order to enjoy it."

      One more thing: I'm re-reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with my kids right now, and I'm finding a lot of Lewis's conversion story and opinions about his own childhood beliefs about religion and faith woven through there since reading Surprised by Joy. I worry that some of the magic of both books is suffering as a result.

    • 5/5
      I certainly identified with Lewis’ evolution in faith. He describes it so spot-on, and provides certain key literature works; some I’d like to explore. He occasionally goes off subject and delights, such as describing the different cast of sunlight in Ireland compared to England. I’ve never read a better nonfiction writer for nailing descriptions.
    • 4/5
      “In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere — "Bibles laid open, millions of surprises," as Herbert says, "fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”In Surprised by Joy C. S. Lewis describes his life from his early childhood up to about 30 years of age when he was converted to Christianity. A journey from atheism, to theism and finally to the Christian faith. I liked the first part of the book best. His description of home in Ireland, the loss of his mother which marked him for life, the estranged father, the close connection with his brother Warnie. A lot of space is devoted to his very bad experiences in school, the horrible teachers and the cruel fellow students. Also a lot about how his logical thinking is sharpened by his teacher and mentor, The Great Knock, W. T. Kirkpatrick.Surprised by Joy reminded me of how our faith is shaped by so many things, not only our own pursuits and reasonings, but experiences in childhood and youth, the friends we have, the mentors and peers we learn from.Lewis kind of lost me in many of his philosophical thinking about the source of “Joy” about nordic and greek myths and the “true myth” of Christianity. His journey to faith in Christianity didn’t resonate with my own - but that is the beauty of it. We all have our own spiritual journey and the “leap of faith” is highly individual.
    • 4/5
      It's been quite a few years since I read this book, and I now have a far different worldview than I did when I read it, but this book continues to interest me as I continue to be interested in the possibility of and nature of religious experiences. It is no longer fresh in my mind what he wrote and, considering I read it back in High School, there was much that he discussed that probably meant nothing to me then that would mean something to me now. But that's why I'm writing this review with it as a distant memory, I want to talk about what was in the book that stuck with me.There exists a feeling that comes upon people at some times. I do not know if it comes to all people – though I have no reason for supposing that it is available to some men and not others, barring the possibility that it has to be prompted by certain environmental factors that some people may not be exposed to – what is important is that the feeling exists. In my opinion, the discussion of this feeling, which Lewis calls “joy” is the greatest contribution this book makes. If you are a Christian, this book is valuable as a discussion of some part of human nature that cries out for another world. If you are an atheist, this book is valuable as an example of some peculiarity of human psychology that leads people to search for God.“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.” (A quote from Mere Christianity, which I imagine was a reference to the desire that Lewis came to call “joy”)You will get plenty of discussion about the rampant homosexuality in the school Lewis was sent to (which was largely a result of Lewis's own overly-sexual and overly-suspicious view of his peers. His older brother was baffled by his portrayal of their school), you will get information about Lewis's time with Kirkpatrick where he began to put on intellectual muscle from a very logical, literal, and precise teacher, you will read about him enduring time as a soldier in World War I, him attaining a prestigious teaching post, and plenty about his love for mythology – especially Norse mythology. You won't find many logical proofs about what led him to Christianity. You won't get a list of facts that Lewis took into account to determine that Christianity was more likely than otherwise. The book would be worse if he included them, as they would detract from the main contribution the book makes: the personal and subjective account of what led a reasonable and intelligent man to place his faith in Christ, and his account of an experience of longing and desire called Joy.If you put aside the pretenses of commitment to facts and evidence that both sides posture with, you will get an glimpse of what can really move an intelligent man to faith – whether or not you consider a move to faith to be an improvement. Or, perhaps just as likely, you yourself may have felt what Lewis called Joy: a bittersweet longing and desire, in which case this book will give you an opportunity to read how he reacted to that experience. Or maybe you think Lewis is just a ridiculous man, well, he certainly won't change your mind here, but you might find some opportunities to laugh at him if that's how you get your kicks. If religious experiences and conversion stories interest you, or if you are interested in Lewis in general, I highly recommend the book. If your main interest is apologetics, I advise skipping this one.[As a general caution, I would recommend reading this book as events that happened in C. S. Lewis's life – as Jack would want you to believe them. This book was nicknamed “Suppressed by Jack” among those intimate with the details of Lewis's life. That's not to say it is not valuable, merely that it should not be taken as true, at least as far as it concerns Lewis's account of his external circumstances. If you want his biography, you can look up George Sayer's book Jack. This book is more valuable for insight into Lewis's internal development.]
    • 5/5
      Philosophy is not a subject, it is a way of living. For the brave! Lewis conversion to christianity is a a modern retelling of the story of Jacob´s fight with the Angel. With his head very much sleeping on a stone the fight was long and hard. But Lewis was not able to run from the questions raised and debated through the inborn dialectics that is our common human heritage since we took the fruit of knowledge. He explores fantasy in all its possible meanings; aknowledges all the roads fantasy can bring us on, including the sexual, occult and magical fantasies. He find that they all leaves him unfulfilled, they do not bring joy like the joy he knows through glimpses (most of us experiences), the unexpected bliss, that neither sex nor the occult or magical can replace. God was not the obvious solution for Lewis. A seasoned dialectician, the fight is long and hard. Lewis fights teism and Christianity until he is caught up in "an undebateable reality." We know the outcome of the conclusion he reached; To Lewis philosophy was not a subject, but a way of living, he continued to fight, bending fantasy to becoming the most unlikely soldier for the ultimate human(e) reality.
    • 4/5
      C. S. Lewis's Surprised By Joy is subtitled "The Shape of My Early Life," and is mainly about his childhood and young adulthood. In this spiritual autobiography Lewis traces the slow hand of God moving in the events and influences of his young life, through his atheism and finally into his spiritual surrender when he finally, reluctantly admitted that "God was God" (228).Some things shocked me (I can't take the rampant pederasty of British public schools with quite Lewis's aplomb); other things merely surprised me. I learned a lot of things I didn't know about Lewis, such as his difficult relationship with his brilliant but eccentric father, his various boarding-school experiences, and his interest in the occult.He traces his atheism and general pessimism about life as far back as the chronic, unusually marked clumsiness he possessed even as a child. He believes that because of this clumsiness, he soon grew to expect that everything he touched would go wrong somehow, that things going well was the exception and not the rule. His mother's death of cancer when he was ten years old also had a profound effect on his worldview.Lewis also explores his early creative and rational influences. His friend Arthur had a strong part in helping Lewis appreciate what Arthur termed "Homeliness," a type of cozy beauty in sharp contrast to Lewis's passion for Wagner and Norse mythology and what he called "Northernness." This passion Arthur also shared, but rounded it with a love of simple, wholesome sights and ideas. Lewis also talks about his friend Jenkins who taught him to savor the taste of everything, even ugly things, to enjoy them fully for what they are. The influence of Lewis's strictly rationalist tutor, William Kirkpatrick, is also acknowledged as a deep debt. All of this is written in Lewis's characteristically excellent prose. I loved this passage about his final thrashings before accepting the reality of God:The fox had been dislodged from Hegelian Wood and was now running in the open, "with all the wo in the world," bedraggled and weary, hounds barely a field behind. And nearly everyone was now (in one way or another) in the pack; Plato, Dante, MacDonald, Herbert, Barfield, Tolkien, Dyson, Joy itself. Everyone and everything had joined the other side. (225)I am finding that the more I learn about Lewis, the more divided I become. I agree with him more; I agree with him less. It is hard to really articulate where we are different (well, besides his obvious and all-permeating Arminian leanings which conflict sharply with my Calvinist tenets). I think one of the issues may be Lewis's reliance on and almost religious respect for literature besides the Bible. Of course he is detailing a period in which he was first reading the world's great literature as a student and lover of beauty, so naturally he will have a lot to say about its influence on his thinking and development. And I have to remember too that Lewis is a Christian thinker, not a pastor charged with preaching the full counsel of God and illuminating Scripture to his flock. I do think, however, that at bottom I have a much deeper reverence for Scripture than Lewis has displayed in the books of his that I've read so far. This both simplifies and complicates my thoughts about him and his work. The thread that ties everything together in this story is the central idea of Joy, which Lewis describes as the "unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction" (17–18). These flashes of beauty, themselves insufficient, point to something else, something outside the person experiencing this longing. Ultimately Lewis connects Joy with the desire to know the source of all Joy, God. Those flashes of beauty and the unfulfilled longings are divinely given. And yet they are not the goal. Lewis writes, But what, in conclusion, of Joy? for that, after all, is what the story has been mainly about. To tell you the truth, the subject has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian... I believe (if the thing were at all worth recording) that the old stab, the old bittersweet, has come to me as often and as sharply since my conversion as at any time of my life whatever. But I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never had the kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer. While that other was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed large in my thoughts. When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter... But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we will be grateful to the authority that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or not much; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold. "We would be at Jerusalem." (238)This was a fascinating read on so many levels. Recommended.
    • 2/5
      Like so many others, I greatly enjoyed the Narnia series when I was growing up. I read it for fun and had no idea that it was a Christian allegory until I was an adult. While my daughters enjoyed them (one has read them at least four times) they disappointed me somewhat as an adult. However, I have tried a few times to read other books by Lewis, but this is the first one I’ve made it all the way through. To be honest, what kept me going is that this will be part of a book discussion with some old reading friends. I read a chapter per day as if it were a school assignment.The two stars are not because Lewis was unable to write or articulate his thoughts, because he certainly did. However, as a memoir of his journey to atheism and then to Christianity, a subject of keen interest to me, it ended up having little appeal. It was more of his educational and intellectual journey through his youth, punctuated by descriptions of life away at different schools, until he became a Christian. Of course, it’s another example of a brilliant intellectual coming around from atheism to Christianity, something so many feel is impossible, but there was little to tug at my heartstrings or to empathize or sympathize as much with him as I would have liked to given so many of his circumstances. Perhaps it’s because he write it when he was will into his fifties and was so far removed, but I think perhaps it may have been because he was not ever given to having many friends when he was growing up, nor did he really want them most of the time, and those he did make were usually as intellectual as he was.That said, Lewis had some interesting insights at times, but what I found irksome was that girls and women tend to only appear as the odd relative hosting some sort of gathering (his mother died when he was very young) almost another species, or were referred to in light of erotic passion not being a substitute for joy, or how lack of girls in the area led to increased pederasty in public school and how it affected or was affected by the social hierarchy (that’s the term he employed for that) or other things equally bereft of any recognition of women as humans with a capacity for intelligence.
    • 3/5
      This book is great for anyone, but most especially for those who wonder if Christianity is substantive. It is also beneficial for those who want to strengthen their ability to articulate the substantial nature of Christianity. It merits reading because it is about a man who became a prolific writer and one of the greatest apologists for Christianity in the 20th century. C.S. Lewis in his pursuit of truth was atheistic but made a 180 degree turn about to embrace Christianity. This largely came about by those authors that he read (and, of course, by being decidedly responsive to God’s grace). He speaks of a thread of occasions in his journey when he experienced inexplicable joy, and he gives insight into his personal experience, of the events and the persons that shaped him, and more primarily the great authors that influenced him.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book.
    • 5/5
      Who would've thought that so much self-talk could be so interesting? But Lewis uses his autobiography to analyze all the shades of intuitive thought that led to his conversion. Particularly relevant are his descriptions of "joy", an aesthetic experience which he eventually identifies as his longing for God. Though Lewis later acknowledged the importance of obedience, he was not the sort who would've been converted by it. This is conversion as seen through the eyes of a romantic. His thoughts on the schools of his boyhood era are also interesting.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      It was interesting to note that much of what he wrote about his own growing up was not new since I have read a couple biographies of him and the info on his early years is very much drawn from this book.

      I loved what he said about experience. I don't have the book with me now to quote it but he explained that when you stop experiencing and start to analyze it you stop experiencing. He pointed out that he realized he missed out on a lot by analyzing it to death instead of just living in the moment to its fullest. I'm frequently guilty of this myself and didn't realize it until he started talking about it.

      Good book and well worth the read.
    • 4/5
      With respect and apologies to Lewis:I love this book--it was one of the first Lewis that I read after the Narnia books and Mere Christianity. Only years later did it occur to me that--in my most humble opinion--Lewis had chosen the wrong word for that illusive feeling so close to the sorrow of loss, which eventually led him to faith. In my opinion--and based as much on my own experiences as the pages of this book--Lewis felt a longing for he knew not what, only knowing that without it he was not whole. I know or knew this feeling. To put this in the words of Tolkien, if one is blessed to discover the reality behind or beyond the longing, -then- the person experiences the eucatastrophe of Joy.Complete joy does not come first as Lewis' words in this book imply repeatedly. Yes, perhaps an ephemeral glimpse or taste of it, but it is blended almost on the instant with its loss. Real joy comes when what is behind the glimpses abides.I probably shouldn't have written this. As someone said, "Words are hard". Or perhaps stubborn. Never more so than when trying to describe something so ephemeral.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Surprised by Joy - C. S. Lewis

    PREFACE

    This book is written partly in answer to requests that I would tell how I passed from Atheism to Christianity and partly to correct one or two false notions that seem to have got about. How far the story matters to anyone but myself depends on the degree to which others have experienced what I call ‘joy’. If it is at all common, a more detailed treatment of it than has (I believe) been attempted before may be of some use. I have been emboldened to write of it because I notice that a man seldom mentions what he had supposed to be his most idiosyncratic sensations without receiving from at least one (often more) of those present the reply, ‘What! Have you felt that too? I always thought I was the only one.’

    The book aims at telling the story of my conversion and is not a general autobiography, still less ‘Confessions’ like those of St Augustine or Rousseau. This means in practice that it gets less like a general autobiography as it goes on. In the earlier chapters the net has to be spread pretty wide in order that, when the explicitly spiritual crisis arrives, the reader may understand what sort of person my childhood and adolescence had made me. When the ‘build-up’ is complete, I confine myself strictly to business and omit everything (however important by ordinary biographical standards) which seems, at that stage, irrelevant. I do not think there is much loss; I never read an autobiography in which the parts devoted to the earlier years were not far the most interesting.

    The story is, I fear, suffocatingly subjective; the kind of thing I have never written before and shall probably never write again. I have tried so to write the first chapter that those who can’t bear such a story will see at once what they are in for and close the book with the least waste of time.

    C.S.L.

    I

    THE FIRST YEARS

    Happy, but for so happy ill secured.

    MILTON

    I was born in the winter of 1898 at Belfast, the son of a solicitor and of a clergyman’s daughter. My parents had only two children, both sons, and I was the younger by about three years. Two very different strains had gone to our making. My father belonged to the first generation of his family that reached professional station. His grandfather had been a Welsh farmer; his father, a self-made man, had begun life as a workman, emigrated to Ireland, and ended as a partner in the firm of Macilwaine and Lewis, ‘Boiler-makers, Engineers, and Iron Ship Builders’. My mother was a Hamilton with many generations of clergymen, lawyers, sailors, and the like behind her; on her mother’s side, through the Warrens, the blood went back to a Norman knight whose bones lie at Battle Abbey. The two families from which I spring were as different in temperament as in origin. My father’s people were true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily moved both to anger and to tenderness; men who laughed and cried a great deal and who had not much of the talent for happiness. The Hamiltons were a cooler race. Their minds were critical and ironic and they had the talent for happiness in a high degree—went straight for it as experienced travellers go for the best seat in a train. From my earliest years I was aware of the vivid contrast between my mother’s cheerful and tranquil affection and the ups and downs of my father’s emotional life, and this bred in me long before I was old enough to give it a name a certain distrust or dislike of emotion as something uncomfortable and embarrassing and even dangerous.

    Both my parents, by the standards of that time and place, were bookish or ‘clever’ people. My mother had been a promising mathematician in her youth and a BA of Queen’s College, Belfast, and before her death was able to start me both in French and Latin. She was a voracious reader of good novels, and I think the Merediths and Tolstoys which I have inherited were bought for her. My father’s tastes were quite different. He was fond of oratory and had himself spoken on political platforms in England as a young man; if he had had independent means he would certainly have aimed at a political career. In this, unless his sense of honour, which was fine to the point of being Quixotic, had made him unmanageable, he might well have succeeded, for he had many of the gifts once needed by a Parliamentarian—a fine presence, a resonant voice, great quickness of mind, eloquence, and memory. Trollope’s political novels were very dear to him; in following the career of Phineas Finn he was, as I now suppose, vicariously gratifying his own desires. He was fond of poetry provided it had elements of rhetoric or pathos, or both; I think Othello was his favourite Shakespearian play. He greatly enjoyed nearly all humorous authors, from Dickens to W. W. Jacobs, and was himself, almost without rival, the best raconteur I have ever heard; the best, that is, of his own type, the type that acts all the characters in turn with a free use of grimace, gesture, and pantomime. He was never happier than when closeted for an hour or so with one or two of my uncles exchanging ‘wheezes’ (as anecdotes were oddly called in our family). What neither he nor my mother had the least taste for was that kind of literature to which my allegiance was given the moment I could choose books for myself. Neither had ever listened for the horns of elfland. There was no copy either of Keats or Shelley in the house, and the copy of Coleridge was never (to my knowledge) opened. If I am a romantic my parents bear no responsibility for it. Tennyson, indeed, my father liked, but it was the Tennyson of In Memoriam and Locksley Hall. I never heard from him of the Lotus Eaters or the Le Morte d’Arthur. My mother, I have been told, cared for no poetry at all.

    In addition to good parents, good food, and a garden (which then seemed large) to play in, I began life with two other blessings. One was our nurse, Lizzie Endicott, in whom even the exacting memory of childhood can discover no flaw—nothing but kindness, gaiety, and good sense. There was no nonsense about ‘lady nurses’ in those days. Through Lizzie we struck our roots into the peasantry of County Down. We were thus free of two very different social worlds. To this I owe my lifelong immunity from the false identification which some people make of refinement with virtue. From before I can remember I had understood that certain jokes could be shared with Lizzie which were impossible in the drawing-room; and also that Lizzie was, as nearly as a human can be, simply good.

    The other blessing was my brother. Though three years my senior, he never seemed to be an elder brother; we were allies, not to say confederates, from the first. Yet we were very different. Our earliest pictures (and I can remember no time when we were not incessantly drawing) reveal it. His were of ships and trains and battles; mine, when not imitated from his, were of what we both called ‘dressed animals’—the anthropomorphised beasts of nursery literature. His earliest story—as my elder he preceded me in the transition from drawing to writing—was called The Young Rajah. He had already made India ‘his country’; Animal-Land was mine. I do not think any of the surviving drawings date from the first six years of my life which I am now describing, but I have plenty of them that cannot be much later. From them it appears to me that I had the better talent. From a very early age I could draw movement—figures that looked as if they were really running or fighting—and the perspective is good. But nowhere, either in my brother’s work or my own, is there a single line drawn in obedience to an idea, however crude, of beauty. There is action, comedy, invention; but there is not even the germ of a feeling for design, and there is a shocking ignorance of natural form. Trees appear as balls of cotton wool stuck on posts, and there is nothing to show that either of us knew the shape of any leaf in the garden where we played almost daily. This absence of beauty, now that I come to think of it, is characteristic of our childhood. No picture on the walls of my father’s house ever attracted—and indeed none deserved—our attention. We never saw a beautiful building nor imagined that a building could be beautiful. My earliest aesthetic experiences, if indeed they were aesthetic, were not of that kind; they were already incurably romantic, not formal. Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature—not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colours 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. And every day there were what we called ‘the Green Hills’; that is, the low line of the Castlereagh Hills which we saw from the nursery windows. They were not very far off but they were, to children, quite unattainable. They taught me longing—Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.

    If aesthetic experiences were rare, religious experiences did not occur at all. Some people have got the impression from my books that I was brought up in strict and vivid Puritanism, but this is quite untrue. I was taught the usual things and made to say my prayers and in due time taken to church. I naturally accepted what I was told but I cannot remember feeling much interest in it. My father, far from being specially Puritanical, was, by nineteenth-century and Church of Ireland standards, rather ‘high’, and his approach to religion, as to literature, was at the opposite pole from what later became my own. The charm of tradition and the verbal beauty of Bible and Prayer Book (all of them for me late and acquired tastes) were his natural delight, and it would have been hard to find an equally intelligent man who cared so little for metaphysics. Of my mother’s religion I can say almost nothing from my own memory. My childhood, at all events, was not in the least other-worldly. Except for the toy garden and the Green Hills it was not even imaginative; it lives in my memory mainly as a period of humdrum, prosaic happiness and awakes none of the poignant nostalgia with which I look back on my much less happy boyhood. It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past.

    To this general happiness there was one exception. I remember nothing earlier than the terror of certain dreams. It is a very common trouble at that age, yet it still seems to me odd that petted and guarded childhood should so often have in it a window opening on what is hardly less than Hell. My bad dreams were of two kinds, those about spectres and those about insects. The second were, beyond comparison, the worse; to this day I would rather meet a ghost than a tarantula. And to this day I could almost find it in my heart to rationalise and justify my phobia. As Owen Barfield once said to me, ‘The trouble about insects is that they are like French locomotives—they have all the works on the outside.’ The works—that is the trouble. Their angular limbs, their jerky movements, their dry, metallic noises, all suggest either machines that have come to life or life degenerating into mechanism. You may add that in the hive and the ant-hill we see fully realised the two things that some of us most dread for our own species—the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective. One fact about the history of this phobia is perhaps worth recording. Much later, in my teens, from reading Lubbock’s Ants, Bees and Wasps, I developed for a short time a genuinely scientific interest in insects. Other studies soon crowded it out; but while my entomological period lasted my fear almost vanished, and I am inclined to think a real objective curiosity will usually have this cleansing effect.

    I am afraid the psychologists will not be content to explain my insect fears by what a simpler generation would diagnose as their cause—a certain detestable picture in one of my nursery books. In it a midget child, a sort of Tom Thumb, stood on a toadstool and was threatened from below by a stag-beetle very much larger than himself. This was bad enough; but there is worse to come. The horns of the beetle were strips of cardboard separate from the plate and working on a pivot. By moving a devilish contraption on the verso you could make them open and shut like pincers: snip-snap—snip-snap—I can see it while I write. How a woman ordinarily so wise as my mother could have allowed this abomination into the nursery is difficult to understand. Unless, indeed (for now a doubt assails me), unless that picture itself is a product of nightmare. But I think not.

    In 1905, my seventh year, the first great change in my life took place. We moved house. My father, growing, I suppose, in prosperity, decided to leave the semi-detached villa in which I had been born and built himself a much larger house, further out into what was then the country. The ‘New House’, as we continued for years to call it, was a large one even by my present standards; to a child it seemed less like a house than a city. My father, who had more capacity for being cheated than any man I have ever known, was badly cheated by his builders; the drains were wrong, the chimneys were wrong, and there was a draught in every room. None of this, however, mattered to a child. To me, the important thing about the move was that the background of my life became larger. The New House is almost a major character in my story. I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass. Where all these books had been before we came to the New House is a problem that never occurred to me until I began writing this paragraph. I have no idea of the answer.

    Out of doors was ‘the view’ for which, no doubt, the site had principally been chosen. From our front door we looked down over wide fields to Belfast Lough and across it to the long mountain line of the Antrim shore—Divis, Colin, Cave Hill. This was in the far-off days when Britain was the world’s carrier and the Lough was full of shipping; a delight to both us boys, but most to my brother. The sound of a steamer’s horn at night still conjures up my whole boyhood. Behind the house, greener, lower, and nearer than the Antrim mountains, were the Holywood Hills, but it was not till much later that they won my attention. The north-western prospect was what mattered at first; the interminable summer sunsets behind the blue ridges, and the rooks flying home. In these surroundings the blows of change began to fall.

    First of all, my brother was packed off to an English boarding-school and thus removed from my life for the greater part of every year. I remember well the rapture of his homecomings for the holidays but have no recollection of any corresponding anguish at his departures. His new life made no difference to the relations between us. I, meanwhile, was going on with my education at home; French and Latin from my mother and everything else from an excellent governess, Annie Harper. I made rather a bugbear of this mild and modest little lady at the time, but all that I can remember assures me that I was unjust. She was a Presbyterian; and a longish lecture which she once interpolated between sums and copies is the first thing I can remember that brought the other world to my mind with any sense of reality. But there were many things that I thought about more. My real life—or what memory reports as my real life—was increasingly one of solitude. I had indeed plenty of people to talk to: my parents, my grandfather Lewis, prematurely old and deaf, who lived with us; the maids; and a somewhat bibulous old gardener. I was, I believe, an intolerable chatterbox. But solitude was nearly always at my command, somewhere in the garden or somewhere in the house. I had now learned both to read and write; I had a dozen things to do.

    What drove me to write was the extreme manual clumsiness from which I have always suffered. I attribute it to a physical defect which my brother and I both inherit from our father; we have only one joint in the thumb. The upper joint (that farthest from the nail) is visible, but it is a mere sham; we cannot bend it. But whatever the cause, nature laid on me from birth an utter incapacity to make anything. With pencil and pen I was handy enough, and I can still tie as good a bow as ever lay on a man’s collar, but with a tool or a bat or a gun, a sleeve-link or a corkscrew, I have always been unteachable. It was this that forced me to write. I longed to make things, ships, houses, engines. Many sheets of cardboard and pairs of scissors I spoiled, only to turn from my hopeless failures in tears. As a last resource, as a pis aller, I was driven to write stories instead; little dreaming to what a world of happiness I was being admitted. You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.

    I soon staked out a claim to one of the attics and made it ‘my study’. Pictures, of my own making or cut from brightly coloured Christmas numbers of magazines, were nailed on the walls. There I kept my pen and inkpot and writing books and paint-box; and there

    What more felicity can fall to creature

    Than to enjoy delight with liberty?

    Here my first stories were written, and illustrated, with enormous satisfaction. They were an attempt to combine my two chief literary pleasures—‘dressed animals’ and ‘knights in armour’. As a result, I wrote about chivalrous mice and rabbits who rode out in complete mail to kill not giants but cats. But already the mood of the systematiser was strong in me; the mood which led Trollope so endlessly to elaborate his Barsetshire. The Animal-Land which came into action in the holidays when my brother was at home was a modern Animal-Land; it had to have trains and steamships if it was to be a country shared with him. It followed, of course, that the medieval Animal-Land about which I wrote my stories must be the same country at an earlier period; and of course the two periods must be properly connected. This led me from romancing to historiography; I set about writing a full history of Animal-Land. Though more than one version

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