I live by a general rule that, at all times, I am to be reading a C.S. Lewis book. Whether I am neck-deep in research for an academic project, ploughing through potential text books for a class, or taking a needed reprieve from scholarly works, I always have something by Lewis close at hand. This may take the form of steadily working through his corpus by picking up a yet-unread volume (I recently finished a long and steady trek through English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama as an exercise in this life-long goal), or taking my kids through Narnia (by my count, we’ve taken that journey five times already), or simply picking up a favorite and working through it again.
Currently, I am re-reading The Screwtape Letters. I’m not sure how many times I’ve eavesdropped on this senior demon, but the number is surely in the double digits. Still, I find I never fail to be surprised by how successful his council has been in my own life. How easily I forget to recognize the signs of his little pupils!
On this most recent occasion reading through the letters, I find one particular letter offers insight in a recent soul-cramp that has been bothering me as of late. Living in a big, vibrant, wealthy, and technologically advanced city like Abu Dhabi, I will occasionally get a hankering for silence and solitude in nature. My appetite along these lines has only been aggravated by my finishing Harry Lee Poe’s triumph of a trilogy, Becoming C.S. Lewis, The Making of C.S. Lewis, and The Completion of C.S. Lewis. I will explain why this biographical portrait gave me the soul-cramps that Screwtape puts his finger (claw?) on momentarily. But first, I hope you’ll indulge me by letting me offer an appreciative word of Poe and his marvelous work.
One of the treasures readers get from a thoroughly researched biography like this one is that sense of coming to know the subject of the work in a personal and endearing way. In fact, finishing this trilogy plunged me into a very Lewisian reflection on loss and time and eternity and joy. I was struck, for example, by how emotionally moved I was by the various tragedies in Lewis’s life (the death of Charles Williams, the death of Joy Davidman, the many relapses of his elder brother, Warnie). What was this emotion? Pity. Sadness. Compassion. Compassion for whom? All the people who would have felt these losses most directly are long dead. Does this render my compassion an illusion? A trick of the emotional senses? What am I to do, for example, for that deep sadness and sense of loss I felt at Poe’s description of Lewis’s own death? I felt, in a small but very real way, that a friend was taken from me. I found, as I put the book away, that I was missing someone whom I had never actually met.
Of course, longtime readers of Lewis will catch precisely what is Lewisian about this reflection, since it resembles that memory of a country never visited; the scent of a flower never known (to paraphrase a well-quoted sermon). These emotions need not be dismissed as fanciful manipulation. Even the sense of affection and loss we feel for imaginary characters in novels need not be reduced to delusion. Somehow, these too are stabs of joy—shafts of light that bespeak a real Sun. In Aslans’s country, we’ll stitch together all the disparate pieces of joy and longing and affection and loss—they’re all parts and shadows of the real thing.
But I digress. I brought Poe and his biographical work up simply to call attention to one of the things I love about my old friend, “Jack:” his love for walks. Many of his biographers make this point, and Lewis himself is not shy about the fact that walking outside was among his most favorite hobbies. Think, for example, about the nearest Mark Studdock got to defecting from the N.I.C.E. before his eventual conversion in That Hideous Strength: never did the musty air of the “inner ring” seem so ridiculous to him as when he was walking through the countryside.
Now, I share this love with Lewis, which accounts for the soul-cramp I feel around this time every year. I live in Abu Dhabi, in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula, which means it is unbearably hot outside for approximately half the year. The sun mercilessly punishes any attempts at long walks during these months. Not only that, but I live in the heart of the city, which means skyscrapers are typically easier to see than trees. Cameras line every street corner, and while there are many parks that have some real natural beauty (a fact for which I commend the city planners of Abu Dhabi—they are clearly making an effort!), a stroll through them is never quite as leisurely as one would hope. During that six-month window wherein the weather is perfect and demands to be enjoyed, these parks—oases in the dessert of steel and concrete and sand—are always populated with security guards whose primary responsibility (bless them, who would envy their jobs?) seems to be to tell my children they can’t be children (“no climbing here,” “get down from their”). But all this is nothing, I tell you, in comparison with the steady, persistent, buzz of noise. Traffic is more recognizable than birdsong.
And in “Letter 22,” Screwtape articulates why all this puts a nagging stich in my soul:
Music and silence—how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since Our Father entered Hell—though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light years, could express—no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise—Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile—Noise which alone defends us from the silly qualms, despairing scruples and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end.[1]
The ache I feel, it would seem, is for one of heaven’s two sounds: silence. Not utter silence, mind you, for the natural world is not really silent at all. The trees, the river, the birds and squirrels and frogs and crickets and cicadas all know how to make a ruckus, but they’re music can only be heard when the whirr of the modern machine shuts up for a bit. In this way, I think it’s not farfetched to assume that heaven’s two sounds are one: sacred silence and majestic music; the highs and the lows all speak, at their highest and truest point, of that happy country. And we get hints of that country here in this present world.
In his Letters to Malcolm, Lewis reflects on how being in nature occasions the adoration and worship of God that recalls the solemn joy of heaven:
The distinction ought to become, and sometimes is, impossible; to receive it and to recognize its divine source are a single experience. This heavenly fruit is instantly redolent of the orchard where it grew. This sweet air whispers of the country from whence it blows. It is a message. We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasures for evermore. There need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event, something done afterwards. To experience the tiny theophany is itself to adore. Gratitude exclaims, very properly, “How good of God to give this.” Adoration says, “What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!” One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.[2]
I know that message: I’ve received it before. Granted, it is possible to hear that message in the concrete jungle, but I confess—I complain—it can be difficult to make out with the blinding lights of the city, the sound of cars, the glare of the smartphone, and the imposing inhumane towering heights of the skyscraper. This is why my soul is feeling cramped and is gasping for some open air.
But this can’t be all. For I can almost intercept Screwtape’s advice to whatever infernal spirit has been “assigned” to me. What might he say to his student? Perhaps something like this:
Remember to keep him discontent. If you can’t convince your patient to be impressed by the glitz of city-life—if, for all our work among the culture-makers and technologists, your patient cannot be made to think that our recent achievements in swallowing mankind up in the noise of modern life is a “good thing;” if he will not be dazzled by the constant, restless, movement of (what we have convinced these disgusting creatures to call, “vibrant”) cities, or our abominably satisfying advances in A.I. (which convinces them to surrender more and more of their humanity over to us before they even make their way down to our Father Below), and the like—try to work this clarity of mind to your advantage. How, you ask? Why, by making him constantly long for that which he does not have. Please don’t object that this is too simple. Conventional tactics became that way for a reason, and you are not above such rudimentary designs. But the particular species of discontentment I am suggesting is rather advanced: don’t merely tempt him with a good that you have twisted to our own end, tempt him with a good that remains truly good. Granted, this is dangerous work, but if you can let him see that the solace for which he longs is, in itself, healthy for him, you just might be able to keep him from seeing the obvious: a longing for that which is good need not eventuate in a hatred for all else. Don’t let him see this. Aggravate his frustrations with the current situation. If those annoyances you call to his mind are truly products of our ingenuity, you might just convince him that a good longing justifies resentment at not acquiring the thing for which he longs. Make him think that he has to choose between refreshment in enjoying the Enemy in a forest—or on a mountain, or in a countryside—on the one hand, and enjoying the Enemy where he is right now on the other. As I once said to my nephew, Wormwood (he was so delicious, I tell you!), “it is so hard for these creatures to persevere.”[3]
What can I do? I think I’ll resolve to continue longing for a walk in the countryside, and thank God for it whenever he sees fit to give it to me, even while keeping a keen eye out for “sunbeams” here in Arabia. As it turns out, this is not as difficult as the above paragraphs suggest. Once we resolve to obey our heavenly orders and “rejoice always,” reasons for happily obeying sprout up everywhere. This shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, “the world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate. The real labor is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come awake. Still more, to remain awake.”[4]
[1] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter 22.
[2] C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, “Letter 17.”
[3] Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, “Letter28.”
[4] Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, “Letter 16.”