An enchanting exercise for an everyday Tuesday
It should only take five minutes (or five hours, depending on your approach)
Today, in my wanderings across the Internet, I came across someone who advised taking the writings of great authors (she mentioned Dostoevsky and C.S. Lewis) and copying them out by hand, in order to absorb the way they sound and feel, their rhythms and byways of thought and speech.
And since, as you know, I especially love the writing of C.S. Lewis, this advice caught my eye. I thought I might do that, and I thought you might like to do that too.
So here, on an everyday Tuesday, is one of Lewis’s extraordinary passages, for you to read and, if you’re so inclined, to write out by hand.
It’s from a sermon called “The Weight of Glory,” and I hope you love it as I do.
“In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be ever…”
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I know that this Kindred Letter probably found you in the middle of your workday, or your exercise routine, or en route to the grocery store. But try stopping for a minute and inhaling these rhythms. And see what happens.
And if you’d like to share your thoughts, or share with a friend, or subscribe, you can do all those things here:
I have heard that in some silent retreats, copying is a meditation technique.
I will occasionally take a passage of an author like John O’Donohue and recreate a paragraph (on the subject of beauty or friendship, for example) into a poem. This changes the thought pace and offers so much room for depth and connection. I put these into a journal.
Thank you for reaching deep into my heart on this cold, dark, January evening. I’m just beginning to read more CSLewis, and this passage caused an emotional reaction. Longing is such a powerful word. And I love those paintings.