The first major shake up in Lewis’ life was his mother’s death.

It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.” But then joy is never in our power and pleasure often is…Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. “ is an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction…Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again.Īpart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief.

To Lewis, these experiences underlined the meaning of joy. It had taken only a moment of time and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison…It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure something, as they would now say, ‘in another dimension’.” “It was a sensation, of course, of desire but desire for what? and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. In his childhood, CS Lewis loved to create fantasy worlds, such as Animal-Land. Even as a child, Lewis had several experiences in his childhood that created a sense of desire for something greater. He was brought up by educated and affluent parents and was exposed to reading from a young age.

In this book CS Lewis describes his personal journey from Atheism to Christianity.

Cs lewis joy book