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Lewis’s interior world during the period before he left to join the Army was under strain. He began to find that the more learned he became in his Norse mythology, the less often he could find Joy in it—and trying to feel Joy became his major motivation. From his present perspective, he explains that he had made a categorical error of the same kind he made as a child when he tried to force himself to really feel his prayers. Joy was not a thing he could control, and it in itself was not the good he hoped for. It emerged from total immersion in a longing for something else, and, her writes:
[…] the very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There, to have is to want and to want is to have. Thus, the very moment when I longed to be so stabbed again, was itself again such a stabbing (166).
Frustrated, Lewis found himself torn between a materialist worldview and a desire for something more. He continued to reject Christianity: The idea of an omnipresent God bothered that part of him that wished to be independent and alone.
By C. S. Lewis
A Grief Observed
C. S. Lewis
Mere Christianity
C. S. Lewis
Out of the Silent Planet
C. S. Lewis
Perelandra
C. S. Lewis
Prince Caspian
C. S. Lewis
That Hideous Strength
C. S. Lewis
The Abolition of Man
C. S. Lewis
The Discarded Image
C. S. Lewis
The Four Loves
C. S. Lewis
The Great Divorce
C. S. Lewis
The Horse And His Boy
C. S. Lewis
The Last Battle
C. S. Lewis
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
C. S. Lewis
The Magician's Nephew
C. S. Lewis
The Pilgrim's Regress
C. S. Lewis
The Problem of Pain
C. S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis
The Silver Chair
C. S. Lewis
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
C. S. Lewis
Till We Have Faces
C. S. Lewis