I’ve just re-immersed myself in the radiant beauty of the Dawn Treader’s voyage through the Silver Sea. Goodness knows how many times I’ve read it, with unfailing awe and joy, as a boy, as a privately reading adult and as a parent and grandparent reading to children. It’s vivid proof of Lewis’s point that for someone who enjoys rereading books, knowing what’s to come doesn’t diminish the pleasure of narrative surprise but sharpens it: you feel the future turn actively swelling within the present moment rather than merely succeeding it. As Lewis says, “children understand this well when they ask … Continue Reading

The only actual verse by C S Lewis that I’ve read is what’s quoted in Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia, where it didn’t catch my imagination in the way Ward’s discussion of Lewis’s ideas did. However, I do think of Lewis as essentially a poet, concerned with crystallising states of being or strong emotions in scenes or pictures that live in the timeless present of the lyrical imagination. There are many such moments in the Narnia books, of course – moments which feel as if a strong light of meanings beyond analytical formulation is shining through them. I’m not talking here … Continue Reading