Surprised By Joy

I had a wish to reread this after the first stage in Narniathon, to understand better the spiritual process behind Lewis's writing. I found it frustratingly evasive in many ways, even as it was unusually articulate in others. Although Lewis tries his best to describe his elusive experience of “Joy” and how he was led from atheism to theism to Christianity, I was left uncertain as to what he really experiences and believes in the fullness of his soul. I suspect at the point of this writing, there was much he was unable to admit to himself, let alone to an audience. There is no wonder at Lewis being an emotionally wounded man, considering the many traumas he went through in his early years; like most of us, he covered these up and endured them as best he could, but that left him with some strange disjunctions in his inner life. It's only now that a fuller understanding of trauma is being unfolded and that new healing methods are being discovered. But even if he was unable to benefit from these, he was a seeker of healing in his own way. I still feel gratitude to him for all that he shared.

An additional note on the e-book edition I read: the proofreading was terrible and there were many mistakes left in from the scanning process (e.g. “Fie” for “He,” extraneous apostrophes, etc.) This is a disgrace for an edition of the work of a man who was meticulous with words. E-book publishers must be more careful about these errors.