Welcome to my first post!

Welcome to the more presentable parts of my innards: the things I love.

I will start you out with one of the most beautiful books I've ever read: "A Grief Observed" (Clive Staples Lewis).

When his wife died, Lewis used a journal to work through his grief process. He never intended to publish it until a friend convinced him it may help other grieving people. He eventually published it under a pen name.

I'd far rather read brutally honest theology written by someone who's desperate for answers than armchair theology. And I often feel irritated by limiting, flat stereotypes of femininity. His descriptions of "H." include some of my favorite gender quotes.

"For a good wife contains so many persons in herself. What was H. not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps more. If we had never fallen in love we should have none the less been always together, and created scandal. That’s what I meant when once I praised her for her ‘masculine virtues.’ But she soon put a stop to that by asking how I’d like to be praised for my feminine ones. It was a good riposte, dear. Yet there was something of the Amazon, something of Penthesileia and Camilla....

It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry 'masculine' when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them, to describe a man's sensitiveness or tact or tendernesss 'feminine.' But also what poor, warped fragments of humanity most mere men and mere women must be to make the implications of that arrogance plausible. Marriage heals this. Jointly the two become fully human."

One of the best literary experiences I've ever had was finally finishing "A Grief Observed" and then starting "Till We Have Faces". He wrote them around the same time, at the end of his writing career, even though he'd come up with the idea for "Faces" as a college student.

So many of the passionate emotions in his grief journal show up in Orual, the main character of "Faces". What a passionate intellectual C.S. Lewis was... a little pessimistic, though. Incredibly authentic, honest. And I can't get over the way he viewed his wife.

http://www.montreat.edu/dking/lewis/AGOasFreeVerse.htm

"His figurative language about Joy is rich though brief. She had a mind like a leopard, “lithe and quick and muscular . . . [able to scent] the first whiff of cant or slush; then [it] sprang, and knocked you over before you knew what was happening” (8).... The most striking simile he uses about Joy occurs when he writes she was “a splendid thing; a soul straight, bright, and tempered like a sword” (35).