Perelandra

This is one of my all-time favorite books by Lewis!

I read it for the first time in 2003 in my college course on the fiction of C. S. Lewis.

Favorite quotes:

“On the contrary, it is words that are vague. The reason why the thing can't be expressed is that it's too definite for language.”

“Words are slow.”

“Were all the things which appeared as mythology on Earth scattered through other worlds as realities?”

“at that moment he had a sensation not of following an adventure but of enacting a myth.”

“He remembered his old suspicion that what was myth in one world might always be fact in some other.”

“Or were the old myths truer than the modern myths? Had there in truth been a time when satyrs danced in the Italian woods?”

“Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places.”

“Long since on Mars, and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact was purely terrestrial—was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the Fall. Even on Earth the sacraments existed as a permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome nor final. The Incarnation had been the beginning of its disappearance. In Perelandra it would have no meaning at all. Whatever happened here would be of such a nature that earthmen would call it mythological. All this he had thought before. Now he knew it. The Presence in the darkness, never before so formidable, was putting these truths into his hands, like terrible jewels.”

“in the very matter of our world, the traces of the celestial commonwealth are not quite lost. Memory passes through the womb and hovers in the air. The Muse is a real thing. A faint breath, as Virgil says, reaches even the late generations. Our mythology is based on a solider reality than we dream: but it is also at an almost infinite distance from that base. And when they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was—gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility.”

““Farewell, Friend and Savior, farewell,” said both voices. “Farewell till we three pass out of the dimensions of time. Speak of us always to Maleldil as we speak always of you. The splendor, the love, and the strength be upon you.””