from 'The Problem of Pain,' C.S. Lewis

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

"I see, lady, the gentleman is not in your books."

Personal digression about the C.S. Lewis God reveal: because I was raised an atheist, when I first started reading the Narnia chronicles the Jesus-analogies which would have been completely obvious to anyone else slipped right by me. Seriously, I didn't have a clue until the last goddamn page of The Last Battle, when Aslan-Jesus shows up and informs our beloved characters that they are all DEAD and that dying before you reach twenty is the BEST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU, and that this whole time Narnia was just Christian heaven. The frothing-furious, soul-searing betrayal I felt at this was beyond my ability to even process. Twenty-six years later I'm still mad, and also deeply disgusted at the idea of writing in a children's book that the character to be pitied is the one who WASN'T on the FATALLY CRASHING TRAIN. (Neil Gaiman wrote a short story about Susan, which could have been a really fascinating discussion of the dangers of a religion which focuses on the afterlife and innocence to the extent of condemning all real-life experiences, and what it's like to grow up after believing that, but what Gaiman actually wrote was bestiality porn. Sigh.)

- from the fabulous, fierce, and absolutely funny blog "Burning My Study," and why aren't you reading it NOW! Go!