Preface
Blake wrote the Marriage
of Heaven & Hell. If I have written of their Divorce, this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great a
genius, nor even because I feel at all sure that I know what he meant.
But in some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is perennial. The
attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an
absolutely unavoidable "either-or"; that, granted skill &
patience & (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives
can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will
somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final & total
rejection of anything we should like to retain. This
belief I take to be a disastrous error. You cannot
take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand &
your right eye may be among the things you have
to leave behind. We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle & where all, if followed
long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer
& finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a
few miles, forks into 2, & each of those
into 2 again, & at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a pool but like a
tree. It does not move towards unity but away from
it & the creatures grow further apart as they increase in
perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only
from evil but from other good.
I do not
think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in
being put back on the right road. A wrong sum can be put right: but only by
going back till you find the error & working it afresh from that point,
never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot "develop"
into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit,
"with backward mutters of dissevering power"--or else not. It is
still "either-or." If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we
shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not
be able to retain even the smallest & most intimate souvenirs of Hell.
I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he
abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) was precisely nothing: that the
kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be
there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in "the High Countries."
In that sense it will be true for those who have completed the journey (&
for no others) to say that good is everything & Heaven everywhere. But we,
at this end of the road, must not try to anticipate that retrospective vision.
If we do, we are likely to embrace the false & disastrous converse &
fancy that everything is good & everywhere is Heaven.
But what, you ask,
of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct
place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven,
will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: &
earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of
Heaven itself.
There are
only 2 things more to be said about this small book. Firstly, I must
acknowledge my debt to a writer whose name I have forgotten & whom I read
several years ago in a highly-coloured American magazine of what they call
"Scientifiction." The unbendable & unbreakable quality of my Heavenly
matter was suggested to me by him, though he used the fancy for a different &
most ingenious purpose. His hero travelled into the past: & there, very properly,
found raindrops that would pierce him like bullets & sandwiches that no
strength could bite--because, of course, nothing in
the past can be altered. I, with less originality but (I hope) equal
propriety, have transferred this to the eternal. If the writer of that story
ever reads these lines I hope he will accept my grateful acknowledgment. The second thing is this. I beg readers to remember that
this is a fantasy. It has of course--or I intended it to have--a moral. But the
transmortal conditions are solely an imaginative supposal: they are not even a
guess or a speculation at what may actually await us. The last thing I wish is
to arouse factual curiosity about the details of the After-world.
-- C.S. Lewis
No comments:
Post a Comment