#cs lewis

[narniansteel]

Every time I saw this as a kid I was like "That's Tash"

[blackdragontavern]

"Grow Up to Be a Wizard: Peter Pan and the Myth of Adulthood"

When I was ten years old, I told a bitter old scholar that I never wanted to grow up.

He looked at me, dead in the eye, and said, "Then die now."

He was my tutor while I was living with my grandfather in Ireland. He was an old soldier, an Oxford man, and had known J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis well enough to keep their letters tucked away in his desk like relics. After telling a ten-year-old to drop dead, he finally explained himself.

He said, "That is the closest man gets to immortality. But remember this: children are powerless. They can do almost nothing on their own. Only a grown person has true power. We are wizards, making the impossible possible. But only in the hearts of children does magic live."

I think about that constantly, especially now. We have spent the last fifty years entirely demonizing the concept of growing up. We look around at modern media, and adulthood is exclusively framed as a trap. The men are sad buffoons, the women are exhausted geniuses, and the cultural battle cry is a relentless, exhausting chorus of, "Adulting is hard."

We are a society obsessed with Peter Pan. We are terrified of becoming Mr. Darling or Captain Hook, desperately clinging to the idea that growing up inherently means losing our magic.

But my tutor was right. Adulthood isn't a curse. It is a tool.

Think of the people who actually lived this way. The adults who used their power to build magic. Two dreamers in Ohio building a machine to literally touch the sky. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby giving a fractured world modern mythology. Hayao Miyazaki bringing paper to life in ways no one else ever could, and Jim Henson crafting entire, breathing universes out of felt and foam.

Growing up is the forge.

So rather than whine about growing old, make sure the child you were lives long enough in your heart to help the adult you become make the impossible real.

Grow up, traveler. But grow up to be a wizard. Stay bloodthirsty.

[eatthebearfirst]

A very wise man. Unfortunately, niceness has turned into "Suicidal empathy " in many cases, along with many other ideals, actions and "isms" which are destructive to Western society.

[bookworm-returning]

[stormypetrol]

Steve Taylor, like C.S. Lewis, had objections to the "modern" Christian church.

This disco used to be a cute cathedral, where the chosen cha-cha every day of the week. This disco used to be a cute cathedral, but we got no room if you ain't gonna be chic!

Got no need for altar calls; they sold the altar for the mirror balls. Do the shuffle, do the twist... that's right! Let's go. (turns, walks out)

Sunday, July 12, 2026

[i-ask-for-broadershoulders]

There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come. There are, of course, moments when the pressure of the excitement is so great that only superhuman self-control could resist it. They come both in war and peace. We must do the best we can.

- The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis

[emphasis added]

[andallshallbewell]

[arcenciel-par-une-larme]

I have tried…to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don’t mean simply by giving thanks for it. One must of course give thanks, but I mean something different. How shall I put it? We can’t—or I can’t—hear the song of a bird simply as a sound. Its meaning or message (‘That’s a bird’) comes with it inevitably—just as one can’t see a familiar word in print as a merely visual pattern. The reading is as involuntary as the seeing. When the wind roars I don’t just hear the roar; I ‘hear the wind.’ In the same way it is possible to ‘read’ as well as to ‘have’ a pleasure. Or not even ‘as well as.’ The distinction ought to become, and sometimes is, impossible; to receive it and to recognise its divine source are a single experience. This heavenly fruit is instantly redolent of the orchard where it grew. This sweet air whispers of the country from whence it blows. It is a message. We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasures for evermore. There need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event, something done afterwards. To experience the tiny theophany is itself to adore. Gratitude exclaims, very properly, ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says, ‘What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun. If I could always be what I aim at being, no pleasure would be too ordinary or too usual for such reception; from the first taste of the air when I look out of the window—one’s whole cheek becomes a sort of palate—down to one’s soft slippers at bed-time. I don’t always achieve it. One obstacle is inattention. Another is the wrong kind of attention. One could, if one practised, hear simply a roar and not the roaring-of-the-wind. In the same way, only far too easily, one can concentrate on the pleasure as an event in one’s own nervous system—subjectify it—and ignore the smell of Deity that hangs about it. A third obstacle is greed. Instead of saying, ‘This also is Thou,’ one may say the fatal word Encore. There is also conceit: the dangerous reflection that not everyone can find God in a plain slice of bread and butter, or that others would condemn as simply ‘grey’ the sky in which I am delightedly observing such delicacies of pearl and dove and silver.

-- C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm