#joy davidman

[metamorphesque]

from Joy Davidman's Valentine's Day Love Sonnets to C. S. Lewis

[lewisian]

I cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of all non-conductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop. I felt just the same after my own mother's death when my father mentioned her. I can't blame them. It's the way boys are. -C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I have always wanted the opportunity to explain one small thing that is in this book and which displays a misunderstanding. Jack refers to the fact that if he mentioned Mother, I would always seem to be embarrassed. He did not understand, which was very unusual for him. I was fourteen when Mother died and the product of almost seven years of British Preparatory School indoctrination. The lesson I was most strongly taught throughout that time was that the most shameful thing that could happen to me would be to be reduced to tears in public. British boys don't cry. But I knew that if Jack talked to me about Mother, I would weep uncontrollably and, worse still, so would he. This was the source of my embarrassment. It took me almost thirty years to learn how to cry without feeling ashamed. -Douglas Gresham, Introduction to A Grief Observed

[suzannahnatters]

TILL WE HAVE FACES is the platonic ideal towards which the entire romantasy genre is reaching. you will not change my mind.

[violettesiren]

XI You have such reasons for not loving me As would persuade the sunfire to go out, Divorce the moon from the obedient sea, Make rain fall upward, lead the rose to flout

The amorous honeybees, and talk the wind Out of a wandering life; as would compel Satan to consort with angelkind And Gabriel to wallow deep in hell.

The argument that keeps the sun in power Over his children, makes the firefly glow, Adorns the summer with her proper flower And decorates the winter with his snow,

Makes dead men rise and promises come true— Such reasons do I have for loving you.

from Love Sonnets to C.S. Lewis by Joy Davidman

[muse-write]

It is interesting that all my life I’ve heard of Joy Davidman as C.S. Lewis’s wife—not as the writer and poet and convert that she also was. And now I’m reading Patti Calahan’s Becoming Mrs. Lewis, in which a large part of Joy’s character is the desperate wish to be known as more than a housewife. I hope that irony comes up in the later part of the book.

[daily-rayless]

Orual the veiled queen from Till We Have Faces.

I've wanted to do a companion picture to my Psyche for a while. While Psyche is intriguing as an ideal, I think Orual is one of CS Lewis' most ambitious and psychologically authentic characters. An antagonist who's poignantly sympathetic, a protagonist who's frustratingly weak -- protective and powerful, self-deluding and dependent, deeply loving and endlessly devouring, mythically heroic yet the reader will see many of their own failures in her.

Lewis gets grief for some of his female characters, but with the help of his wife Joy Davidman (who was an actual genius, by the way, and doesn't deserve to exist in Lewis' shadow), Orual feels so believable to me. Faces isn't an easy book to read (and definitely isn't for kids), but I think it's fascinating, and Orual's a big part of that.

[oakashandwillow]

[myclutteredstudy]

“Snow In Madrid” Softly, so casual, Lovely, so light, so light, The cruel sky lets fall Something one does not fight. How tenderly to crown The brutal year The clouds send something down That one need not fear. Men before perishing See with unwounded eye For once a gentle thing Fall from the sky. -Joy Davidman