The Transformative Power of Memory: Lewis and the Great Wars #LestWeForget

A Pilgrim in Narnia

The first reader of C.S. Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy, might be puzzled by the fact that WWI—the catastrophe that decided the fate of so many of Europe’s great thinkers and artists and inventors—makes up very little of Lewis’ narrative. “It is even in a way unimportant,” Lewis wrote in a longish paragraph that talks about the death of his mother, the realities of trench warfare, a shivering French mouse, environmental and other kinds of mental degradation, cold feet and heroes tales and

“horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet…”

As vivid as his narrative is, Lewis is not anxious to root his life to the Great War, even though it was fateful for him. Every day is fateful…

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