Something East or West of the World

What is universal is not the particular picture, but the arrival of some message, not perfectly intelligible, which wakes this desire and sets men longing for something East or West of the world; something possessed, if at all, only in the act of desiring it, and lost so quickly that the craving itself becomes craved; something that tends inevitably to be confused with common or even with the satisfactions lying close to hand, yet which is able, if any man faithfully live through the dialectic of its successive births and deaths, to lead him at last where true joys are to be found. [...]one, at least had carried this new form of the desire right up to its natural conclusion and found what he had really been wanting. He wrote it all down in what he called a Comedy.
~C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

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On this day:

1933 The Pilgrim's Regress is published by J. M. Dent, London.