On Sehnsucht

Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don't understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning . . . a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again.
~C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, (1950)

All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasises our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.
~C.S. Lewis, Letters, (Letter of November 5, 1959)

... the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live . . . what I learned to love in Phantastes was goodness . . . The deception is all the other way round - in that prosaic moralism which confines goodness to the region of Law and Duty, which never lets us feel in our face the sweet air blowing from "the land of righteousness."
~C.S. Lewis, preface to George Macdonald: An Anthology, (1948)

We do not want merely to see beauty . . . We want something else which can hardly be put into words - to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.
~C.S. Lewis, Transposition and Other Addresses, (1949)

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On this day:

1931 Lewis returns to a belief "that Jesus Christ is the Son of God" while riding to Whipsnade Zoo in the sidecar of brother Warren's motorcycle.
(from A Year With C.S. Lewis)