What pitiable cant to say ‘She will live forever in my memory!’ Live? That is exactly what she won’t do. You might as well think like the old Egyptians that you can keep the dead by embalming them. Will nothing persuade us that they are gone? What’s left? A corpse, a memory, and (in some versions) a ghost. All mockeries or horrors. Three more ways of spelling the word dead. It was [Helen Joy] I loved. As if I wanted to fall in love with my memory of her, an image in my own mind! It would be a sort of incest.
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 18-19.
What attracted me to the quote below was, what it was that caused him to come to this conclusion.
ReplyDelete"What pitiable cant to say ‘She will live forever in my memory!’ Live? That is exactly what she won’t do. You might as well think like the old Egyptians that you can keep the dead by embalming them. Will nothing persuade us that they are gone? What’s left? A corpse, a memory, and (in some versions) a ghost. All mockeries or horrors. Three more ways of spelling the word dead. It was [Helen Joy] I loved. As if I wanted to fall in love with my memory of her, an image in my own mind! It would be a sort of incest."
It seems that C.S. Lewis seemingly gets it right by virtue of his unpleasant statement above. He rejects the idea that his wife has gone anywhere but the grave, and at the same time he rejects the idea of her somewhere in heavenly bliss being able to communicate with him.
If he has hopes in Jesus Christ the life giver and the resurrection he shall see his wife again.
Stay tuned, Andy... Lewis has something important to say about this "reunion" in heaven idea.
ReplyDeleteBut his point in this paragraph is addressing this idea of keeping someone "alive" in your memory. He's attacking the idea that this is somehow a consolation. With the previous day's post, I think you can see what he's trying to say. He misses his wife Joy. She is dead. Even if he conjures up his memories of Joy (which may not be 100% accurate), she is still not alive with him. She is dead. He is alive and alone. Taking comfort in his memory of Joy, loving the Joy in his mind is fleeting and not really the real Joy, but more like a ghost.
All I can say further is that this writing is more emotional than theological or even just logical. He's writing out of the experience of grief, not out of the theology of resurrection or suffering.