This terrible little notebook (A Grief Observed)

What would [Helen Joy] herself think of this terrible little notebook to which I come back and back? Are these jottings morbid? I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.’ That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. Do these notes merely aggravate that side of it? Merely confirm the monotonous, tread-mill march of the mind round one subject? But what am I to do? I must have some drug, and reading isn’t a strong enough drug now. By writing it all down (all? - no: one thought in a hundred) I believe I get a little outside it. That’s how I’d defend it to [Helen Joy]. But ten to one she’d see a hole in the defence.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 10-11.

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