“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.” -C.S. Lewis
With the Weight of Glory quote from earlier in the year, I believe this quote solidifies C.S. Lewis as someone who has thought deeply about the nature of beauty. This quote come from his book Till We Have Faces, which is one of my favorite Lewis books. The mountain represents what the characters don't understand and this particular character is expressing an innate longing within her where the unknown and the beautiful are one and the same. The aspect of this quote that strikes me is where she says "the place where I ought to have been born." I think this is getting at a particular emotion in humankind where we believe we something isn't quite right with the world. Our sense that things "should be made right" and our viewing of the nightly news do not add up and so we want to be somewhere else. This somewhere else is not foreign to us but where we are supposed to be, home. it is a "place" where things like beauty and truth and goodness are.
Lewis was a Christian, and so this is inherently a religious sentiment. But even those who do not find themselves to be part of an organized religion express similar sentiments, that is, they express and live out a particular spirituality that seeks after beauty, truth and goodness.
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