Death Will Shake You from Mere Verbal Thinking
"Feelings, feelings, and feelings. let me try thinking instead. what grounds has it given my for doubting all that i believe? I knew already that these things, and worse, happened daily. I would have said that i had taken them into account. I had been warned - I had warned myself - not to reckon on worldly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'blessed are they that mourn,' and I accepted it. I've got nothing that i hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination. Yes; but should it, for a sane man, make quite such a difference as this? No. And it wouldn't for a man whose faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people's sorrow had been real concern. The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which 'took these things into account' was not faith but imagination. The taking them into account was not real sympathy. If i had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my sorrow came. It has been an imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labelled 'illness,' 'pain,' 'death,' and 'loneliness.' I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find it didn't.
Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game, 'or else people won't take it seriously,' - apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high; until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man - or at any rate a man like me - out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself."
- C.S. Lewis: A Grief Observed, pp. 41-44
Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game, 'or else people won't take it seriously,' - apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high; until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man - or at any rate a man like me - out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself."
- C.S. Lewis: A Grief Observed, pp. 41-44
