# “Devastating desire” by C.S. Lewis

- Link: https://tollelege.net/2015/03/10/devastating-desire-by-c-s-lewis/
- Published: 2015-03-10T16:00:47-05:00
- Author: tollelege

“I feel strongly, with you, that there was something more than a physical pleasure
in those youthful activities. Even now, at my age, do we often have a _purely_ physical
pleasure?

Well, perhaps, a few of the more hopelessly prosaic ones: say, scratching or getting
one’s shoes off when one’s feet are tired.

I’m sure my meals are not a purely physical pleasure. All the associations of every
other time one has had the same food (every rasher of bacon is now 56 years thick
with me) come in: and with the things like Bread, Wine, Honey, Apples, there are
all the echoes of myth, fairy-tale, poetry, and Scripture.

So that the physical pleasure is also imaginative and even spiritual. Every meal
can be a kind of lower sacrament.

‘Devastating gratitude’ is a good phrase: but my own experience is rather ‘devastating
desire’– desire for that-of-which-the-present-_joy_-is-a-Reminder.

All my life nature and art have been _reminding_ me of something I’ve never seen:
saying ‘Look! What does this– and this– remind you of?’

I am so glad that you find (as I do too) that life, far from getting dull and empty
as one grows older, opens out. It is like being in a house where one keeps on discovering
new rooms.”

–C.S. Lewis, [“To Mary Van Deusen” (March 3, 1955)](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060819227/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0060819227&linkCode=as2&tag=toletaupanre-20&linkId=SZIOWVYUBOTITWU3)
in [_The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963, Volume 3_](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060819227/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0060819227&linkCode=as2&tag=toletaupanre-20&linkId=SZIOWVYUBOTITWU3)(
Ed. Walter Hooper; New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 583-584.

More quotes from [C.S. Lewis](https://tollelege.net/category/cs-lewis/) · More on
[Art](https://tollelege.net/category/art/)