# “You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness” by C.S. Lewis

- Link: https://tollelege.net/2018/01/31/you-and-i-have-need-of-the-strongest-spell-that-can-be-found-to-wake-us-from-the-evil-enchantment-of-worldliness-by-c-s-lewis/
- Published: 2018-01-31T12:00:15-06:00
- Author: tollelege

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves
even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency.

I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which
hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia
and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness
that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we
grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot
tell, though we desire to do both.

We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared
in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting
it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.

Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the
matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own
past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the
past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what
he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering.

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us
if we trust to them; it was not _in them_, it only came _through them_, and what
came through them was longing. These things– the beauty, the memory of our own past–
are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing
itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.

For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not
found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet
visited.

Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy
tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them.

And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from
the evil enchantment of worldliness which has laid upon us for nearly a hundred 
years.”

–C.S. Lewis, “[The Weight of Glory](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060653205?tag=toletaupanre-20),”
in _[The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060653205?tag=toletaupanre-20)_(
New York: Harper Collins, 1949/2001), 29-31.

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