A time to heal.

I finally finished reading That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis, the third book in his space trilogy that I’ve been meaning to get to for years. On the whole, there’s a lot I probably didn’t understand, and it’s a little heavy on the sci-fi stuff (a little too heavy for my taste), but every once in a while he has these passages that make you stop and be still and marvel at his Clarity.

Like this passage, for instance:

…if one is thinking simply of goodness in the abstract, one soon reaches the fatal idea of something standardized—some common kind of life to which all nations ought to progress. Of course, there are universal rules to which all goodness must conform. But that’s only the grammar of virtue. It’s not there that the sap is. He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same: how much less two saints, two nations, two angels. The whole work of healing [the Earth] depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each. (pp. 368-369)

And then later on you read the news, and it’s all a bunch of fucked-up shit that just won’t ever stop, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so you go back to the stuff you read the night before and you write it down because that’s the only way to hang on.

Instead of pouring over endless news articles filled with what I can assure you will be 99% sensationalized speculation, I encourage you to look away from it, to nurse that little spark…yes, that one…that one right there…

and heal the Earth.