Surprised by Joy

Lewis’s interior world during the period before he left to join the Army was under strain. He began to find that the more learned he became in his Norse mythology, the less often he could find Joy in it—and trying to feel Joy became his major motivation. From his present perspective, he explains that he had made a categorical error of the same kind he made as a child when he tried to force himself to really feel his prayers. Joy was not a thing he could control, and it in itself was not the good he hoped for. It emerged from total immersion in a longing for something else, and, her writes:

[…] the very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There, to have is to want and to want is to have. Thus, the very moment when I longed to be so stabbed again, was itself again such a stabbing (166).

Frustrated, Lewis found himself torn between a materialist worldview and a desire for something more. He continued to reject Christianity: The idea of an omnipresent God bothered that part of him that wished to be independent and alone.