a grief observed.

i just read a c.s. lewis book. he wrote it after his wife died. actually i think it's his journal. i haven't dealt with a death like he did, so i don't relate to it in that sense. but there were some really good quotes in it that apply to any kind of sadness.

he goes through stages in this book...so some of these sound hopeless or pessimistic. but that's how sadness goes.

"There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me."

"I was happy before I ever met her. I've plenty of what are called 'resources.' People get over these things. Come, I shan't do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this 'commonsense' vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace."

"On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos...I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it - that disgusts me."

"Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."

"At first I was very afraid of going to places where she and I had been happy - our favourite pub, our favourite wood...Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else."

"I have no photograph of her that's any good. I cannot even see her face distincly in my imagination."

"Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand."

"Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the spiritualists bait their hook! 'Things on this side are not so different after all.'...For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored."

"Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less?"

"And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned her least, I remembered her best."

"This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged."

"God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't."

"Did you ever know how much you took away with you when you left?"