The Imagination and Life of C.S. Lewis

I received for Christmas, and quickly finished reading, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis, by Wheaton College (IL) English professor Alan Jacobs.  The subtitle is accurate, and the second part of it the subtitle is the key to why it's a fascinating, occasionally stirring book.  Jacobs foregoes a simple chronological biography and spends a lot of time on the themes in Lewis's writing.  He argues that the Narnia stories are not just what Lewis is most widely known for.  The fantasy stories are the key to understanding the whole range of his writing -- apologetics, literary criticism, moral critiques -- because for Lewis it was the "enchanting power of stories" that most fully revealed, if still only partially, the truth about good and evil, human purpose, God and the "joy" that is the object of our almost unutterable longings.

The book closes on this idea with a frequently-quoted passage from "The Weight of Glory," Lewis's 1941 sermon at the University Church in Oxford.  Although it's about literature and music -- and I think that law is different from those -- it also calls up some associations with the enterprise of law as a partial reflection of the ultimate law and the ultimate ends of human beings.  Jacobs calls the passage "the whole of what Narnia represents" and adds that "[i]f this thought has a future, then so does Narnia, and so does the body of C.S. Lewis's writing":

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.

Tom