Used Books
I love the experience of reading a used book. There’s something about thinking that the pages have been experienced by someone else that makes it interesting to me. I look at the words and wonder what the other person thought when their eyes passed over them. Recently I have started reading “The Great Divorce” by C.S. Lewis. I was given the book by someone close to me. The book is very interesting to me, and it is basically a fantasy about what what it would be like, as a citizen of Hell, to take a trip to Heaven.
Physically the book is in great condition. I noticed that there was one page that had the corner folded over. When I received the book, I assumed that this was just a random stopping point, an easy way of marking where they were. Maybe this is still true, maybe that’s how this corner was folded. But then I wondered if there was another reason. As I read through the pages, there seemed to be nothing that would warrant flagging for its own sake. Then, at the end of the page marked, I read this:
“Ye cannot in your present state understand eternity…” “… But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. This is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences’: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”
This is a great part of my Joy. I am living at the very beginning of eternity.
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