C.S. Lewis

Are you ever moved just by listening to someone talk about something that inspires them?

Yeah, that's how I felt when I read the preface to "George Macdonald" by C.S. Lewis. Maybe you'll enjoy it, too :)


"Most myths were made in prehistoric times, and, I suppose, not consciously made by individuals at all. but every now and then there accurs in the modern world a genius - a Kafka or a Novalis - who can make such a story. MacDonald is the greatest genius of this kind whom I know. But I do not know how to classify such genius. To call it literary genius seems unsatisfactory since it can coexist with great inferiority in the art of words - nay, since its connection with words at all turns out merely external and, in a sense, accidental. Nor can it be fitted into any of the other arts. It begins to look as if there were an art, or a gift, which criticism has largely ignored. It may even be one of the greated arts; for it produces works which give us (at the first meeting) as much delight and (on prolonged accuaintance) as much wisdom and strength as the greatest poets.
It is in some ways more akin to music than poetry - or at least to most poetry. It goes beyond the expression of things we have already felt. It arrouses in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of conciousness and "possessed joys not promised to our birth." It gets under our skin, hits us at a deeper level than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest certainties till all questions are reopened, and in general shocks us more fully awake than we are for most of our lives."


Am I the only one that finds that amazing? I can't even describe why... It just kind of 'hits me'...  And makes me want to read more George Macdonald...