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Library of Congress Marriage of Heaven and Hell Plate 2, Copy D |
https://ramhornd.blogspot.com/2011/01/blakes-nakedness_16.html
Preface to The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis:
https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20140726
Blake wrote the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If I have written of their
Divorce, this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great
a genius, nor even because I feel at all sure that I know what he meant.
But in some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is
perennial. The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents
us with an absolutely unavoidable ‘either-or’; that, granted skill and
patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both
alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or
refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on
for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain.
This belief I take to be a disastrous error. You cannot take all luggage
with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your
right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind. We are not
living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if
followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally
meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few
miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork
you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a
river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it
and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection.
Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil
but from other good.
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue
consists in being put back on the right road. A wrong sum can be put
right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it
afresh from that point, never by simply _going on_. Evil can be undone,
but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must
be unwound, bit by bit, ‘with backward mutters of dissevering power’—or
else not. It is still ‘either-or’. If we insist on keeping Hell (or even
earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able
to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell. I
believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what
he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that
the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes
will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in ‘the High
Countries’. In that sense it will be true for those who have completed
the journey (and for no others) to say that good is everything and Heaven everywhere. But we, at this end of the road, must not try to anticipate that retrospective vision. If we do, we are likely to embrace the false and disastrous converse and fancy that everything is good and everywhere is Heaven.
But what, you ask, of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone
to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead
of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell:
and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a
part of Heaven itself.
There are only two things more to be said about this small book. Firstly,
I must acknowledge my debt to a writer whose name I have forgotten and
whom I read several years ago in a highly coloured American magazine of
what they call ‘Scientifiction’. The unbendable and unbreakable quality
of my heavenly matter was suggested to me by him, though he used the
fancy for a different and most ingenious purpose. His hero travelled into
the _past_: and there, very properly, found raindrops that would pierce
him like bullets and sandwiches that no strength could bite—because, of
course, nothing in the past can be altered. I, with less originality but
(I hope) equal propriety have transferred this to the eternal. If the
writer of that story ever reads these lines I ask him to accept my
grateful acknowledgment. The second thing is this. I beg readers to
remember that this is a fantasy. It has of course—or I intended it to
have—a moral. But the transmortal conditions are solely an imaginative
supposal: they are not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually
await us. The last thing I wish is to arouse factual curiosity about the
details of the after-world.
C. S. Lewis
_April, 1945_.
