More than an autobiography or memoir, Surprised by Joy is really autoenthnography, a philosophy of holistic aesthetic longing, or Joy. “I knew nothing about Balder but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it” ( Surprised By Joy, ch. The pleasure of reading these words was quite different from other pleasures he had experienced as a youth, more “like a voice from far more distant regions….” In his autobiography, Lewis goes on to describe his experience of reading Norse saga: He read these words that forever changed him:Īs a young man he was quite drawn to the experience of aesthetic pleasure. Lewis casually turned to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s death-dirge in the tradition of a northern epic poem, Tegner’s Drapa.
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