Shadowlands

I can't seem to escape dear old Jack. I'm enrolled in a Lewis seminar for this semester, and so far I've read Surprised By Joy and A Grief Observed; the latter is a heartbreaker of a read. Would that my reflections on death and dying were as poignant and lyrical, and that I would have loved someone so deeply and truly by the end of all things. That, of course, is another theme for another post. On the other side, my Great Conversations class (for which I am only a TA) was required to both read The Four Loves and watch Shadowlands, the film about Lewis' coming to know and marry Joy Davidman Gresham, a woman very much Lewis' complement in arenas romantic, intellectual and spiritual. Lewis' longing for a world beyond this one, beyond the Shadowlands, as he called earth, was ever more clear in his relationship with Joy; "You are the truest person I have ever known," he tells her as she lies helpless on her hospital bed, suffering through the pain of cancer. And though he admits that his incessant seeking after the next world, the real world, has ever consumed his entire being, he carefully reminds Joy that he only started living after he met her. I'm eager to call theirs the poster of anti-romance, a relationship that almost works backwards, and yet I'm keenly aware of the influence each had on the other even when love followed marriage. Their rapport and sparring is inspiring, as is their honesty and mutual longing for the real life, for Heaven as it is both imagined and left to God's creative prowess.

George Knightley does it perfectly...

“I cannot make speeches, Emma:”- [Mr. Knightley] soon resumed; and in a tone of such sincere, decided, intelligible tenderness as was tolerably convincing.-”If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. …”


Emma, Volume III Chapter XIII