Quantcast
Channel: Vault of Books » C.S. Lewis
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4

Review: A Grief Observed

0
0

By:C.S. Lewis.  Grade:A+

Written after his wife’s tragic death as a way of surviving the “mad midnight moment,” A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis’s honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period: “Nothing will shake a man — or at any rate a man like me — out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.” This is a beautiful and unflinchingly honest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings.

A Grief ObservedC.S. Lewis always brings new ideas to the table and in such a poignant way that touches the very core of your heart. This book was hard to read because it dealt with grief, something most of us have gone through, which can be a source of such emotional stress. This book was like removing all the fluff and dealing with the hardness and harshness of life. But more specifically, C.S. Lewis’ life. I have never seen such a naked and bare view of this intellectual great. It goes to prove that who we are comes to light in the hard places of life.

This transcription is the closest I’ve ever come to crying over a book. Even though these were his notes through this process and not something that he necessarily worked at to communicate effectively with, you could feel the emotion and the pain coming off the pages. Maybe it’s different for each person who has experienced different degrees of grief. Maybe what I was feeling was a reflection of my own emotional experiences, but whatever it is, you get the sense that C.S. Lewis is in pain and that makes all of his writings the more bearable and the more eaiser to listen to, because he knows the pain too.

In this pain he deals with his doubts about God. Not the issue about whether or not there is a God but who God really is. He is brutally honest with God and with himself. And in the end it’s not like the pain is suddenly gone, he just “misunderstands a little less completely.”

It is so interesting, this is like a true journal or diary. When he starts to right himself back up from this overwhelming sense of grief it’s not like we see it gradually come, as the conclusions of his other books show; It is almost, almost, sudden but still filled with clarity. You still kind of wish you could have been there each day because you know he didn’t document each moment of this revelation. He himself said that he was only writing down one thought in one hundred that he was thinking.

When you finish the book you will come out with grief analyzed in some ways. Maybe with some pointers on how to deal with your own grief. But definitely with the sense that you aren’t alone when you are grieving. Someone has gone through this too. And maybe that’s what makes this book so valuable. Having someone inside being able to write out what he was feeling in those very moments, shedding some light on what’s happening inside of you.

A nineteen year old who likes to write essays, code websites and dance. She loves math and science, along with love logic and reasoning. She is not terribly athletic and doesn’t know how she feels about the color pink. If she could go back in time she would see the first space shuttle launch. Her favorite author is C.S. Lewis because he talks about things from a different angle than she has heard before. He has raised new questions for her to ask while building her up. The best kind of friend she thinks; she wishes she could have met him.

She has written a lot of reviews for non-fiction books but she also likes fantasy and a few books by Meg Cabot and similar authors.

The post Review: A Grief Observed appeared first on Vault of Books.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images