We can foresee our own death while keenly desiring to go on living.

With just enough happiness to give us an agonized fear of losing it.

And when lost, the poignant misery of remembering how good it felt.

So, if you asked me to believe all this I've just described as a work of an omnipotent, benevolent God.

To direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root,

From senseless work to a workman infinitely wise? Staggers belief

Had an estranged relationship with my father, that I regret even now

Only to see horribly smashed man, still moving about like crushed beetles.

A mortar shell that wounded me, killed the man next to me, splattering shrapnel, some of which I carried my body to this day.

Were you much frightened in France? All the time, but I never sank so low as to pray.

Father was a solicitor in Belfast, Ireland.

He was Welsh by blood, passionate, rhetorical, laughed and cried a great deal.

Mother was of a cooler rance. She was tranquil, affectionate.

As an experienced traveler goes for the best seat on the train.

Books suitable for a child and books emphatically not.

I almost literally read my way through the house.

And as our whole existance changed into something alien and menacing.

The house became full of strange smells, midnight noises, and sinister whispered conversations.

My brother Warnie and I lost our mother gradually as she was slowly withdrawn from our life and the hands of nurses, delirium, and morphea.

My brother Warnie and I lost our mother gradually as she was slowly withdrawn from our life and the hands of nurses, delirium, and morphea.

We were two frightened urchins, huddled for warnth in a bleak world.

Mother's death occationed what some might say at the time, my first religous experience.

When my mother's case was first pronounced hopeless, I remembered what I have been taught.

I set myself to produce in prayer, a firm belief for her recovery. When she died, I shifted ground.

I approached God, not as a savior, but as a magician. I simply wanted himt to restore the status quo.

Mother's death, among other things, produced in me a deeply ingrained pessimism.

The universe in the main was a rather regretable institution.

Father's melancholy was a contributing factor. A prosperous man who my our present tax-ridden standards would be describe as incredibly secure.

Expressed adule life as one unremitting struggle.

Best one to hope for, according to him, was to avoid the workhouse.

This only by extreme exertion.

Temperamental widower still grieving the loss of his wife, must be very wise to raise two noisy school boys, who reserve their confidence only to each other.

The same scene, reenacted time after time.

When he opened his mouth to reprove us, he no doubt intended a short well-chosen appeal to our common sense.

But alas, he had been a public prosecutor (起诉人), long before he becomes a father.

Words came to him, and intoxicated him as they came.

Never, in all my born days, have I come accross such a recalcitrant behavior.

Deliberate disobedience, such as would dismay the very founders of our civilization.

What happened was a small boy who left the bathroom in a pickle, found himself attacked like Cicero on Catiline

Simile on simile, rhetorical question on rhetorical question, the flash of an orator's eye,

The gestures, the cadences, the pauses: The pauses were the chief danger.

One was so long, that my brother, assuming the denunciation to have ended, humbly picked up his book and resumed reading. A gesture which my father, who had only made a rhetorical miscalculation of about a second and a half described as - Cool, premeditated, insolent.

One was so long, that my brother, assuming the denunciation to have ended, humbly picked up his book and resumed reading. A gesture which my father, who had only made a rhetorical miscalculation of about a second and a half described as - Cool, premeditated, insolent.

The disproportion between the tirades, and what prompted them, was ludicrous.

Perhaps I should board up the house.

The career of crime, on which you have both already embarked.

At school all teachers and book editors took it for granted that religion was some sort of endemic nonsense into which humanity tend to blunder

At school all teachers and book editors took it for granted that religion was some sort of endemic nonsense into which humanity tend to blunder

What could be more natural to suppose they were animated by spirits and that by singing songs and making sacrifices one might appease him.

A cult sprang up and Christianity began.

Oh, the superstitions always held by the common people.

I was not prepared to believe in a bogey man, who would torture me forever.

I underwent a successful assault of sexual temptation.

The electric effect was a dancing mistress.

I love the smell of bunting. And I was undone.

Dainty toes, very good, Danty toes.

But now I labor hard to become a fop, a cad, and a snob.

I couldn't tell my father my change of belief. He was no fool. He even had a streak of genius.

For a man that is formidable in court and I presume efficient in his office. He has more power for confusing an issue, than any man I have ever known.

Attempted to correct his version produced an incredulous.

I would not have valued a straw, the beauty of the authorized version, the Christian tradition. Oh, it was all sentiment.

I would not have valued a straw, the beauty of the authorized version, the Christian tradition. Oh, it was all sentiment.

And if I tried to make the exact point clear, there would have been a thunder from him and a thin peevish rattle from me, nor could the subject ever have been dropped.

And if I tried to make the exact point clear, there would have been a thunder from him and a thin peevish rattle from me, nor could the subject ever have been dropped.

In a surprisingly short time, this tutor had so rebuilt the ruins of Warnie's education, that he passed into Sandhurst, and recieved a prize army cadetship.

Seeing my brother's progress, I finally plucked up the courage to ask.

I tried to look grave. No other boys, Never to play games. I was transported.

His grip was like iron pincers.

His grip was like iron pincers.

I remember feeling the need of make conversation in the deplorable manner. I felt necessary to use with my father.

As answer after answer was torn into shreds.

Kirk lived with his wife in a confortable and secluded cottage on the edge of the village.

Most boys would have cowered at all this.

Off for a walk by two, not with a friend. Walking and talking are two great pleasures, but it's a mistake to combine them.

Our noise blocks out the sounds and sliences of the outer world.

Work until 7, deep into the classics, not sparing the horses.

Good talk all evening, all chanlleging, brain-rattling stuff.

In bed by 11, unless you are making a night of it, at the pub with your cronies.

Homer first. Oh still relish the brightness and music of it.

Later when I met him, I was awed by his personality and he rejected the whole materialist philosophy out of hand.

A ravenous desire for the supernatural.

Or, to put it bluntly, the occult.

No connection of my atheism swayed me in different moods.

And it was scorned by both the Christian and the rationalists.

Had there been an elder in the neighborhood who dabbled in dirt, oh, they have a nose for potential disciples.

While waiting for the train, I rummaged in the second hand bookstore, and picked out an unusual title: 'Phantastes'.

As I began to read my new book, I was electrified. I felt like a miner who had struck gold.

Oh, if I could only let go, unmake myself.

When my brother brought the lid of a biscuit tin garnished with twigs and flowers to make a toy garden.

When my brother brought the lid of a biscuit tin garnished with twigs and flowers to make a toy garden.

A sensation of desire.

At 18, I arrived at Oxford, the fable cluster of towers and dreaming spires.

Except that night nurse was conducting a furious affair with my roomate.

No, not jokes, still less a tone of flippancy.

Rather, his humor was the bloom of his argument.

I did not have the cynics nose for hypocrisy and smugness so common among my peers.

After my convalescence, I returned to the frontlines.

And I, whoever that may be, cared not two farthings.

It was a ghastly interruption to rational life.

When I returned to Oxford, I put on a new look, which meant to act with the greatest good sense, and to have no more flirtations with the supernatural.

I spent a fortnight with a man I dearly loved, who was going mad.

I held him as he wallowed on the floor and screamed "Devils are tearing me apart."

But I took it as a warning to stay on the beaten track.

Barfield bought up all the abominations.

There is a hopeless discord between what our minds claim to be and what they really must be.

Human reason is merely cognitive maps resulting from natural selection, with random mutations over millions of years to confer on humans a reproductive advantage over other species.

Mind, reason, imagination, consciousness must be more than mere biochemistry. Something further up, further in.

Still it had immense potency.

Within the faculty, I befriended Hugo Dyson.

Oh, these queer people were popping up on every side.

George McDonald had done more to me than any other writer. Of course he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity.

George McDonald had done more to me than any other writer. Of course he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He is good in spite of it.

My fellow tutor, the hardest boiled atheist I'd ever known.

I was shattered.

Before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered a moment of free choice.

I could unbuckle the armor, or keep it on.

Into my mind, crept a horrible novelty.

What I found appalled me.

Amiable agnostics talk cheerfully of man's search for God.

But no one talked glibly of the comforts of religion.

I knew I would not allow my self to do anything intolerablly painful.

As the dry bones shook in Ezekiel's dreadful valley, the absolute spirit began to stir and heave and throw off its grave clothes.

The steady unrelenting approach of him, whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.

The most dejected, reluctant convert in all England.

I did not then see the divine love that would accept a prodigal on such terms.

His compulsion is my liberation.

I call a line crooked, because I have some idea of a straight line.

And the botheration of it all, the crowds, the notices, the perpetual organizing.

Lighten out darkness, we beseech thee. Oh Lord.

And by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.

Did not make me a paid-up member in the Church of England.

As for the materialists, their view was out of court.

One day Tolkien and I took a stroll on Addison's walk.

Suddenly a rush of wind interrupted us, startling me.

Full of wisdom and shrewdness.

The overwhelming longings that emerged from 'Phantastes', and my brother's toy garden, were merely signposts to what I truly desired.

We cannot mingle with the splendors we see.

All the leafs of NT rustling with...

A cleft has opened