Fifteen years old, my legs hugged the bare back and flanks of my copper horse as we mounted the ridge. We wandered past a weathered, wooden sign with the words, “NO MANS LAND” painted on it, nailed too high to the tree for most ladders to reach. When I first spotted the sign on a horseback trail ride as a child, my father told me with a gruff laugh that it was from the local old men who wanted to make a statement to the government folk that they couldn’t claim this camping, partying, and hunting ground. My eyes never failed to find it when we passed by.
After passing that sign, my friend and I climbed up the ridge. Woods shielded us from the view above, but we soon passed through the pines and walked up unto the clearing. The warm, summer sun glowed golden on my skin and reflected off my horse’s fur like foil. I looked down the ridge and out across the tree-laden woods that seemed to have been unrolled as an unending carpet. Bramble, bracken, and blueberry bushes fought for territory between the trees, with moss, carnivorous plants, and other vegetation below them.
My friend soon mounted through the pines behind me, and her gaze took in the sight below us too. We sat silent together, staring out at the trees below and feeling our horses’ ribs expand and retract with breath under our legs.
Finally, one of us spoke. I can’t remember who spoke it but we both agreed: if this moment could extend on like the trees, we wouldn’t be sad.
What we felt was what many romantics such as Wordsworth wished to capture—joy, deep joy. A joy that can be felt in our chest, stomach, and toes and can’t help but draw a smile to our faces. There we sat, completely unaware of the priceless joy we felt, what it meant, and how fleeting it would be, unaware how others had spent their whole lives searching for such a feeling again, unaware what this feeling meant to lean us towards.
C. S. Lewis did not have the beautiful, classical education with numerous opportunities to grow his imagination as we might picture he did. Instead, he faced a great deal of suffering from a young age. He lost his mother, which in turn led to losing his father in a way. He spent years at various boarding schools which sought to crumble any remnant of love for people, reading, and play. It was only when he went to live with The Great Knock and be privately tutored by him that life changed for Lewis. He went on to Oxford where he had the joy of reading great books and discussing all facets of philosophy and life with fellow thinkers.
Yet a moment of deep joy held Lewis captive during all these years, and he spent his life trying to grasp it again. On one of those early days of his life, his older brother brought him a toy forest he had made in the lid of a biscuit tin; his brother had layered moss over the tin and then garnished it with twigs and flowers. Despite the hours spent in the perfectly trimmed garden outside his house, Lewis, for the first time, felt the deep joy the romantics wrote of. Rather than seeing nature as “a storehouse of forms and colours” the toy garden showed him nature as something “cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant.” “As long as I live,” Lewis wrote, “my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s tow garden.”1
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