Till We Have Faces

C. S. Lewis

Don't you want to hear my story?

I wanted to be a wife so that I could have been her real mother. I wanted to be a boy so that she could be in love with me. I wanted her to be my full sister instead of my half sister. I wanted her to be a slave so that I could set her free and make her rich.

How if I am indeed to wed a god?

That there should be gods at all, there's our misery and bitter wrong. There's no room for you and us in the same world. You're a tree in whose shadow we can't thrive. We want to be our own.
It's only the lies of poets, lies of poets, child. Not in accordance with nature.

But how if it's not so at all? How if we were made to be dregs and refuse everywhere and everyway?

Why should your heart not dance?

And though her face was pale with the heat and her lips cracked with thirst, she was no more pitiable than when I have seen her, often pale with heat and thirsty, come back with the Fox and me from a summer day's ramble on the old hills. She was merry and in good heart. I believe, from the way her lips moved, she was singing.

Then I did a thing which I think few have done. I spoke to the gods; myself, alone, in such words as came to me, not in a temple, without a sacrifice.

Only this I know. This age of ours will one day be the distant past. And the Divine nature can change the past. Nothing is yet in its true form.

Well. You have a secret from me, he said in the end. No, don't turn away from me. Did you think I would try to press or conjure it out of you? Never that. Friends must be free. My tormenting you to find it would build a worse barrier between us than your hiding it. Some day--but you must obey the god within you, not the god within me. There, do not weep. I shall no cease to love you if you have a hundred secrets. I'm an old tree and my best branches were lopped off me the day I became a slave.

They rushed over me in their joy; perhaps they did not see me; certainly I was nothing in their minds. I understood it well. They butted and trampled me because their gladness led them on; the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is. We call it the wrath of the gods; as if the great cataract in Phars were angry with every fly it sweeps down in its green thunder.

Die before you die. There is no chance after.

The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

I ended my first book with the words No answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. Long did I hate you, long did I fear you, I might---

What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work.

All things come to pass in their appointed time. Words I had, flutter away like so many moths before the wind of Till We Have Faces. I seem always to read books when I most need to read those particular books. If you are a sane person you will of course claim that its me and not the books that's doing the writing. But if you join me in my foolery, you might be brave enough to believe that the books really are medicines (of the sweetest taste, I assure you) for specific ailments that could have worked in no other time nor any other place.
I was not familiar with the Cupid and Psyche myth (beyond knowing that it existed) before I read this. As always though, Lewis tickles a part of me that believes there is a truth that has always been there--even in the myths of an ancient and no doubt pagan people.
Why don't the gods answer us? Why do they harm us? In the recognition of what we truly are (for the recognition of what they truly are is not yet allowed for us) is the answer; God is the cataract. Step into the whitewater, step into the waves, into the waterfall's pounding fury, into the mounding water, the deep green, the black, deep.

Joy silenced me.