We have been encouraged by our editors to write an article on our post-election thoughts. I am very reluctant to do so. I feel like a “voice crying in the wilderness.” I’ve hardly stood up on my soap-box to say “When in the course of human events…” before giving a yelp and ducking for cover under the blitz of political ravings that are blowing up the internet every five minutes. I shall, therefore, turn to wiser heads than myself (what a concept) and for this election I nominate a certain venerable old man named C.S. Lewis, who would have been a great president if he hadn't been tragically assassinated on the same day JFK died of kidney failure. I can’t come close to making a comprehensive survey of the innumerable things I have learned from this man, but here is a compilation of eight quotes I think are well worth being reminded of.

1.“You can’t get what you want if you want it too desperately.” (A Grief Observed)

It's common to say that you can have anything in life if you want it bad enough. But I think we’ve all had an experience like this: you slave away to become the very best at something you consider to be your “real talent” (say, photography) and then someone comes along who does it better than you, as a hobby, along with six other pursuits that they threw in just for fun. It’s just like Antonio Salieri in the play Amadeus, who offered his devotion and chastity to God in exchange for being the greatest composer who ever lived, only to be outdone by Mozart for the rest of his career, who seemed to be so much more undeserving of God’s gift.

Amadeus is quite off the mark historically, but the phenomenon is familiar enough to us. People who want too much always spoil the thing they are wanting. Lewis reminds us of common domestic situations: the moment we want some “good talk” produces awkward silences in the conversation and the time you really need a good night’s rest “ushers in hours of wakefulness.” It sounds unfair to us, but when we think about, it’s exactly the way life should be. As Lewis writes, “The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.”

2. “Love…can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.” (Till We Have Faces)

The infinite meaningfulness of the word “love” cannot be reduced to a mere protest poster. We throw the word around because of the power it used to contain, but like anything else, we cry and scream and demand it so loudly that the real meaning evades our grasp. Orual was a character in Till We Have Faces who ended up destroying everyone she loved in the name of love. The popular song by Passenger says “you only know you love her when you let her go” but perhaps it is truer to say “you only know you love her if you let her go.” For love often means letting go of the things we want to hold on to, and holding on to the things we would very much wish to be rid of.

Orual convinced herself that she was doing some noble thing on the premise that “sometimes love means hurting the beloved”. But she ignored the fact that love is a commutative property, which means the inverse is also true: “sometimes love means being hurt yourself”. It’s like making the statement “A = B” only to turn around and deny that B = A. “We’d rather they’d be ours and dead than yours and made immortal,” Orual cries to the gods. For people like Orual, Lewis says“That kind is sometimes perfectly ready to plunge the soul they say they love in endless misery if only they can still in some fashion possess it” (The Great Divorce). On the subject of commutative properties…

3.“Logic! What do they teach in schools these days?” (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

I know I’m sounding like an old man, but seriously, what DO they teach in these schools? (Hint: it's not logic.)

4. “100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.” (Learning in War-Time)

Prophecy was never my forte, but my amateurish consultations with the cosmos reveal that eventually, every single one of us is going to die. I think we accept this abstractly without really digesting it, and when the inevitable moment threatens to congeal, we act as if we’ve never heard of the concept. Lewis, who fought in World War I and gave this lecture during World War II, implored his audience to look death in the eye. Part of the reason Trump had so much sway was because so many people right now fear for lives. The Left imagine themselves uncommonly bold when they claim that X people group is “not really a threat.” That may be true or it may not be true, but it is not really bravery. If there is no tiger in the room, you’re not brave by mentioning the fact that it isn’t there. The Left is not “facing death” any more than the Right, but rather they are insisting that death, at least at this time, does not need to be faced. Again, I am not making an argument for which party is correct, but neither is ready to die, and that’s a problem.

I am constantly fighting the temptation (and yes, I admit it is a temptation) to pledge my loyalties to one side or another. I fight the temptation not because I'm sitting on the fence, but because I know my true loyalty lies elsewhere. As Lewis put it:

"A man may have to die for his country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself."

Gird up your loins like a man—dying isn't that bad. It was Peter Pan who said that “To die would be an awfully great adventure.”

5.“A children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story.” (Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories)

You may be wondering why I’m including this. The reason is this. It is a huge mistake to think that the lessons we learned as a kid somehow don’t apply in the adult world. When people want to justify some morally questionable subject, they always say something like this: “When you’re a kid, things are black and white. People tell you what’s right and what’s wrong. That sort of thing is all fine for children, but when you grow up you realize that some things are morally gray and those lessons just don’t apply anymore.” There are two problems with that argument. 1) If they don’t apply anymore, we shouldn’t have been teaching those lessons in the first place. We’re supposed to be preparing our children for adulthood; we’re not doing them any favors by bringing them up in happy lies only to throw them into existential confusion later on. 2) If they do apply, then isn’t this “morally gray” situation the real testing point? Isn’t this the crucial moment when the individual must take a stand for what is right? We haven’t escaped our Sunday School lessons just by nature of growing up. A society that adhered to the principles taught in Little Red Riding Hood and The Boy Who Cried Wolf would be a shockingly moral society.

As a matter of fact, Lewis builds a character around this idea, and he put him a children's book called The Magician's Nephew. This character tells his nephew, "Men like me, who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules...ours, my boy is a high and lonely destiny." This is what Lewis says about that sort of person:

6.“Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.” (The Magician’s Nephew)

I want to make it clear that I am not directing this quote at any one particular political party. I do not think anyone is exempt from the fallacy of seeing what they wish to see instead of what they see. I am guilty of it as much as the next person. We are all blind to the truth in some way: it is an eternal problem and the unfortunate handicap of being human. Which leads us to the next quote:

7.“Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.” (On Reading Old Books)

In order to keep people from practically murdering each other, we like to propagate peace-keeping phrases such as “Everyone has a valid reason for their own point of view.” I think that is an oversimplification of the truth. Everyone has a point of view, and not every viewpoint is valid (see quote no. 6). You can’t put a musical instrument in every person’s hand, leave them alone, and expect them to a produce a symphony. You are looking at a mass of untrained musicians. There is only one truth and an indefinite number of lies. So how do we find the truth? It’s a needle in the haystack. Well, I have one solution that isn’t the best, but it should mathematically work. Don’t begin by assuming that the world is mostly right, but rather assume that they are mostly wrong, and then narrow your search by the process of elimination. Lewis encouraged people to read old books in order to find the truth, not necessarily because previous ages were more correct, but because they did not make the same mistakes as our own. As he says in The Problem of Pain, “From considering how the cruelty of our ancestors looks to us, you may get some inkling of how our softness, worldliness, and timidity would have looked to them, and hence how both must look to God.”

Lastly, if none of these quotes resonate with you, there is one bit of advice you must never forget:

8.“It is very silly to shut oneself into a wardrobe.”

Have a good Thanksgiving.