From the biscuit tin to the land of Aslan: the "Joy," the secret desire that connects all of Lewis's work

• Joy: an intense longing for something unknown, more precious than any satisfaction.
• Three childhood experiences reveal it to Lewis.
• It leads him from atheism to faith.
• Narnia is its purest expression: "further up and further in."

In brief

Lewis uses the word with a capital letter, in a very specific sense. It is neither happiness nor pleasure. It is a sudden, sweet and painful pang of longing for something we cannot name. The Germans have a word for this: *Sehnsucht*, the longing for somewhere else. Lewis defines it as "an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction."

Did you know

In *The Magician's Nephew*, Lewis describes the three first instances:

1. The Miniature Garden. His brother Warnie creates, in the lid of a biscuit tin, a tiny garden of moss and flowers. Years later, this memory provokes in Jack an inexplicable longing.
2. Beatrix Potter's Autumn. Reading *The Voyage of the Dawn Treader*, he is struck by "the idea of autumn."
3. Baldur the Beautiful is Dead. As a teenager, he happens upon a line from a Swedish poem translated by Longfellow and is carried away by a vision of a vast, cold and pale "North."

On screen

Next come Arthur Rackham's illustrations for *Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods* by Wagner, music, Nordic myths (those he shares with Arthur Greeves), and in 1916, *Phantastes* by George MacDonald.

Going further

For years, Lewis seeks Joy in the object that provoked it: he rereads the book, listens again to the music, and the Joy does not return. He also seeks it in occultism, in eroticism, in daydreaming. Always in vain. He gradually understands that Joy is not a state to be reproduced, but a sign pointing to something else.

An indication of another world

After his conversion, Lewis reasons: hunger proves that food exists; thirst, that water exists. If we experience a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, perhaps we were made for another world. This is not a proof in the mathematical sense, and he knew it; it is an indication, which he develops in *The Weight of Glory* (1941), in the preface to the third edition of *The Silver Chair* (1943), and in *Mere Christianity*.

Narnia, a machine for giving Joy

Perhaps the best way to understand the Chronicles is this: Lewis wanted to give his readers these flashes of Joy.

• Hearing the name of Aslan for the first time awakens in each of the children a strange feeling, like the start of a holiday or waking from a beautiful dream.
• From his cradle, Reepicheep hears a song that calls him eastward, just as John in *The Silver Chair* seeks his island.
• The final cry of *The Last Battle*, "Further up and further in!", is the cry of a desire that has finally found what it was looking for: "This is my true country! I belong to it. This is the country I have been longing for all my life."

In brief

Ironically, the woman Lewis would marry was named Joy. His friends never tired of saying that he had been "surprised by Joy."

For us?

We do not need to share Lewis's faith to recognize the experience he describes: a landscape, a music, a page awakening a longing for a place we have never been. This is doubtless why so many readers, closing Narnia, feel that they are leaving a country they already knew.

See also

• Surprised by Joy
• The Weight of Glory
• The Silver Chair
• Mere Christianity
• Lewis's Lexicon: Twelve Concepts and the Narnia Scene that Shows Them
• The Other Self and the Anti-Self: Arthur Greeves and Owen Barfield, the Two Friendships that Shaped Lewis
• From "The Great Knock" to Professor Kirke: Lewis's Influences and Their Fictional Counterparts
• The Last Battle
• Aslan
• Reepicheep
• How C.S. Lewis Created Narnia