Perelandra

Perelandra is a book where C.S. Lewis tries to understand pleasure, beauty and spirituality. He does this in a number of ways. The book starts out with Lewis heading to his friend’s house. His friend, Ransom, had asked him to come, but hadn’t told him why. On his way, Lewis starts to worry that he’s going mad. This is the first part of the book where Lewis (as the author) tries to get you to understand an experience that is more complicated than words can express.

He spends multiple pages on this journey between the railroad station and the house, trying to convey what he was feeling.

“This was upon me now. I staggered on into the cold and the darkness, already half convinced that I must be entering what is called Madness. But each moment my opinion about sanity changed. Had it ever been more than a convention–a comfortable set of blinkers, an agreed mode of wishful thinking, which excluded from our view the full strangeness and malevolence of the universe we are compelled to inhabit?”

One criticism that I have heard of this book is that is can be difficult to understand, which is true, but in a way it adds to the meaning. First, part of the reason that is difficult to understand is that it’s slightly older British English, and I think Lewis also had a large vocabulary. A larger vocabulary isn’t a bad thing, since using it he is able to paint a more detailed picture (a point that I will talk more about later). One thing I’ve noticed when reading older books is that sometimes you don’t need to know all the words to understand the meaning. For example, Shakespeare is fairly difficult to understand, but the general idea of what’s happening comes into my mind when reading it even when I don’t understand all the words. So if you don’t understand all the words, just keep reading and the story might still make sense.

After he arrives at Ransom’s house, he sends Ransom off to Perelandra and once he returns (about a year later), Ransom narrates his experience (the rest of the book). Throughout the book, he continues to use intricate and expressive language to try to convey pleasure beauty and spirituality. In a few places, the language gets close to nonsensical, but he still conveys meaning using it.

One of the first things Lewis addresses is pleasure. His goal appears to be to describe a pleasure which is indescribable, which leads him to try to convey it by contradictions of a sort. Soon after Ransom arrives in the world, Lewis describes Ransom’s experience.

“But more than all these was something else…which can hardly be put into words–the strange sense of excessive pleasure which seemed somehow to be communicated to him through all his sense at once. I use the word “excessive” because Ransom himself could only describe it by saying that for his first few days on Perelandra he was haunted, not by a feeling of guilt, but by suprise that he had no such feeling. There was an exuberance or prodoigality of sweetness about the mere act of living which our race finds it difficult not to associate with forbidden and extravagant actions” (p. 33)

That is quite a long quote, but Lewis is trying to convey something “beyond” words, and I think the longer quote expresses it better than any shorter quote could. It also helps to bring you into the story and into the wonder of what Ransom was experiencing.

Throughout the book Lewis uses language like the above to convey Ransom’s experiences. When he first tastes the fruit of the planet, he describes it as a “new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant…” He goes on for another few sentences. There’s so many instances of this in the book, and it adds a lot to the scene Lewis is painting.

Soon after, Lewis describes why Ransom didn’t eat another fruit, even though it was so good. While explaining it, he acts as if it’s something neither Ransom nor him truly understand. He leaves it for the reader to wonder at. Later this idea leads him to pose this question (one of my favorite things to think and wonder about from the book).

“This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards…was it possibly the root of all evil?”

He then considers that the love of money is called the root of all evil, but he says

“But money itself–perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defence against chance, a security for being able to have things over again”

That idea could be a whole essay in and of itself, but it is something to ponder. One reason I love this book is that it has so many ideas to think about. I don’t want to spoil the book too much (since I want you to read it), so I am going to move onto the next topic: beauty.

One of the first things Lewis addresses is beauty. His language all throughout the book is extremely descriptive, and at least for me, invoked a wonder at beauty, especially the beauty of nature. Soon after he arrives, Ransom sees something in the never ending ocean.

“It was an irregularly shaped object with many curves and re-entrants. It was variegated in colours like a patch-work quilt–flame-colour, ultramarine, crimson, orange, gamboge, and violet. He could not say more about it for the whole glimpse lasted so short a time. Whatever the thing was it was floating…It behaved rather like a mat of weeds on a river–a mat of weeds that takes on every contour of the little ripples you make by rowing past it–but on a very different scale”

This description is just the beginning of Lewis revealing the world to the reader. Towards the end of the book, Lewis starts describing the beauty of the world.

“Looking back on the adventure afterwards it seemed to him that he floated out of blackness into greyness and then into an inexplicable chaos of semi-transparent blues and greens and whites, there was a hint of arches above his head and faintly shining columns. It looks like a cave of ice…He rolled rather than crawled out of the pool on to a sweet blue turf. Looking back whence he had come he saw a river pouring from the mouth of a cave, a cave that seemed indeed to be made of ice. Under it the water was spectral blue, but near where he lay it was warm amber…At his side rose a cliff mantled with streamers of bright vegetation, but gleaming like glass where its own surface showed through”

Later he gives more detail.

“Before him the lawn of blue turf continued level for about thirty paces, and then dropped with a steep slope, leading the river down in a series of cataracts. The slope was covered with flowers which shook continually in a light breeze. It went down a long way and ended in a winding and wooded valley which curled out of sight on his right hand round a majestic slope: but beyond that, lower down–so much lower down as to be almost incredible–one caught the point of mountain tops, and beyond that, fainter yet, the hint of still lower valleys, and then a vanishing of everything in golden haze…” (p.159)

He goes on to give even more detail. Take a moment to imagine the scene that Lewis is setting: high up on a mountain much much taller than any other mountain, looking out on the world covered in a golden mist. It’s so different from our world, but at the same time, our world contains similar beauty. If you go outside and look at anything in nature (stars, plants, trees, mountains, valleys, etc.) and try to appricate its beauty, you will find it.

The last thing I want to touch on is the spirtual aspect of the book. I don’t want to go into too much detail here to not spoil the book too much. As Lewis often does, he introduces spiritual topics into the book, and especially towards the end, it can be difficult to understand what exactly he means and there are parts that I think he intends to be almost incomprehensible to try to convey a feeling or faint concept rather than a concrete idea.

I would say more, but to avoid spoiling it, I am going to stop here. Perelandra suggests that we should wonder about the world. Lewis attempts, through words, to give us a glimpse of the wonder of true beauty and true pleasure, not marred by the sinfulness of our own world. He struggles to bring us out of our world and into another, more perfect world. He wants to show us an idea of what life was meant to be. That is the beauty of this book.