[Available as a free ebook for those in countries where it is out of copyright and in the public domain (e.g. Canada and the UK).]
Published in the midst of the Second World War, the second of the trilogy, this one has a slow start and, thinking about it, a pretty slow middle and end but it gets increasingly gripping as it plays out the temptation of an Eve figure in a pre-fall world. Just as Lewis brilliantly gets into the mind of a demon in the Srewtape Letters, here he gets into the minds both of a pre-fall person and an instrument of Satan. We see this interaction of a beautiful innocence which cannot imagine why anyone would not trust the Creator and a creature of undiluted evil. As the interaction goes on for page after page of Job-like dialogues it becomes excruciating. You want to cry out "Don't listen to him!" This book brought home to me the beauty of innocence and the defiling, disgusting, devious horror of evil more than anything I've read in a long time.
So here again are a bunch of quotes with minimal commentary:
"Haven't you noticed how in our own little war here on earth, there are different phases, and while any one phase is going on people get into the habit of thinking and behaving as if it was going to be permanent? But really the thing is changing under your hands all the time, and neither your assets nor your dangers this year are the same as the year before."
(chapter 2, applies well to pandemic, cost of fuel...)
"One never can see, or not till long afterwards, why any one was selected for any job. And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity. Certainly, it is never for what the man himself would have regarded as his chief qualifications."
(chapter 2)
"I found myself noticing and loving all sorts of little mannerisms and expressions in him such as we notice always in a woman we love, but notice in a man only as the last hours of his leave run out or the date of the probably fatal operation draws near."
(chapter 2, not sure how universal this is - could just be a male perspective - but personally I know what he means, I only noticed certain mannerisms of my father at the end of his life)
"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?"
(chapter 4, a point he brought out in Book 1 but makes much more of in Book 2)
"You see, I'm a Christian. And what we mean by the Holy Ghost is not a blind, inarticulate purposiveness."
(chapter 7)
"Don't you worship [God] because He is pure spirit?"
"Good heavens, no! We worship Him because He is wise and good. There's nothing specially fine about simply being a spirit. The Devil is a spirit."
(chapter 7)
The serpent figure says: "the world is made up not only of what is but of what might be. [God] knows both and wants us to know both."
(chapter 8, Gen. 3:5)
"The architects tell us that nothing is great or small save by position"
(chapter 9, e.g. a great man may be great compared to other men but not compared to God or a small ugliness in a place of great beauty will be found far more horrible than a larger ugly thing in a field of ugliness)
The voice of innocence: "How can we not obey what we love?"
(chapter 9)
Possible reason for an apparently arbitrary forbidden fruit in The Garden: "I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are His will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?"
(chapter 9)
Evil: "this creature was, by all human standards, inside out--its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
(chapter 9)
"it regarded intelligence simply and solely as a weapon, which it had no more wish to employ in its off-duty hours than a soldier has to do bayonet practice when he is on leave."
(chapter 10)
"a furious, self-exiled negation"
(chapter 12)
The devil knows the power of stories: "At last it dawned upon him what all these stories were about. Each one of these women had stood forth alone and braved a terrible risk for her child, her lover, or her people. Each had been misunderstood, reviled, and persecuted: but each also magnificently vindicated by the event."
The effect: "her imagination was already filled with bright, poisonous shapes."
"The external and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy's true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage. He had already written the play."
(chapter 10)
"The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for."
(chapter 12, i.e. for hating evil)
"Part of him still knew that the size of a thing is its least important characteristic"
(chapter 13)
Masculinity: "seemed to him to have the look of one standing armed, at the ramparts of his own remote archaic world, in ceaseless vigilance, his eyes ever roaming the ... horizon"
(chapter 16)
"We have learned of evil, though not as the Evil One wished us to learn. We have learned better than that, and know it more, for it is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking. There is an ignorance of evil that comes from being young: there is a darker ignorance that comes from doing it, as men by sleeping lose the knowledge of sleep."
(chapter 16)
"The best fruits are plucked for each by some hand that is not his own."
(chapter 17)
"[The Lord] dwells (all of Him dwells) within the seed of the smallest flower and is not cramped: Deep Heaven is inside Him who is inside the seed and does not distend Him."
"When He died in the Wounded World He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less."
(chapter 17)
God's providence: ""In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else had been directed."
"There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre."
"He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties."
(chapter 17, BTW for a secular media echo of this see the TV series Touch)
"He has immeasurable use for each thing that is made... Love me, my brothers, for I am infinitely necessary to you and for your delight I was made. ... Love me, my brothers, for I am infinitely superfluous, and your love shall be like His, born neither of your need nor of my deserving, but a plain bounty."
(chapter 17, beautiful paradox)
"if we never met the dark, and the road that leads no-whither, and the question to which no answer is imaginable, we should have in our minds no likeness of the Abyss of the Father, into which if a creature drop down his thoughts for ever he shall hear no echo return to him."
(chapter 17)
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