Life is as habit-forming as
cocaine.
-- C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
On the face of it, that is a zinger, of no very clear
meaning, jejune and shallow. From the pen of an Oscar Wilde, it
would have been exactly that.
In fact, it is a serious statement, only incidentally
somewhat epigrammatic. It occurs
during Lewis’s discussion of G.K.C.’s Manalive (the scene about dangling
the God-mocker out the window). It
is one step in a complex argument which I shall not attempt to summarize. It is thus an anti-epigram (the antiparticle of an
epigram): whereas an epigram, for
what it’s worth, survives its loss of context, seeking only to glitter, CSL’s
observation is rigorously contextual.
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