- I am choosing the final chapter from C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed. The final chapter is the part of the book where Lewis comes to most of his conclusions about grief. He realizes that as he writes down all the things he is going through as he is stricken with grief that grief is not a state but a process. He realizes that he is coming back to the same thoughts that he has had not too long ago and explains that what he has written before is beginning to come back into his mind. From there he shoots off in many directions as his thoughts begin to swirl around and pop up onto the page.
- At first this seems as a way to see into what Lewis is thinking during his time of grief. Almost as if it is a new type of biography genre and it is Lewis writing a completely open autobiography. Then you can see it as a way to help you through grief when you get to the point that you need it to. So when you are in the same place as Lewis was you can pick up this nice read and get an emotional experience out of his pain enough to kick you out of yours. It can easily be viewed as something that has more of an inward look to Lewis and Lewis alone. He hides his purpose behind a lot of vivid imagery and in questions that are like life's imponderables. My reasoning behind interpreting this is because I feel no matter who you are you need to be able to have an experience with grief and Lewis does a great job with it. Also the professor said I needed to interpret a text we read.
- I think the biggest thing that Lewis is trying to get across is that grief is something that every person will experience at some point and time in their life and that you need to understand what exactly it entails. He takes a more spiritual approach to the whole take on being at a place where it seems as though God doesn't belong. Most people yell at God or take out their anger on him because they believe that it is God's fault. Though Lewis does that in the beginning part of the book in this chapter it is as if his journey, or process as he puts it, is nearing an end and he is beginning to see the daylight and he takes the daylight that he is beginning to see and applies it to what he has written before. He takes on his final leg of grief as a sort of entry into a new direction of grief. He views the process as less of a level to level or stage to stage and a hand in hand walk with something that was created to change you in a phenomenal way if you were only able to realize that instead of grief standing in front of you yelling but next to you and is gently talking you into submission. TO appreciate what you have while you have it and not when you have lost it.
- My main reason behind using and reusing the whole grief as a process is because on the very first page of the fourth chapter Lewis says that sorrow is less of a state and more of a process. That sets up the theme for the entire chapter. My reasoning behind describing grief as a friend that is next to you comes from a part that actually started off sounding like it would be a difficult passage to understand and slowly transitioned to a passage that was simpler than you once thought just like I stated above. This part is from a dream that Lewis had in which there is a man in total darkness who hears a noise. The noise is either interpreted as something far off or as a friend who is close by chuckling. He ends the whole story by saying that people may actually be completely wrong as to the situation that they are actually in. Which shows that people are unable to see what the worth of something is until it is taken. So grief is a way of them seeing what they had missed for so long yet people never realize that grief is also something that should be understood for what it is worth and is easily and almost always overlooked. Yet Lewis has a great way of making sure that what needs to be seen is actually seen. Another great example of that is when Lewis talks of enjoying praise while at the same time enjoying what you are praising. I find all those to be great ways of backing my interpretation.
- The greatest thing I got from this story taking all the interpretations into account was that the life of a human is marred by so many things that we never take into account the importance of the things that mar us. That so often we focus on the things that highlight our life that we refuse to accept the beauty of the highlighter. That without the dark line that defines us we are unable to exist on the pages of life. Its not about accepting the darkness or even embracing the darkness but its about realizing that darkness has something for us too and we should get what we can from it. Lewis by showing us the darkness inside him opened up two doors for those who are reading, a door filled with light that he is walking towards and a door filled with darkness that he came from and he wants us to watch his journey from one to another.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Such a Sad Somber End
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