All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing - to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from - the place where I ought to have been born. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home. Everything seemed to be saying, “Psyche come!” But I couldn’t (not yet) and I didn’t know where I was to come to. Do you remember? The color and the smell, and looking across at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. ‘Ah, Psyche,’ I said, ‘have I made you so little happy as that?’ ‘I have always - at least, ever since I can remember - had a kind of longing for death.’ Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.’ (50) It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. I, King, have dealt with the gods for three generations of men, and I know that they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. They demand to see such things clearly, as if the gods were no more than letters written in a book. Much less does it give them understanding of holy things. It does not even give them boldness to die. Without giving too much away, we thought we’d share a few of the novel’s most provocative passages for those who might be interested in giving the book a read.

It’s the second-to-last full-length novel Lewis published, and was apparently his own favorite from among his works. The book is a liberal retelling of the Psyche and Cupid myth - but from the perspective of one of the myth’s side-characters, Psyche’s older sister Orual. Several weeks ago, members of Mockingbird’s inaugural Zoom Book Club hopped online to discuss our first book, the fascinating C.

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