On Choosing

This post is the sort of thing you've heard before, especially if you've talked much with Eric Lowe, but it bears repeating. It comes from C.S. Lewis's Perelandra (that is, that's how it comes to me; it certainly doesn't originate there):

"What you have made me see," answered the Lady, "is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one's mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before--that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished--if it were possible to wish--you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other."

In the rest of Perelandra Lewis sets that principle up as the cornerstone of his theory of freedom and of sin: I cling to the good thing I'm not given, and in choosing the imagined thing I destroy the good of the actual thing I'm given. That bears thinking on.

(Just before that passage there's another good quotable: "The sense of precariousness terrified him: but when she looked at him again he changed the word to Adventure, and then all words died out of his mind." Well, so be it.)