Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, by C.S. Lewis, is one of my favorite Lewis books to date. I loved learning more about his boyhood days and how he didn’t like puzzles or cohabitating with other boys at boarding school, particularly peers who bullied him on occasion. Through Lewis’s eyes, I experienced what it must have been like to face cruel instructors and to realize that a tyrannical environment is not conducive to learning.
Throughout the narrative, I learned more about Lewis’s emotional interior. His brother, Warnie, and Lewis had a brotherly bond and shared sadness over the death of their mother. I felt Lewis’s sorrow in his stylistic narrative. I also felt his frustration over not being able to have a close relationship with his father. Lewis’s father was a black-and-white thinker and either could not or would not stretch beyond the box into the world of creativity and imagination, where Lewis thrived.
One of the things I enjoy most about Lewis is his love of poetry. He referred to Dante’s Inferno, Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters, Wordsworth’s Surprised by Joy, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Lewis believed that books were “magical things,” imaginative writings, which I later discovered in the adventurous, fictional writings of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Complete Audio collection.
One of my favorite moments in Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life was when Lewis encountered a master or teacher, such as Kirk, who wasn’t intimidated by his challenging questions. Under his tutelage, Lewis fueled his imagination while also learning the art of rational discourse. Kirk’s singleness of focus, clarification, and correction made me chuckle. For such an intelligent man and teacher, his quest for genuine conversation seemed like a simple request compared to the complexity of his mind.
If you enjoy C.S. Lewis and his writings, you will appreciate Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. Another great read that connects to the joy in Lewis’s life, literature, linguistics, medieval history, and his future wife, Joy Davidson, is Becoming Mrs. Lewis: The Improbable Love Story of Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis.
