A Grief Observed
1961
- death
- meditations
- bereavement
- christianity
- grief
- religion
- addresses, essays, lectures
- religious aspects of bereavement
- nonfiction
- consolation
The story
Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moment," A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period: "Nothing will shake a man -- or at any rate a man like me -- out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself." This is a beautiful and unflinchingly homest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings.
What it’s like
Spare, short-sentenced notebook entries that read like late-night private writing: plain paper, no ornament, a voice that circles back on itself, stops mid-thought, and then sets down one hard sentence that lands like a stone. The prose is domestic and precise, full of small concrete things (a chair, a wet pavement, a notebook left open on a kitchen table) rather than grand description, so the atmosphere comes from the quiet of an empty house and the grey texture of ordinary days. Emotionally the register is raw but tightly held, moving from numbness and anger toward a slow, reluctant steadiness. It is a fragmented, meditative read best taken in short sittings, perhaps on a rainy afternoon or late at night when the house is still. Its intensity is emotional rather than graphic: no violence or gore, though the grief is unsparing, with some sharp, bitter passages about God and despair. Its arc follows a grieving man who slowly recovers his footing. It suits readers who want honest, undramatic company in sorrow, especially those who are grieving or who appreciate restrained, searching religious reflection.
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