A Grief Observed
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.
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- See also perhaps A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Grief_Observed
* https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20150436 (Canada public domain)
* http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/PDFs/GriefObserved_CSL.pd...
- A little longer (76 pages), but A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis is also worth checking out:
* http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/PDFs/GriefObserved_CSL.pd... (Canada public domain)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Grief_Observed
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26077627-a-grief-observe...
- C.S. Lewis - A Grief Observed
"Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything."
I lost someone very close to me in my early 20s. Reading through the grief C.S. Lewis went through after he lost his wife was very cathartic. There will be setbacks (death, sickness, divorce, etc.) in life that will violently shake your core and make you feel as though you cannot go on. What I learned was communing with the grief, staring it straight in the face no matter how painful, is an absolute necessity. You will always carry the loss with you, but that does not mean your life has to be dominated by it.
I think his book really help me put "life" into perspective. Setbacks big or small can be overcome, and exploring the grief caused by them really helps with the process of moving past them, despite how painful it may be.
- C.S. Lewis' 'The problem of pain', and 'A grief Observed' I think is relevant, even if you are trying to avoid reading apologetics.
I would definitely consider reading Julian Jaynes' 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' in this context as well.
- Someone here recommended The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed, and I would add Mere Christianity and The Four Loves.
- Davidman had a lot of influence on the writing of "Till We Have Faces," but it was published before her death. "A Grief Observed" is the book Lewis wrote about the grief that followed.
