A Grief Observed
Where to buy A Grief Experimental books online?
Product Description
This very personal anguished tale of the death of Lewis’s wife is reissued with a foreword by Madeleine L’Engle. The celebrated leader shares an intenseaccount of the meaning of death with wit and insight.Amazon.com Review
C.S. Lewis joined the human race when his wife, Joy Gresham, died of cancer. Lewis, the Oxford don whose Christian apologetics make it seem like he’s got an answer for everything, veteran crushing doubt for the first time after his wife’s tragic death. A Grief Experimental contains his epigrammatic reflections on that period: “Your bid–for God or no God, for a excellent God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity–will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never learn how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high,” Lewis writes. “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 learn it himself.” This is the book that inspired the film Shadowlands, but it is more wrenching, more revelatory, and more real than the movie. It is a gorgeous and unflinchingly honest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings. –Michael Joseph Yucky
Buy Cheap A Grief Experimental Online
Related posts:
Not too much was insightful or original in this book. It seems like the same ancient trite cliches that have been used before to clarify death. I t deals with the ordinary issues of death: Pain, suffering and how to cope with persons issues as well as coping with your own mortality. Grief, sadness, sadness and coping. I establish this book dreadfully unoriginal, dreadfully dull and reasonably unengaging and unappealing. Giving this book two stars is only because the writing was superb. The leader articulates emotion so vividly and well. Very realistic. Every emotion was described in detail. I nearly felt like it were happening to me, but it was too unrealistic, which was disappointing. Relating to this book is hard but. An appealing, but unnecessary read.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
Maybe it’s because I have reached the mourning period of losing my mother where I no longer want to whallow in it. Maybe it’s because I was told by many that although I’m not a Christian, I can take parts from this book; his words of wisdom, despair and light at the end of the book and apply it to my own experience.
Although I didn’t lose a spouse like CS Lewis did, I watched my father’s pain losing my mother. I had my own pain as well. In reading the first chapter I establish myself shaking my head to myself relating to some of his questioning, some of his rage, underlinging some feelings he expressed that felt like my own. This is where I then became annoyed I bought the book. I won’t give away the ending, but I will say I didn’t find what some said I would.
I establish after a few pages everything was related to Christianity. I guess I wanted to read about this man’s journey lacking bible quotes. And to be reasonably frank, after a while I grew weary of his rage.
I would recommend this book to a name in the very beginnings of mourning. A name who lost a spouse. A name is a Christian. For me it was a bit too much and I gave my copy to the library in hopes it finds a nice home. It didn’t belong in mine.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
We all must face Death of a loved one or also for ourselves. Its one point of view, but everyone handles it differently. It was ok.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Though I am a fan of CS Lewis, I establish his meditation at times unnecessarily abstract, at others repetitive or self-indulgent.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I approach every CS Lewis book with a fantastic source of expectations. I still remember the marvel of learning Prince Caspian as a child and the sheer joy of beginning the trilogy in the middle of the series…!
In most of the writing of Lewis there is a lot that people can learn, but there is also a lot that CS Lewis takes for granted.
In dealing with the death of a child (my own personal grief). I may have come from a particularly hard death experience… I reflect in the grand scheme of things a child’s death is a to some extent harder prospect than an adult or elderly death — in the end we were not born to bury our own children. Their line of ancestry is finished forever. They will never grow up, never experience things that even young adults experience… for especially young children with genetic problems, their mere conception dooms them.
Is there meaning in any of this? If so what meaning? In the end CS Lewis struggles with an environment and cultural milleiu he feels in some ways confines his grief.
To be sure CS Lewis’ grief cannot be my grief… or anyone’s grief and he does not presuppose so. Some of the topic is but dated: in the early 50s society was more repressed, people were uncomfortable with death and even crying was something that was to some extent shaming for others to witness — the assumption being that people crying meant one should place their presence. Society has grown up fortunately. Most people are warm, loving and able to reach out to persons in need with small or no sense of embarrassment. That clearly was not the case in CS Lewis’ time. So this experience, perfectly related, was of appealing past note, but small comfort.
Also the central question of meaning is where CS Lewis falls ultimately into a sort of neo-traditional Christian interpretation of suffering — at the end of the day he believes that man was born into sin and therefore born to suffer. For persons raised on such cultural suppositories, the literal translation of the scriptures ultimately is a source of comfort.
Ultimately you must abandon reason to tread the path of Lewis. And it is here that I personally cannot tread. Lacking going into detail there are just too many contradictions to judge in such a version of a God. Contradictions will continue and cannot be resolved. In that sense maybe Christianity had it right — we can never resolve such contradictions — we are born to relive them… over and over… and over in our head and must have the courage to face them and know that there is no apparent meaning in the traditional western christian conception of suffering that makes any real sense.
For me meaning is vital, and there must be meaning in the life of such a small girl, or anyone who lived, but fleeting a life. And so… I resolved that I would honour the life and give it meaning within the memory of the living and try as much to construct things that would suffer after death. This is really as much as I, or anyone can ever do.
One can surrender to all the balms or “additional worlds” but these are not rational constructs. They are cultural myths — Lewis through grief ultimately swims into the warmth of faith, but it is ultimately a blind leap of logic and something that I could never do lacking having thoughts I had deceived myself and my deceased daughter’s memory. So I honour her with action and rememberance. We place her memories in close contact with us and remember her everyday and make sure that others can do so as well.
Lewis had additional thoughts and I reflect that he is a wonderful writer. Some of his struggles I have felt in his writing, but I cannot reach the conclusions he has come to lacking thinking I have somehow betrayed the logic a supreme being may have brilliant me with….
And that is the lot of mankind. Whether Christian or Humanist, we suffer. It is for each of us to make meaning in the madness of life. CS Lewis has his truth… but it isn’t mine… I wish his could be mine…
———–
PS: The introduction by his son is particularly terrible with references to “the Devil” as a real entity injecting doubt in grief. This retrograde, medieval interpretation of the Bible certainly is jolting alongside CS Lewis’ rather transcendental book — it should be removed.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5