I have been reading C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters this summer with a book study group, and this particular passage stood out to me recently as it relates to my interests in art (keep in mind this is being written from the point of view of a demon trying to tempt a human):
"The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart--an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change, the Enemy [God] (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme." (excerpt from Letter 25 of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters)
I'm interested in extending this idea of the seasons to the day-to-day. How can novelty be found within the regularity of our everyday experience?
Why do I ask this? Because my life is that boring? No, because my life is that un-boring. And your life is that un-boring too. If happiness is found within the balance of change and permanence, or "Rhythm" as C.S. Lewis names it, then how must we see so that we can find something novel and beautiful on the shower wall every morning? (or every evening, every afternoon, every other morning, every other evening, you get the picture...)
"The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart--an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change, the Enemy [God] (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme." (excerpt from Letter 25 of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters)
I'm interested in extending this idea of the seasons to the day-to-day. How can novelty be found within the regularity of our everyday experience?
Why do I ask this? Because my life is that boring? No, because my life is that un-boring. And your life is that un-boring too. If happiness is found within the balance of change and permanence, or "Rhythm" as C.S. Lewis names it, then how must we see so that we can find something novel and beautiful on the shower wall every morning? (or every evening, every afternoon, every other morning, every other evening, you get the picture...)
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