Perelandra

by Clive Staples Lewis

  “He has no need at all of anything that is made. An eldil is not more needful to Him than a grain of the Dust: a peopled world no more needful than a world that is empty: but all needless alike, and what all add to Him is nothing. We also have no need of anything that is made. Love me, my brothers, for I am infinitely superfluous, and your love shall be like His, born neither of your need nor of my deserving, but a plain bounty. Blessed be He!”

  “All things are by Him and for Him. He utters Himself also for His own delight and sees that He is good. He is His own begotten and what proceeds from Him is Himself. Blessed be He.

  “All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for. In these seas there are islands where the hairs of the turf are so fine and so closely woven together that unless a man looked long at them he would see neither hairs not weaving at all, but only the same and the flat. So with the Great Dance. Set your eyes on one movement and it will lead you through all patterns and it will seem to you the master movement. But the seeming will be true. Let no mouth open to gainsay it. There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre. Blessed be He!”

  “Yet this seeming also is the end and final cause for which He spreads out Time so long and Heaven so deep; lest if we never met the dark, and the road that leads no-whither, and the question to which no answer is imaginable, we should have in our minds no likeness of the Abyss of the Father, into which if a creature drop down his thoughts for ever he shall hear no echo return to him. Blessed, blessed, blessed be He!”

  And now, by a transition which he did not notice, it seemed that what had begun as speech was turned into sight, or into something that can be remembered only as if it were seeing. He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties. Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled all else and brought it into unity-only to be itself entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former pattern not thereby dispossessed but finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated. He could see also (but the word “seeing” is now plainly inadequate) wherever the ribbons or serpents of light intersected, minute corpuscles of momentary brightness: and he knew somehow that these particles were the secular generalities of which history tells-peoples, institutions, climates of opinion, civilisations, arts, sciences, and the like-ephemeral coruscations that piped their short song and vanished. The ribbons or cords themselves, in which millions of corpuscles lived and died, were things of some different kind. At first he could not say what. But he knew in the end that most of them were individual entities. If so, the time in which the Great Dance proceeds is very unlike time as we know it. Some of the thinner and more delicate cords were beings that we call shortlived: flowers and insects, a fruit or a storm of rain, and once (he thought) a wave of the sea. Others were such things as we also think lasting: crystals, rivers, mountains, or even stars. Far above these in girth and luminosity and flashing with colours from beyond our spectrum were the lines of the personal beings, and yet as different from one another in splendour as all of them from all the previous class. But not all the cords were individuals; some were universal truths or universal qualities. It did not surprise him then to find that these and the persons were both cords and both stood together against the mere atoms of generality which lived and died in the clashing of their streams: but afterwards, when he came back to earth, he wondered. And by now the thing must have led altogether out of the region of sight as we understand it. or he says that the whole solid figure of these enamoured and inter-inanimated circlings was suddenly revealed as the mere superficies of a far vaster pattern in four dimensions, and that figure as the boundary of yet others in other worlds: till suddenly as the movement grew yet swifter, the interweaving yet more ecstatic, the relevance of all to all yet more intense, as dimension was added to dimension and that part of him which could reason and remember was dropped farther and farther behind that part of him which saw, even then, at the very zenith of complexity, complexity was eaten up and faded, as a thin white cloud fades into the hard blue burning of the sky, and a simplicity beyond all comprehension, ancient and young as spring, illimitable, pellucid, drew him with cords of infinite desire into its own stillness. He went up into such a quietness, a privacy, and a freshness that at the very moment when he stood farthest from our ordinary mode of being he had the sense of stripping off encumbrances and awaking from trance, and coming to himself. With a gesture of relaxation he looked about him . . .

  The animals had gone. The two white figures had disappeared. Tor and Tinidril and he were alone, in ordinary Perelandrian daylight, early in the morning.

  “Where are the beasts?” said Ransom.

  “They have gone about their small affairs,” said Tinidril. “They have gone to bring. up their whelps and lay their eggs, to build their nests and spin their webs and dig their burrows, to sing and play and to eat and drink.”

  “They did not wait long,” said Ransom, “for I feel it is still early in the morning.”

  “But not the same morning,” said Tor.

  “We have been here long, then?” asked Ransom.

  “Yes,” said Tor. “I did not know it till now. But we have accomplished one whole circle about Arbol since we met on this mountain top.”

  “A year?” said Ransom. “A whole year? O Heavens, what may by now have happened in my own dark world! Did you know, Father, that so much time was passing?”

  “I did not feel it pass,” said Tor. “I believe the waves of time will often change for us henceforward. We are coming to have it in our own choice whether we shall be above them and see many waves together or whether we shall reach them one by one as we used to.”

  “It comes into my mind,” said Trinidril, “that today, now that the year has brought us back to the same place in Heaven, the eldils are coming for Piebald to take him back to his own world.”

  “You are right, Trinidril,” said Tor. Then he looked at Ransom and said, “There is a red dew coming up out of your foot, like a little spring.”

  Ransom looked down and saw that his heel was still bleeding. “Yes,” he said, “it is where the Evil One bit me. The redness is of Hru (blood).”

  “Sit down, friend,” said Tor, “and let me wash your foot in this pool.” Ransom hesitated but the King compelled him. So presently he sat on the little bank and the King kneeled before him in the shallow water and took the injured foot in his hand. He paused as he looked at it.

  “So this is hru,” he said at last. “I have never seen such a fluid before. And this is the substance wherewith Maleldil remade the worlds before any world was made.”

  He washed the foot for a long time but the bleeding did not stop. “Does it mean that Piebald will die?” said Tinidril at last.

  “I do not think so,” said Tor. “I think that any of his race who has breathed the air that he has breathed and drunk the waters that he has drunk since he came to the Holy Mountain will not find it easy to die. Tell me, Friend, was it not so in your world that after they had lost their paradise the men of your race did not learn to die quickly?”

  “I had heard,” said Ransom, “that those first generations were long livers, but most take it for only a Story or a Poetry and I had not thought of the cause.”

  “Oh !” said Tinidril suddenly. “The eldila are come to take him.”

  Ransom looked round and saw, not the white manlike forms in which he had last seen Mars and Venus, but only the almost invisible lights. The King and Queen apparently recognised the spirits in this guise also: as easily, he thought, as an earthly King would recognise his acquaintance even when they we
re not in court dress.

  The King released Ransom’s foot and all three of them went towards the white casket. Its covering lay beside it on the ground. All felt an impulse to delay.

  “What is this that we feel, Tor?” said Tinidril.

  “I don’t know,” said the King. “One day I will give it a name. This is not a day for making names.”

  “It is like a fruit with a very thick shell,” said Tinidril. “The joy of our meeting when we meet again in the Great Dance is the sweet of it. But the rind is thick-more years thick than I can count.”

  “You see now,” said Tor, “what that Evil One would have done to us. If we listened to him we should now be trying to get at that sweet without biting through the shell.”

  “And so it would not be “That sweet” at all,” said Tinidril. “It is now his time to go,” said the tingling voice of an eldil. Ransom found no words to say as he laid himself down in the casket. The sides rose up high above him like walls: beyond them, as if framed in a coffin-shaped window, he saw the golden sky and the faces of Tor and Tinidril. “You must cover my eyes,” he said presently: and the two human forms went out of sight for a moment and returned. Their arms were full of the rose-red lilies. Both bent down and kissed him. He saw the King’s hand lifted in blessing and then never saw anything again in that world. They covered his face with the cool petals till he was blinded in a red sweet-smelling cloud.

  “Is it ready?” said the King’s voice. “Farewell, Friend and Saviour, farewell,” said both voices. “Farewell till we three pass out of the dimensions of time. Speak of us always to Maleldil as we speak always of you. The splendour, the love, and the strength be upon you.”

  Then came the great cumbrous noise of the lid being fastened on above him. Then, for a few seconds, noises without, in the world from which he was eternally divided. Then his consciousness was engulfed.

  [1] In the text I naturally keep to what I thought and felt at the time, since this alone is first-hand evidence: but there is obviously room for more further speculation about the form in which eldila appear to our senses. The only serious considerations of the problem so far are to be sought in the early seventeenth century. As a starting point for future investigation I recommend the following from Natvilcius (De Aethereo et aerio Corpore, Basel. 162’7, II. xii.); liquet simplicem flammem sensibus nostris subjectam non esse corpus proprie dictum angeli vel daemonis, sed potius aut illius corporis sensorium aut superficiem corporis in coelesti dispositione locorum supra cogitationes humanas existentis (“It appears that the homogeneous flame perceived by our senses is not the body, properly so called, of an angel or daemon, but rather either the sensorium of that body or the surface of a body which exists after a manner beyond our conception in the celestial frame of spatial references”). By the “celestial frame of references” I take him to mean what we should now call “multi-dimensional space”. Not, of course, that Natvilcius knew anything about multi-dimensional geometry, but that he had reached empirically what mathematics has since reached on theoretical grounds.

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