Surprised by Joy

Lewis’s first experience of Joy comes through the miniature garden his brother makes in the lid of a biscuit tin—or, rather, through the memory of that garden, which elicits “a sensation, of course, of desire, but of desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss […]” (16). This garden is loaded with meaning. The miniature garden, Lewis writes, had first given him an idea of nature—a clearer idea than his real garden could. The garden contains his idea of Paradise, and all these things are true of it: Tt is an artistic representation of a perfect place, rather than a real place; it is miniature and therefore inaccessible (you can’t walk around in it); it has to be inhabited by the imagination. 

All of these qualities reflect not just Lewis’s imagining of Paradise, but his eventual understanding of the nature of reality itself. To Lewis, there is something very big, realer than anything around us, and infinitely desirable, just out of sight, glimpsable only through an imaginative reach.

Lewis uses the metaphor of chess twice in his chapter headings: “Check,” for the chapter in which he encounters George MacDonald’s Phantastes, and “Checkmate,” for the chapter in which he admits to himself that he believes.