Surprised by Joy

“Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature—not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant. I do not think the impression was very important at the moment, but it soon became important in memory. As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.”

Lewis’s experience of the toy garden in some ways encapsulates the whole book. In its associations—with nostalgia, longing, love, and beauty—the toy garden both produces Joy and symbolizes it. Lewis’s memory of the weight of this seemingly innocuous moment sets us up for a story that will have a lot to do with the force and mystery of the human imagination.

“With pencil and pen I was handy enough, and I can still tie as good a bow as ever lay on a man’s collar; but with a tool or a bat or a gun, a sleeve link or a corkscrew, I have always been unteachable. It was this that forced me to write. I longed to make things, ships, houses, engines. Many sheets of cardboard and pairs of scissors I spoiled, only to turn from my hopeless failures in tears. As a last resource, a pis aller, I was driven to write stories instead; little dreaming to what a world of happiness I was being admitted. You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.”

Lewis’s early memories of his writing life give us a vivid sense of his personality. He describes his clumsiness with self-effacing humor, but he can also see how this seeming evil led to a greater good: The joy he found in writing far outpaces what he might have gotten out of building a cardboard castle. This theme of a good emerging from an evil will reappear throughout his story.

“As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when by brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. […] It was a sensation, of course, of desire, but of desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss […].”

Lewis’s memory of his first experience of Joy further deepens the import of the miniature garden. Joy seems to strike a chord through memory and experience. Even as a child, Lewis can feel this intense sense of nostos: the longing for a home that seems to be at once in the past and in the future.