Sunday, January 17, 2010

The itch to play it again

[Ransom, reflecting on his desire for more while on Perelandra:]  Looking at a fine cluster of the bubbles which hung above his head he thought how easy it would be to get up and plunge oneself through the whole lot of them and to feel, all at once, that magical refreshment multiplied tenfold. But he was restrained by the same sort of feeling which had restrained him overnight from tasting a second gourd. He had always disliked the people who encored a favourite air in the opera—“That just spoils it” had been his comment. But this now appeared to him as a principle of far wider flying-film-reelapplication and deeper moment. This itch to have things over again, if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards… was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself—perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defence against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film.

C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)

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