The Morning Benders - Excuses (Yours Truly session)

A song I love lately.

Some C. S. Lewis Quotes

"Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours."

"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream."

"It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from."


On friendship

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival."


On literature

"I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once."

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."

"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become."

"Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me."

"Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words."


On Christianity

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."

"If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."

"If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

We read to know we are not alone.

[From 5:00 onwards]

C. S. Lewis:
We read to know we are not alone. Do you think that's so?

Student Chadwick:
Well, I hadn't thought at it before like that, Sir.

C. S. Lewis:
No, nor would I. I suppose people would say, "We love to know we are not alone. Would you?

Student Chadwick:
Well, if you mean falling in love, well, I haven't really, I mean, I probably learn more about love from books than from personal experience.

C. S. Lewis:
[A pause of silence and turns to the window] Go on, I'm listening.

Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers any more; only the life I have lived. Twice in that life, I've been given the choice, as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety; the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal.


I think along the path of life, there are few things that one must feel thankful of. A "life author" is one of them. By that I mean not just a good writer with few books you enjoy, but a great mind that you can connect with, for life. S/he's your mentor, your friend and could be almost like a soul-mate. I'm fortunate enough to find in the writings of C.S. Lewis. There aren't many authors who possess as diverse a body of work as him: from literature criticism, theological writings, Christian apologies, poetry, autobiography, collective letters and essays, novels, science fictions (Space Trilogy) to the classic children books, The Chronicles of Narnia.

I don't consider myself an avid reader. I read very little. I cannot compare him with other great thinkers and writers through out the history of mankind. But often greatness is not to be known by comparison. It stood there. You just know when you see it.

I re-watched recently the movie Shadowlands. It's based on the true story of him and his wife Joy Davidman and how they come to terms with Joy's cancer illness and her subsequent death. The above conversation gives the movie an understated but conclusive end. For an Oxford professor who suffered the pain of losing his mother at an early age and opted for a life safe from the turbulence and possible agony of being in love, it's an unexpected life event to meet an American writer at his middle age and go on to marry her.

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

What C. S. Lewis wrote in books and believed in mind, now became a reality that he struggled to live through. "Experience is a brutal teacher, you learned, my God you learned." A cry in the movie after Joy's death. He did experience a period of questioning his faith and theodicy, later recorded in his book A Grief Observed, which helped inspire this movie.

It's worth a watch just for the brilliant performance of Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger (Academy Award nomination for Best Actress). It's a quiet, sometimes slow-paced film. Nothing overdramatic but possibly tear-jerking and even life-changing.

On Growing Up

I saw it one day on a bus ride.
Under a flyover,
two miniature-like kids running over the forbidding bank
between two opposing roads.
That's it.
It's the picture.
The picture that froze in my mind.
Skipping thousands of reasons,
jumping hundreds of conclusions,
emitting and connecting trillions of nerve impulses or maybe
just one struck by lightning –
The picture of how we're growing up.

Tracey Thorn – Love and its Opposite

To me, the singing of (my) Everything But The Girl – Tracey Thorn remains to be the voice of 90s'. Her voice seems to emerge from the deepest recesses of her throat and have been just steadied from sobbing minutes ago. Bear with me, I'm an incurable sucker of melancholic vocals and tunes.

From the heart-breaking "I don't want to talk about it" to the refreshing electronic makeover of "Driving" and "Missing", I can almost time-travel into the past. But before an actual time machine was made, we can only grow old forward. And she apparently did. After years of self-imposed hiatus to concetrate on parenting three children she had with her EBTG partner Ben Watt, she released another solo album this May, titled Love and its Opposite. She described it as "a record about the person I am now and the people around me ... about real life after forty." So Thorn wonders in the album's opening track "Oh, the Divorces!":

Who's next?
Who's next?
Always the ones that you least expect
They seem so strong
It turned out she wanted more all along
And each time I hear who's to part
I examine my heart
See how it stands
Wonder if it's still in safe hands

Anyone who is married or have been married could find sympathy with the lyrics. Love (and marriage), can be as strong as death, and can be as brittle as a changing thought.

As the irony is floating in the air, I notice the song is a waltz.

Pringle of Scotland Animation by David Shrigley

Speaking about Scottish, here's a truly hilarious stuff made in Scotland.

Camera Obscura

I posted on my Facebook awhile ago saying "Starved of new, good music."
My colleague "Big Mouth" pointed me to this Scottish band.
I am deeply, utterly in love with them ever since.
I feel what we Chinese say"相逢恨晚" (regretting not having met earlier).
Now, one more thing Scottish that has won my heart over (after Travis, Snow Patrol, Belle & Sebastian, Trainspotting, Kenny Dalglish, and their very own accent.)

From the heart of hummingbird to ours

You can brick up your heart as stout and tight
and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can
and down it comes in an instant,
felled by a woman's second glance,
a child's apple breath,
the shatter of glass in the road,
the words I have something to tell you,
a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die,
the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair,
the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen
where he is making pancakes for his children.

The last lines of "Joyas Voladoras" by Brian Doyle.
A beautiful piece of writing begins with an invitation to consider the heart of a hummingbird, beats and pumps with facts, vigour, and ends inside a little left of our chest.

For full essay here.