Selection from

C.S. Lewis, Perelandra,
pp. 67-71. Collier Books1965.

[Perelandra is Lewis’s retelling of the story of the Garden of Eden
in a science fiction format to show that the Fall need not have
happened. It takes place on Venus where there are only two
green-skinned people the Mother (Eve) and the King (Adam),
living in paradise. Maledil is their word for God. A man from Earth
(Ransom or Piebald) has been sent to prevent their temptation and
fall. This selection introduces the nature of freedom and its relation
to sin as Ransom tries to explain what death and evil are to the
Mother (Eve). ]

"Greet your Lady and Mother well from me when you re-
turn to your own world," said the Green Woman. And now
for the first time there was a note of deliberate courtesy, even
of ceremony, in her speech. Ransom understood. She knew
now at last that she was not addressing an equal. She was a
queen sending a message to a queen through a commoner, and
her manner to him was henceforward more gracious. He
found it difficult to make his next answer.

"Our Mother and Lady is dead," he said.

"What is dead?"

"With us they go away after a time. Maleldil takes the soul
out of them and puts it somewhere else—in Deep Heaven,
we hope. They call it death."

"Do not wonder, O Piebald Man, that your world should
have been chosen for time's corner. You live looking out al-
ways on heaven itself, and as if this were not enough Maleldil
takes you all thither in the end. You are favoured beyond all
worlds."

Ransom shook his head. "No. It is not like that," he said.

"I wonder," said the woman, "if you were sent here to
teach us death."

"You don't understand," he said. "It is not like that. It is
horrible. It has a foul smell. Maleldil Himself wept when He
saw it" Both his voice and his facial expression were ap-
parently something new to her. He saw the shock, not of
horror, but of utter bewilderment, on her face for one instant
and then, without effort, the ocean of her peace swallowed it
up as if it had never been, and she asked him what he meant.

"You could never understand, Lady," he replied. "But in our
world not all events are pleasing or welcome. There may be

such a thing that you would cut off both your arms and your
legs to prevent it happening—and yet it happens: with us."

"But how can one wish any of those waves not to reach us
which Maleldil is rolling towards us?"

Against his better judgment Ransom found himself goaded
into argument.

"But even you," he said, "when you first saw me, I know
now you were expecting and hoping that I was the King. When
you found I was not, your face changed. Was that event not
unwelcome? Did you not wish it to be otherwise?"

"Oh," said the Lady. She turned aside with her head bowed
and her bands clasped in an intensity of thought. She looked
up and said, "You make me grow older more quickly than I
can bear," and walked a little farther off. Ransom wondered
what he had done. It was suddenly borne in upon him that her
purity and peace were not, as they had seemed, things settled
and inevitable like the purity and peace of an animal—that
they were alive and therefore breakable, a balance maintained
by a mind and therefore, at least in theory, able to be lost.
There is no reason why a man on a smooth road should lose
his balance on a bicycle; but he could. There was no reason
why she should step out of her happiness into the psychology
of our own race; but neither was there any wall between to
prevent her doing so. The sense of precariousness terrified
him: but when she looked at him again he changed that word
to Adventure, and then all words died out of his mind. Once
more he could not look steadily at her. He knew now what the
old painters were trying to represent when they invented the
halo. Gaiety and gravity together, a splendour as of martyr-
dom yet with no pain in it at all, seemed to pour from her
countenance. Yet when she spoke her words were a
disappointment.

"I have been so young till this moment that all my Me now
seems to have been a kind of sleep. I have thought that I was
being carried, and behold, I was walking."

Ransom asked what she meant.

"What you have made me see," answered the Lady, "is as
plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened
every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already

the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in
one's mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not
the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is
given. But this I had never noticed before—that the very
moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting
back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not
found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished—
if it were possible to wish—you could keep it there. You could
send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of
turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real
good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking
of the other."

Ransom interrupted. "That is hardly the same thing as finding
a stranger when you wanted your husband."

"Oh, that is how I came to understand the whole thing. You
and the King differ more than two kinds of fruit. The joy of
finding him again and the joy of all the new knowledge I
have had from you are more unlike than two tastes; and when
the difference is as great as that, and each of the two things
so great, then the first picture does stay in the mind quite a
long time—many beats of the heart—after the other good has
come. And this, O Piebald, is the glory and wonder you have
made me see; that it is I, I myself, who turn from the. good
expected to the given good. Out of my own heart I do it. One
can conceive a heart which did not: which clung to the good it
had first thought of and turned the good which was given it
into no good."

"I don't see the wonder and the glory of it," said Ransom.

Her eyes flashed upon him such a triumphant flight above
his thoughts as would have been scorn hi earthly eyes; but in
that world it was not scorn.

"I thought," she said, "that I was carried in the will of Him
I love, but now I see that I walk with it. I thought that the
good things He sent me drew me into them as the waves lift
the islands; but now I see that it is I who plunge into them
with my own legs and arms, as when we go swimming. I feel
as if I were living in that roofless world of yours where men
walk undefended beneath naked heaven. It is a delight with
terror in it! One's own self to be walking from one good to

another, walking beside Him as Himself may walk, not even
holding hands. How has He made me so separate from Him-
self? How did it enter His mind to conceive such a thing? The
world is so much larger than I thought I thought we went
along paths—but it seems there are no paths. The going itself
is the path."

"And have you no fear," said Ransom, "that it will ever
be hard to turn your heart from the thing you wanted to the
thing Maleldil sends?"

"I see," said the Lady presently. "The wave you plunge into
may be very swift and great. You may need all your force to
swim into it. You mean, He might send me a good like that?"

"Yes—or like a wave so swift and great that all your force
was too little."

"It often happens that way in swimming," said the Lady.
"Is not that part of the delight?"

"But are you happy without the King? Do you not want
the King?"

"Want him?" she said. "How could there be anything I did
not want?"

There was something in her replies that began to repel Ransom
"You can't want him very much if you are happy without
him," he said: and was immediately surprised at the sulkiness
of his own voice.

"Why?" asked the Lady. "And why, O Piebald, are you
making little hills and valleys in your forehead and why do
you give a little lift of your shoulders? Are these the signs of
something in your world?"

"They mean nothing," said Ransom hastily. It was a small
lie; but there it would not do. It tore him as he uttered it, like
a vomit. It became of infinite importance. The silver meadow
and the golden sky seemed to fling it back at him. As if
stunned by some measureless anger in the very air he stam-
mered an emendation: "They mean nothing I could explain to
you." The Lady was looking at him with a new and more
judicial expression. Perhaps in the presence of the first
mother's son she had ever seen, she was already dimly fore-
casting the problems that might arise when she had children
of her own.