Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

It is a complete mystery to me why I like C. S. Lewis. I most decidedly don't share many of Lewis's values and they seem antiquated and rather ridiculous to me. I know he's casually sexist, can be didactic and most annoyingly of all, disgustingly Christian and sincere about it. But there's something about his language and style that appeals to me like few other authors do, a sort of simplicity and ability to convey what he means utterly and beautifully. This book is half-autobiography, half the story of his conversion to Christianity, and the autobiography part is vastly more interesting than the conversion part. He often writes absolutely terrible things, to which my first reactions is 'surely, this is a joke', but it isn't, thing such as 'Life at a vile boarding-school is in this way a good preparation for the Christian life, that it teaches one to live by hope. Even, in a sense, by faith...' It seems inconceivable to me that a rational adult human being can write something so ridiculous, but on the other hand, he also describes some things with the most touching simplicity and poignancy, such as his descriptions of his emotional life and relationships with his family and friends. He uses wonderful, lucid metaphors and imagery, and has the ability to convey the workings of a child's mind and imagination in the most direct, magical and uncondescending way I have ever read. His description of reading the words 'Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods' in a newspaper and having his entire life changed suddenly was so great. There were parts of this book that I related to passionately, and parts that I thought completely ludicrous and pathetic. All that I gathered about Lewis's conversion was that he was a perfectly reasonable, highly intelligent person, then took up philosophy seriously, got terrified by its overwhelming questions and concepts (who can blame him? I personally don't understand one word of philosophy) and decided that Christian belief would be the best way of avoiding the existential terror induced by his studies. He stresses that he had to learn to avoid what he calls 'chronological snobbery' (seeing the world as constantly improving and the past as necessarily bad/unenlightened/incomplete) but, in a contradiction that he seems to have completely overlooked, imposes on his own life a narrative of linear (or almost linear) progress towards Christianity. For me, this book was a bizarre combination of the exceptionally touching and the absolutely infuriating. Oh, and I will never forgive Lewis for labelling Oscar Wilde as part of the 'depraved side of Romanticism' (if we assume that 'depraved' has the morally censorious connotation that Lewis means it to have).