Inklings // June 2025 (The Great Divorce)

The Inklings prompt for June (see Heidi’s post here for rules to link up!) is a scene with running water in book or film. Heidi already chose a (fantastic, of course) C.S. Lewis selection for this prompt, and I am going with yet another. You can never have too much C.S. Lewis.

This is a bit from The Great Divorce, which is one of my all-time favorite books. (In fact, this is what I’m most likely to say when asked what my favorite book is.) In this section, Lewis-as-narrator is still exploring the “outer edges” of Heaven. He is finding that everything around him is much more solid and real than anything he has ever known – and indeed much more solid and real than himself. He comes upon a river.

“If the grass were hard as rock, I thought, would not the water be hard enough to walk on? I tried it with one foot, and my foot did not go in. Next moment I stepped boldly out on the surface. I fell on my face at once and got some nasty bruises. I had forgotten that though it was, to me, solid, it was not the less in rapid motion. When I had picked myself up I was about thirty yards further down-stream than the point where I had left the bank. But this did not prevent me from walking up-stream: it only meant that by walking very fast indeed I made very little progress.

…

An immense yet lovely noise vibrated through the forest. Hours later I rounded a bend and saw the explanation.

Before me green slopes made a wide amphitheatre, enclosing a frothy and pulsating lake into which, over many-coloured rocks, a waterfall was pouring. Here once again I realised that something had happened to my senses so that they were now receiving impressions which would normally exceed their capacity. On earth, such a waterfall could not have been perceived at all as a whole; it was too big. Its sound would have been a terror in the woods for twenty miles. Here, after the first shock, my sensibility ‘took’ both, as a well-built ship takes a huge wave. I exulted. The noise, though gigantic, was like a giant’s laughter: like the revelry of a whole college of giants together laughing, dancing, singing, roaring at their high works.

[Lewis-as-narrator here catches sight of one of the Ghosts he’d been talking to earlier, who is now trying to pick up one of the impossibly heavy apples with the idea of bringing it back with him to Hell.]

‘Fool. Put it down,’ said a great voice suddenly. It was quite unlike any other voice I had heard so far. It was a thunderous yet liquid voice. With an appalling certainty I knew that the waterfall itself was speaking: and I saw now (though it did not cease to look like a waterfall) that it was also a bright angel who stood, like one crucified, against the rocks and poured himself perpetually down towards the forest with loud joy.

‘Fool,’ he said, ‘put it down. You cannot take it back. There is not room for it in Hell. Stay here and learn to eat such apples. The very leaves and the blades of grass in the wood will delight to teach you.'”

I need to re-read this again…it’s so ridiculously good.

Have you read The Great Divorce? What are your favorite C.S. Lewis sections/books?