Of course you don’t know it: but every man who is waiting to be hanged knows it. To thicken the rind by one centimetre–to live one week, one day, one half hour longer–that’s the only thing that matters. All the good things are now–a thin little rind of what we call life, put on for show, and then–the real universe for ever and ever. ‘That’s why it’s so important to live as long as you can. That’s what it all means.’ ‘I’m not quite clear–’ began Ransom, when Weston interrupted him. That is the real universe, always has been, always will be. They’re not: except that they think there is a way of escape. Dirty priests in back streets in Dublin frightening half-witted children to death with stories about it. Well, the blacks know more about the universe than the white people. People in Central Africa doing beastly things with masks on in the middle of the night–and missionaries and civil servants say it’s all superstition. ‘Children are afraid to go through a churchyard at night, and the grown-ups tell them not to be silly: but the children know better than the grown-ups.

An enormous grandmother, you understand.’ ‘What do you mean by saying that’s truer?’ ‘I mean that child knows something about the universe which all science and all religion is trying to hide.’ Ransom said nothing. ‘What?’ ‘A little child that creeps upstairs when nobody’s looking and very slowly turns the handle to take one peep into the room where its grandmother’s dead body is laid out–and then runs away and has bad dreams. “I’ll tell you what’s true,’ said Weston presently. The Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength 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.

You may need all your force to swim into it. “The wave you plunge into may be very swift and great. 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. I thought we went along paths-but it seems there are no paths. How has He made me so separate from Himself? How did it enter His mind to conceive such a thing? The world is so much larger than I thought. It is 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. I feel as if I were living in that roofless world of yours when men walk undefended beneath naked heaven. 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 thought,” she said, “that I was carried in the will of Him I love, but now I see that I walk with it.

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