On NPR today, I listened to a man who edited the literary work of his widow. He read a passage from C.S. Lewis about remembering the dead. I wrote down a few keywords: C.S. Lewis; otherness; embalming. They came to me like a vague memory, I turned to Google to make the fragments whole. And Google did.

Here’s the passage:

“Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes-the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night – little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quiet hidden in the end. Ten minutes-ten seconds of the real H. would correct all this. And yet even if those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall again. The rough, sharp, cleaning tang of her otherness is gone.

What pitiable cant to say ‘She will live forever in my memory!’ Live? This is exactly what she won’t do. You might as well think like the old Egyptians that you can keep the dead by embalming them. Will nothing persuade us that they are gone? What’s left? All mockeries or horrors. Three more ways of spelling the word dead. It was H. I loved. As if I wanted to fall in love with my memory of her, an image in my own mind!” C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed.

Aside from its moving language and underlying psychology, It’s Google Books. Go have a look. Google scanned the large sections of books online, and you even search by keyword.

Welcome home. -Z

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