Nicholas Nelson

“The title of Sullivan’s essay is profound; many of us seem to remember a time, at some point in our lives, when we just didn’t hear the noise the way we do now. We remember days and weeks and months without comparing our lives to strangers or wrestling with the insecurity of not measuring up. We remember a time when we could enjoy good things without having to photograph or broadcast them. We remember, somehow, what it felt like to lose ourselves in something outside us, to have our attention drawn to something that was really happening: the joy that comes from a genuine self-forgetfulness. And while those experiences still happen, they seem harder than ever to find, and all the while the anxiety and guilt and frustration of feeling like we’re somehow less human than we used to be drives us back to the screen, back to the feed where we can at least stop thinking for a minute.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“His “light” is a swifter movement which for us is nothing at all; and what we call light is for him a thing like water, a visible thing, a thing he can touch and bathe in—even a dark thing when not illumined by the swifter. And what we call firm things—flesh and earth—seem to him thinner, and harder to see, than our light, and more like clouds, and nearly nothing. To us the eldil is a thin, half-real body that can go through walls and rocks: to himself he goes through them because he is solid and firm and they are like cloud. And what is true light to him and fills the heaven, so that he will plunge into the rays of the sun to refresh himself from it, is to us the black nothing in the sky at night. These things are not strange, Small One, though they are beyond our senses.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy: Three books in One : Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength