Jacob Moore’s Reviews > Reflecting the Eternal: Dante's Divine Comedy in the Novels of C.S. Lewis > Status Update

P. 143: The lizard that the angel had flung to the ground ... becomes a silvery white stallion for the young man to ride up to the Mountains. The ... lizard's metamorphosis is an apt explanation for the similar new energy that Dante's pilgrim describes in his own situation: "Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.

P. 113: This is not the path for everyone, but it is the necessary path for Mark, just as it was for Dante's pilgrim. Beatrice says about the pilgrim, "He sank so low that the only means for his salvation was showing him the damned in hell" (Purg. 30.136-138). Ironically, the Objective Room, described as coffin-shaped, is "the intended tomb for Mark as a moral human being," but it "becomes the site of his rebirth."

P. 99: Although he later considered Till We Have Faces his best novel, he earlier states that "Perelandra is much the best book I have written." "Best," however, is not the same as "favorite," and one month before his death, he writes to a correspondent, "Perelandra is my favorite too."

P. 12: In literature and art, no man who bothers to be about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. Originality, then, is a by-product thay can occur when an author sets sights on higher goals.