15.2.11
from C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Today I had to meet a man I haven't seen for ten years. And all that time I had thought I was remembering him well-how he looked and spoke and the sort of things he said. The first five minutes of the real man shattered the image completely. Not that he had changed. On the contrary. I kept on thinking, 'Yes, of course. I'd forgotten that he thought that-or disliked this, or knew so-and-so--or jerked his head back that way.' I had known these things and I recognized them the moment I met them again. But they had all faded out of my mental picture of him, and when they were all replaced by his actual presence the total effect was quite astonishingly different from the image I had carried about with me for those ten years. How can I hope this will not happen to my memory of H? That it is not happening already?
Slowly, quietly, like snowflakes-–like 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 quite 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, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone.
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Slowly, quietly, like snowflakes-–like 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 quite 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, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone.
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
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