Past Watchful Dragons

““I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices, almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.”“ —C. S. Lewis on The Chronicles of Narnia

Author Biography

Walter Hooper, foremost authority on C. S. Lewis, became Lewis’s secretary just prior to Lewis’s death in 1963. Thereafter he was invited to edit Lewis’s literary remains and this has kept him busy ever since. He is coauthor, with R. L. Green of C. S. Lewis: A Biography, author of C. S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide, and editor of The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. He is the Literary Adviser to the Estate of C. S. Lewis and lives in Oxford with his cat, Blessed Lucy of Narnia.