The Cosmos

Weston, in one of his brief, reluctant answers, admitted a scientific basis for these sensations: they were receiving, he said, many rays that never penetrated the terrestrial atmosphere.

But Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A Nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of “Space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now–now that the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it “dead”; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of the worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes–and here, with how many more! No: space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens–the heavens which declared the glory–the

happy climes that ly

Where day never shuts his eye

Up in the broad fields of the sky

He quoted Milton’s words to himself lovingly, at this time and often.

–

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Scribner, 2003), 34.