Unwitting Channels of Joy

I am so glad you have really enjoyed a Morris once again I had the same feeling about it as you, in a way, with this proviso — that I don’t think Morris was conscious of the meaning either here or in any of his works, except Love is Enough where the flame actually breaks through the smoke so to speak. I feel more and more that Morris has taught me things he did not understand himself. These hauntingly beautiful lands which somehow never satisfy, — this passion to escape from death plus the certainty that life owes all its charm to mortality — these push you on to the real thing because they fill you with desire and yet prove absolutely clearly that in Morris’s world that desire cannot be satisfied.

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“Letter to Arthur Greeves, 22 Sept. 1931,” Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. I, 970.