Further Up, Further In

The Last Battle - C. S. Lewis

During the holidays I gave myself the gift of reading all of the Chronicles of Narnia back to back. I think I have read most of them (or had listened to them as my mother read them aloud), but that was long ago. It was a wonderful gift and I very much enjoyed understanding how they all fit together. In the next few posts, I'll record my favorite parts, during this reading, from each of the Chronicles.

This is the starting point for this blog, and from here on out, I'm going to try to record my thoughts on all that I read - from personal reading, book club selections, class assignments, stories I read with my daughter, and so on. If you're reading and you have your own favorite parts of the books I've included, please feel free to share your good words.

Today I'll starting with the Lewis' final episode of the Narnia series...The Last Battle. (Page numbers are from the 1994 Harper Trophy edition.)

"I'd rather be killed fighting for Narnia than grow old and stupid at home and perhaps go about in a bath-chair and then die in the end just the same." Jill to Eustace (p. 120)

"...it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him." (p. 204)

"And this is the marvel of marvels, that he called me Beloved, me who am but as a dog-" (p. 206)

The unicorn on the New Narnia: "I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!" (p. 213)

Lucy: "This garden is like the stable. It is far bigger inside than it was outside." "Of course, Daughter of Eve," said the Faun. "The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside." (p. 224)

"And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before." (p. 228)