Out of the Silent Planet....

I got a Barnes & Noble gift card that enabled me to finally pick up C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy that I have been wanting to read. I'm over half way through "Out of the Silent Planet" and I found this paragraph interesting. The main charachter, "Ransom" is talking to a "Sorn" a martian being and they are discussing the angelic beings known as "Eldil". The Sorn is attempting to explain why they "appear" to be ghost like but in reality are simply living and moving at a faster speed than we live at. I find this type of mental conjecture very stimulating from Lewis. It's discussions like these that I am sure were first spoken amongst his Kindling friends over pipes, brews and books at the local pup.

"The swiftest thing that touches our senses is light. We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge---the last thing we know before things become to swift for us. But the body of an eldil is a movement swift as light, you may say its body is made of light, but not of that which is light for the eldil. His "light" is swifter movement which for us is nothing at all; and what we call light is for him a thing like water, a visible thing, a thing he can tough and bathe in--even a dark thing when not illumined by the swifter. And what we call firm things---flesh and earth---seem to him thinner, and harder to see, than our light, and more like clouds, and nearly nothing. To us the eldil is a thin, half-real body that can go through walls and rocks; to himself he goes through them because he is solid and firm and they are like cloud."


Oh my that is yummy.