{Shane Sevo.com} » The Way of the ‘Sensible Man’…

The Way of the Disillusioned ‘Sensible Man’–He soon decides that the whole thing was moonshine. ‘Of course,’ he says, ‘one feels like that when one’s young. But by the time you get to my age you’ve given up chasing the rainbow’s end.’ And so he settles down and learns not to expect too much and represses the part of himself which used, as he would say, ‘to cry for the moon’.

This is, of course, a much better way than the first, and makes a man much happier, and less of a nuisance to society. It tends to make him a prig (he is apt to be rather superior towards what he calls ‘adolescents’), but, on the whole, he rubs along fairly comfortably.

It would be the best line we could take if man did not live for ever. But supposing infinite happiness really is there, waiting for us? Supposing one really can reach the rainbow’s end? In that case it would be a pity to find out too late (a moment after death) that by our supposed ‘common sense’ we had stifled in ourselves the faculty of enjoying it.

~C.S. Lewis; Mere Christianity, Hope

Mere Christianity
Author: C. S. Lewis

It is to this fatal error of the ‘Sensible Man’ that Lewis would have found fundamental respect, yet supreme difference with the likes of Freud and Nietzsche… is it hope, or is it self deception?

I call a lie: wanting not to see something one does see, wanting not to see something as one sees it… The most common lie is the lie one tells to oneself; lying to other is relatively the exception.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ