Sterling Terrell

Do you struggle with sloppy language about your own feelings like this?

See, this passage seems obscure, but it’s not.

Think of how many things today fall into this category of feeling.

We rewrite reality with emotion and expect everyone else in the world to accept it too.

Good grief I am trying to stop typing and not get political here. 🤣

Let’s just not settle deep questions in this same manner, ok?

In their second chapter Gaius and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it ‘sublime’ and the other ‘pretty’; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust. Gaius and Titius comment as follows: ‘When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall… Actually… he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word “Sublime”, or shortly, I have sublime feelings.’ Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: ‘This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.’

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition Of Man (Amazon)