the deep down things

 I finished C.S. Lewis book. Toward the end, there was a section that seemed so dense and I decided that I didn't have to read every word, but then, looking at the last chapter I felt like reading it.

Jason Baxter speaks of nostalgia as a positive thing: "Lewis was nostalgic for the future." he says. "The old model was not wrong, strictly speaking, but a kind of deep, human subconscious desire for a world that, in some sense, we are meant to occupy, but not yet."

He says, "The experience of nostalgia is a feeling of beauty's remoteness, but only because it is so far in the future, rooted 'deep down things'.* It is hope. And the great thing about true hope, this nostalgia for the future, is that it has none of the irritability, fear, anxiety, and discouragement that flavors many of the words of those who describe the demise of Christendom in our day. We were denied the garden, and then we were exiled from the enchanted cosmos. Now we must own our modernity, But by doing so, we engage in an extraordinary ascesis of the senses. We must move forward and look beyond."

                                     - from The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis

*God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is smeared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins