Commonplaces from C. S. Lewis’ Discarded Image, a seminal work for understanding a long-lost way of thought.
“Whatever else a modern feels when he looks out at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out–like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the Medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is ‘outside the city wall.’ When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within; the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life.”(118-119)
“The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos. If it has an aesthetic fault, it is, perhaps, for those of us who have known romanticism, a shade too ordered…Is there nowhere any vagueness?” (121)
