Danielle Hawkins: The bad before the good?

     There is one particular quote that has stood out to me while reading Till We Have Faces and it takes place when Orual and Psyche reunite after Psyche was taken as a sacrifice from the kingdom of Glome. Psyche is sharing with Orual the happens that happened to her once she left the palace. Many of the details that Psyche shared were too "painful" or "hard" for Orual to hear and many times Orual tried to get Psyche to skip to the good parts of the story. Psyche got frustrated with her impatience and told Orual this "And you won't understand the wonder and glory of my adventure unless you listen to the bad part. It wasn't very bad, you know"(123).

    This quote is interesting to me for a few reasons. I often, like Orual, want to skip over the bad and get to the good parts and only experience the good. This though, is not reality. Everything needs to be experienced, the good, the bad, and the mundane, inorder to appreciate the realllllllly good moments. I think that's what Psyche was trying to get Orual to realize. If we had exclusively good moments, they would become stale. In the NBC show The Good Place, the "good place" became really boring and mundane because people had their greatest desires everyday and all day and it became old after a while. The bad makes the good even better. The other reason I found this quote interesting because it reminded me of a line from Shadowlands. Joy often tried to talk about the inevitable of her sickness and Lewis often over looked it or tried to change the subject. At one point Joy says "the pain now is part of the happiness then." This is very similar to what Psyche is getting at. 



I think it's very notable that many of the themes/ideas in Lewis books overlap. Much of his life experiences can be seen in the pages of his books and I think its super cool! 

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