Change Brings Jealousy To Affection

"But we have not yet touched on jealousy. I suppose no one now believes that jealousy is especially connected with erotic love. If anyone does, the behaviour of children, employees, and domestic animals ought soon to undecieve him. Every kind of live, almost every kind of association, is liable to it. The jealousy of Affection is closely connected with its reliance on what is old and familiar. So also with the total, or relative, unimportance for Affection of what I call Appreciative love. We don't want the "old, familiar faces" to become brighter or more beautiful, the old ways to be changed even for the better, the old jokes and interests to be replaced by exciting novelties. Change is a threat to Affection.

"A brother and sister, or two brothers - for sex here is not at work - grow to a certain age sharing everything. They have read the same comics, climbed the same trees, been pirates or spacemen together, taken up and abandoned stamp-collecting at the same moment. Then a dreadful thing happens. One of them flashes ahead - discovers poetry or science or serious music or perhaps undergoes a religious conversion. His life is flooded with the new interest. The other cannot share it; he is left behind. I doubt whether even the infidelity of a wife or husband raises a more miserable sense of desertion or a fiercer jealousy than this can sometimes do. It is not yet jealousy of the new friends whom the deserter will soon be making. That will come; at first it is the jealousy of the thing itself - of this science, this music, of God (always called "religion" or "all this religion" in such contexts). The jealousy will probably be expressed by ridicule. THe new interest is "all silly nonsense," contemptibly childish (or contemptibly grown-up), or else the deserter is not really interest in it at all - he's showing off, swankering; it's all affectation. Presently the books will be hidden, the scientific specimens destroyed, the radio forcibly swetched off the classical programmes. For Affection is the most instinctive, in that sense the most animal, of loves; its jealousy is proportionately fierce. It snarls and bares its teeth like a dog whose food has been snatched away. And why would it not? Something or someone has snatched away from the child I am picturing his life-long food, his second self. His world is in ruins.

"But it is not only children who react thus. Few things in the ordinary peacetime life of a civilised country are more nearly fiendish than the rancour with which a whole unbelieving family will turn on the one member of it who has become a Christian, or a whole low-brow family on the one who shows signs of becoming an intellectual. This is not, as I once thought, simply the innate and, as it were, disinterested hatred of darkness for light. A church-going family in which one has gone atheist will not always behave any better. It is the reaction to a desertion, even to robbery. Someone or something has stolen "our" boy (or girl). He who was one of Us has become one of Them. What right had anyone to do it? He was ours. But once the change had thus begun, who knows where it will end? (And we all so happy and comfortable before and doing no harm to no one!)

"Sometimes a curious double-jealousy is felt, or rather two inconsistent jealousies which chase each other round in the suffer's mind. One the one hand "This" is "All nonsense, all bloody high-brow nonsense, all canting hum-bug." But on the other, "Supposing-it can't be, it mustn't be, but just supposing-there were really something in it?" Supposing there really were anything in literature, or in Christianity? How if the deserter had really entered a new world which the rest of us had never suspected? But, if so, how unfair! Why him? Why was it never opened to us? "A chit of a girl - a whipper-snapper of a boy - being shown things that are hidden from their elders?" And since that is clearly incredible and unendurable, jealousy returns to the hypothesis "All nonsense."

"Parents in this state are much more comfortably placed than brothers or sisters. Their past is unknown to their children. Whatever the deserter's new world is, they can always claim that they have been through it themselves and come out the other end. "It's a phase," they say. "It'll blow over." Nothing could be more satisfactory. It cannot be there and then refuted, for it is a statement about the future. It stings, yet - so indulgently said - is hard to resent. Better still, the elders may really believe it. Best of all, it may finally turn out to have been true. It won't be their fault if it doesn't. "

--C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

I bet you already knew it was Lewis, seeing as he's practically the only author I've quoted. Oh, and the fact that he and Tolkien are my two favorite authors.

Interesting note: for college, I had to write about someone who's had a great impact on my life and I chose Lewis; Andy nearly chose the same for the same college... wonder if they would have guessed that we are friends?

This book is totally going to college with me. Then too, so are all my Lewis and Tolkien books. And that's a fair number.