Change & Permanence
After my blog yesterday, my mind caught itself remembering a section it had read earlier relating (though not directly) to the topic of experience.
So, without further ado, here is the excerpt.
".... The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He give them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme....
.... Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out the natrual pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absoulte novelty....
.... This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both.... "
C.S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters
So, without further ado, here is the excerpt.
".... The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He give them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme....
.... Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out the natrual pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absoulte novelty....
.... This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both.... "
C.S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters
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