Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (pp. 14-15). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
You cannot be so small-minded as to think that the rights or the life of an individual or of a million individuals are of the slightest importance in comparison with this.” “I happen to disagree,” said Ransom, “and I always have disagreed, even about vivisection.
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (pp. 27-28). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
He had read of “Space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity , the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now— now that the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it “dead”; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren; he saw now that it was the womb of worlds , whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the Earth with so many eyes— and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens —the heavens which declared the glory— the
happy climes that ly
Where day never shuts his eye
Up in the broad fields of
the sky.
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 35). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. the sky.
What had been a chariot gliding in the fields of heaven became a dark steel box dimly lighted by a slit of window, and falling. They were falling out of the heaven, into a world. Nothing in all his adventures bit so deeply into Ransom’s mind as this. He wondered how he could ever have thought of planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets— the “earths” he called them in his thought— as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven— excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness. And yet, he thought, beyond the solar system the brightness ends. Is that the real void, the real death ? Unless . . . he groped for the idea . . . unless visible light is also a hole or gap, a mere diminution of something else. Something that is to bright unchanging heaven as heaven is to the dark, heavy earths. Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 45). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
He gazed about him, and the very intensity of his desire to take in the new world at a glance defeated itself. He saw nothing but colors— colors that refused to form themselves into things. Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are.
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 47). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
He was quite aware of the danger of madness, and applied himself vigorously to his devotions and his toilet.
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (pp. 59-60). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
“Is the begetting of young not a pleasure among the hrossa?” “A very great one, Hm n. This is what we call love.” “If a thing is a pleasure, a hm n wants it again. He might want the pleasure more often than the number of young that could be fed.” It took Hyoi a long time to get the point. “You mean,” he said slowly, “that he might do it not only in one or two years of his life but again?” “Yes.”“But why? Would he want his dinner all day or want to sleep after he had slept? I do not understand.” “But a dinner comes every day. This love, you say, comes only once while the hross lives?” “But it takes his whole life. When he is young he has to look for his mate ; and then he has to court her; then he begets young; then he rears them; then he remembers all this, and boils it inside him and makes it into poems and wisdom.” “But the pleasure he must be content only to remember?”
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (pp. 89-90). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Hyoi’s reply unfortunately turned on one of those points in their language which Ransom had not mastered. There were two verbs which both, as far as he could see, meant to long or yearn; but the hrossa drew sharp distinction, even an opposition , between them. Hyoi seemed to him merely to be saying that everyone would long for it (wondelone) but no one in his senses could long for it (hluntheline). “And indeed,” he continued, “the poem is a good example. For the most splendid line becomes fully splendid only by means of all the lines after it; if you went back to it you would find it less splendid than you thought. You would kill it. I mean in a good poem.”
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 90). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
How could there ever be enough to eat if everyone had twenty young? And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back— if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?”
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (pp. 91-92). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Something long sleeping in the blood awoke in Ransom. It did not seem impossible at this moment that even he might be the hnakra-slayer; that the fame of Hm n hnakrapunt might be handed down to posterity in this world that knew no other man. But he had had such dreams before, and knew how they ended.
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 97). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Presently Whin reluctantly went aft to paddle, and Hyoi came forward to take his place. Almost as soon as the change had been effected, Hyoi spoke softly to him and said, without taking his eyes off the current: “There is an eldil coming to us over the water.” Ransom could see nothing— or nothing that he could distinguish from imagination and the dance of sunlight on the lake. A moment later Hyoi spoke again, but not to him. "What is it sky-born?"
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 98). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
When he recollected himself they were all on shore , wet, steaming, trembling with exertion and embracing one another . It did not now seem strange to him to be clasped to a breast of wet fur. The breath of the hrossa, which , though sweet, was not human breath, did not offend him. He was one with them. That difficulty which they, accustomed to more than one rational species, had perhaps never felt, was now overcome. They were all hnau. They had stood shoulder to shoulder in the face of an enemy, and the shapes of their heads no longer mattered. And he, even Ransom, had come through it and not been disgraced. He had grown up.
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 100). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Ransom looked back and saw the lake black with boats. The main body of the hunt would be with them in a few minutes. “They are afraid of the hrossa,” said Ransom. “That is why they do not come out of the wood. I will go to them, Whin.” “No,” said Whin. “I have been thinking. All this has come from not obeying the eldil. He said you were to go to Oyarsa. You ought to have been already on the road. You must go now.” “But that will leave the bent hm na here. They may do more harm.” “They will not set on the hrossa. You have said they are afraid. It is more likely that we will come upon them. Never fear— they will not see us or hear us. We will take them to Oyarsa. But you must go now, as the eldil said.” “Your people will think I have run away because I am afraid to look in their faces after Hyoi’s death.” “It is not a question of thinking but of what an eldil says. This is cubs’ talk. Now listen, and I will teach you the way.”
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 103). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
“If they catch you,” he said, “then it will be as you say, they will come no farther into our land. But it is better to be taken on your way to Oyarsa than to stay here. And once you are on the way to him, I do not think he will let the bent ones stop you.”
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 104). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Ransom sternly repressed an insistent, whining impulse to renewed protestations and regrets, self-accusations that might elicit some word of pardon. Hyoi with his last breath had called him hnakra-slayer; that was forgiveness generous enough and with that he must be content.
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 104). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
He made a strong resolution , defying in advance all changes of mood, that he would faithfully carry out the journey to Meldilorn if it could be done. This resolution seemed to him all the more certainly right because he had the deepest misgivings about that journey. He understood that the harandra, which he had to cross, was the home of the sorns. In fact he was walking of his own free will into the very trap that he had been trying to avoid ever since his arrival on Malacandra. (Here the first change of mood tried to raise its head. He thrust it down .) And even if he got through the sorns and reached Meldilorn, who or what might Oyarsa be? Oyarsa, Whin had ominously observed, did not share the hrossa’s objection to shedding the blood of a hnau. And again, Oyarsa ruled sorns as well as hrossa and pfifltriggi. Perhaps he was simply the arch-sorn. And now came the second change of mood. Those old terrestrial fears of some alien, cold, intelligence, superhuman in power, subhuman in cruelty, which had utterly faded from his mind among the hrossa, rose clamoring for readmission. But he strode on. He was going to Meldilorn. It was not possible, he told himself, that the hrossa should obey any evil or monstrous creature; and they had told him— or had they? he was not quite sure— that Oyarsa was not a sorn. Was Oyarsa a god?—perhaps that very idol to whom the sorns wanted to sacrifice him. But the hrossa, though they said strange things about him, clearly denied that he was a god. There was one God, according to them, Maleldil the Young; nor was it possible to imagine Hyoi or Hnohra worshipping a bloodstained idol. Unless, of course, the hrossa were after all under the thumb of the sorns, superior to their masters in all the qualities that human beings value, but intellectually inferior to them and dependent on them. It would be a strange but not an inconceivable world; heroism and poetry at the bottom, cold scientific intellect above it, and overtopping all, some dark superstition which scientific intellect, helpless against the revenge of the emotional depths it had ignored, had neither will nor power to remove. A mumbo-jumbo . . . but Ransom pulled himself up. He knew too much now to talk that way. He and all his class would have called the eldila a superstition if they had been merely described to them, but now he had heard the voice himself. No, Oyarsa was a real person if he was a person at all.
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (pp. 105-107). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Now, in the clear light of an accepted duty, he felt fear indeed, but with it a sober sense of confidence in himself and in the world, and even an element of pleasure. It was the difference between a landsman in a sinking ship and a horseman on a bolting horse: either may be killed, but the horseman is an agent as well as a patient.
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 107). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
- all the time the old resolution, taken when he could still think, was driving him up the road. Often he forgot where he was going, and why. The movement became a mechanical rhythm— from weariness to stillness, from stillness to unbearable cold, from cold to motion again.
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 110). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
He learned that his own procedure on arriving in Meldilorn must be to go where he liked and do what he pleased until Oyarsa called for him.
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (pp. 135-136). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Malacandra, like all worlds, floats in heaven. And I am not ‘here’ altogether as you are, Ransom of Thulcandra. Creatures of your kind must drop out of heaven into a world; for us the worlds are places in heaven . But do not try to understand this now. It is enough to know that I and my servants are even now in heaven; they were around you in the sky-ship no less than they are around you here.”
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 153). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
“I see you are hnau after all,” said the voice. “Doubtless no stone that faced the air then would be a stone now. The picture has begun to crumble away and been copied again more times than there are eldila in the air above us. But it was copied right. In that way you are seeing a picture that was finished when your world was still half made. But do not think of these things. My people have a law never to speak much of sizes or numbers to you others, not even to sorns. You do not understand, and it makes you do reverence to nothings and pass by what is really great. Rather tell me what Maleldil has done in Thulcandra.”
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 157). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
To every man, in his acquaintance with a new art, there comes a moment when that which before was meaningless first lifts, as it were, one corner of the curtain that hides its mystery, and reveals, in a burst of delight which later and fuller understanding can hardly ever equal, one glimpse of the indefinite possibilities within.
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 167). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
“I see now how the lord of the silent world has bent you. There are laws that all hnau know, of pity and straight dealing and shame and the like, and one of these is the love of kindred. He has taught you to break all of them except this one, which is not one of the greatest laws; this one he has bent till it becomes folly and has set it up, thus bent, to be a little blind Oyarsa in your brain. And now you can do nothing but obey it, though if we ask you why it is a law you can give no other reason for it than for all the other and greater laws which it drives you to disobey. Do you know why he has done this?”
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (pp. 177-178). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
The weakest of my people does not fear death. It is the Bent One, the lord of your world, who wastes your lives and befouls them with flying from what you know will overtake you in the end. If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace.”
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 179). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
He could not feel that they were an island of life journeying through an abyss of death. He felt almost the opposite— that life was waiting outside the little iron eggshell in which they rode, ready at any moment to break in, and that, if it killed them, it would kill them by excess of its vitality.
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) (p. 188). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Can I make even you understand how I know, beyond all question, why it is that the Malacandrians don’t keep pets and, in general, don’t feel about their “lower animals” as we do about ours? Naturally it is the sort of thing they themselves could never have told me. One just sees why when one sees the three species together. Each of them is to the others both what a man is to us and what an animal is to us. They can talk to each other, they can cooperate , they have the same ethics; to that extent a sorn and a hross meet like two men. But then each finds the other different, funny, attractive as an animal is attractive. Some instinct starved in us, which we try to soothe by treating irrational creatures almost as if they were rational, is really satisfied in Malacandra. They don’t need pets.
Lewis, C. S. (2012-04-03). Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy) . HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
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