Final Reflection: From Distortion to Clarity
This essay is the seventh and final entry in our series comparing and contrasting C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed and Javier De Lucia’s A Pleasant Fiction.
The series begins with A Pleasant Fiction positioned as an existential reply to A Grief Observed—a humanist conversation with a man who sought divine coherence in the aftermath of loss. Where Lewis looked upward for answers, Calvin looks inward. That divergence carries through each essay, from the survey of grief literature that situates both writers within a broader lineage to Calvin’s critique of theodicy and his rejection of mystery as a moral absolution. Each step has moved us from theology toward psychology, from the search for explanation to the practice of understanding.
Early in A Grief Observed, Lewis confesses his fear that his memory of his wife, Joy, is not Joy—that to remember is to distort, and that distance from the moment means distance from truth. For Lewis, memory is a betrayal of presence; reflection is an act of desecration. He sees the mind as untrustworthy, its reconstructions tainted by loss and longing. His faith requires that the truth of the beloved exist beyond human perception—preserved in God’s keeping rather than his own flawed recollection.
Calvin, by contrast, builds his entire enterprise on the opposite conviction: that reflection is not distortion but revelation. The Wake of Expectations is a catalogue of misunderstandings—a record of how little he truly saw of the people he loved while living among them. Only in retrospect can he begin to see them clearly, and in seeing them clearly, to see himself. Where Lewis clings to proximity as the guarantor of truth, Calvin discovers that time is the necessary lens through which truth finally comes into focus.
That is the essential inversion. Lewis grieves because memory falters; Calvin finds peace because memory deepens. Lewis fears that he will forget his wife and, in doing so, lose her again; Calvin understands that by reimagining his past—not to preserve it, but to comprehend it—he grants grace both to others and to himself.
And perhaps that is where these two works ultimately meet: both are written in the aftermath of love, by men confronting the limits of their understanding. But where Lewis flinches—retreating into mystery—Calvin steps forward, accepting the incompleteness of knowledge, and the recognition of it as such, as part of what makes understanding possible.
Lewis mourns the distortion; Calvin learns to embrace it. Both persist in its wake.
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