David Thornton - Perelandra

After reading through half of Perelandra I began to think about the subject matter of my last blog and the material I had read since last week. I realized that I think I know what space is like. Obviously I don’t, but it was an intriguing realization. I have seen so many movies in space and read books about what space is like that I think I know what space is and what it would be like to be in space. But, I have no experiential knowledge of space. Astronauts, because of the wholly different nature of space than that of earth, may not even be able to describe in words what they had experienced. The human language developed on earth, pertaining to the relative conditions it had been developed in. However vast people’s vocabularies may be, they all have been centered around that which is of earth, not that which is outside of earth. This thought captured me because it gave me a great appreciation of the setting of C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy. Also, it helped me to value the way Lewis describes the environment the books take place in. Because Lewis faces the task of explained and describing unknown things entirely out of his own imagination that language is nearly incapable of.