The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

5/10

I read this about 7 or 8 years ago. It's a fun little book, not as good as Mere Christianity or The Screwtape Letters, but it's alright nonetheless.

The book is about a bus ride that a bunch of people take from the "grey town" (hell) toward the mountains (heaven). (I actually read this story about a bus ride while I rode the bus between Orem and Draper). Eventually everyone is given the choice of whether they want to return to the grey town or continue on to the sunrise (a place they got to partially experience and recognize as a better place). Yet most people chose to return to the grey town. And we do the same thing, choose the things of the world in the face of the way better and more obvious choice.

His quote in the preface sums it up well: "If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell. I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) was precisely nothing: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in 'the High Countries.'" And later: "I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself."

More quotes:

"That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory."

"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.'

"There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels."

"Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see."