151 pages
English language
Published March 26, 1976 by Bantam Books.
Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moment," A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period: "Nothing will shake a man -- or at any rate a man like me -- out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself." This is a beautiful and unflinchingly homest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings.
A less theological writing compared to his other works. Writing his emotions, you can see him being pulled back and forth. Might not be for everyone, but I certainly gleamed something from it. It was interesting the distinction he made between the images we make of people in our own mind as opposed to their actual makeup.
