Journeys and Luggage

I first read The Great Divorce on my high school senior trip to Fort Lauderdale; C.S. Lewis and I hung out at the beach a lot that week.

At a different stage of life, I'm happy to announce this book is just a great the second time around. Honestly, it's taken me several days to work through the preface, trying to wrap my head around all that Lewis is proposing and taking to heart the words of this brilliant mind. 

You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind. We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from bad but other good...

I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: 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.' In that sense it will be true that those who have completed this journey to say that good is everything and heaven is everywhere...

But what, you ask of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region of hell: and earth, if put second to heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of heaven itself.

-C.S. Lewis