Posts tagged omnipresence

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Resist the phantom of omnipresence.

“I must think about H. and less about myself.

Yes that sounds very well.  But there’s a snag.  I am thinking about her nearly always.  Thinking of the H. facts - real words, looks, laughs, and actions of hers.  But it is my own mind that selects and groups them.  

Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman.  

Founded on fact, no doubt.  I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan’t).  

But won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own?

The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me.


The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real.

Is all that work to be undone?

Is what I shall still call H. to sink back horribly into being not much more than one of my old bachelor-pipe dreams?

Oh my dear, my dear, come back for one moment and drive that miserable phantom away.

Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back - to be sucked back - into it?”  

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Insidious and imaginary.  








…when the composition inevitably of Genine and God become more and more my own.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to resist the phantom of omnipresence.