I recently reread C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in his Space Trilogy. The story follows a philologist, Ransom, who is kidnapped and taken to the planet Mars (which its inhabitants call Malacandra) by a hubristic scientist and an opportunistic businessman. After escaping from his captors, Ransom befriends the planet’s indigenous residents.
On this unfallen yet imperfect world, three intelligent species live harmoniously. There is no war. Nor is there overpopulation or scarcity, because Malacandrians do not reproduce often. Ransom, learning this, at first assumes they must not find sex enjoyable. But for the Malacandrians, the idea of being driven by appetites to overrun a planet and deplete its resources is incomprehensible—like wanting to eat dinner all day long. “A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered,” Ransom’s Malacandrian friend says. They experience pleasures deeply. They just don’t feel the need to repeat them.
J. R. R. Tolkien offered a similar explanation for why the elves of Middle-earth, though they live for centuries, have so few children: They reproduce infrequently, only after careful deliberation.
As a younger reader, I paid little attention to the theme of ecological balance in Out of the Silent Planet and took the talk about pleasure as something like a chastity speaker’s admonitions. But the Malacandrian isn’t talking about resisting pleasure. He’s talking about honoring it. Nor is this just about sex or eating. The human impulse to recapture and reexperience something we enjoyed affects us on every level. Often, I’ve refused to let a simple pleasure be “full grown” because I was desperate to have it again. When I visit a beloved place, such as the mountain in North Carolina where I hiked and played as a child, I sometimes get so focused on recapturing past memories, I miss the joy of the present.
I don’t think this is sinful or shameful. It’s just the human condition. Trapped in time, we easily feel helpless and want to retrieve important experiences so we can reassure ourselves that the experiences were real—that we are real. This theme has captured the imagination of multiple poets and philosophers. In Goethe’s Faust, what seals the deal of damnation is when the protagonist experiences a sublime moment and says to it, “Abide! You are so beautiful.” In Repetition, Søren Kierkegaard describes how we try to recapture precious moments to take possession of our lives.
But it’s futile. Repetition isn’t going to dislodge me from time or help me cheat death. The sublime moment always slips away.
It is ironic that temporal beings have difficulty recognizing the value in the finite. If a relationship ends, we assume it was never important. If we can’t hold onto a treasure, we see no point in having it. Maybe this is why billionaires mindlessly amass wealth and civilizations build towers to reach heaven. But it’s not just a problem of materialism. Distrusting the body because of its changeability is a hallmark of many spiritualities. Plato viewed temporal being as barely real. Look at the stories about how trying to cheat death and become godlike leads to doom.
A being doesn’t need to last forever to have value. And here’s another irony: Sometimes, we don’t realize how precious something is until it is unrecoverably lost.
Consider the mayflies, which live for only a day before they die. From a God’s-eye perspective, our lives are nearly as short. “The life of mortals is like grass,” the psalmist writes. Do we really believe our lives are sacred? If we did, might we be more careful with other living things? What if we learned to love the fleeting moment of beauty or tranquility, then let it go? We might be happier for it. And the Earth we live on might be more peaceable.
This article also appears in the November 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 11, page 9). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Unsplash/Greg Mills
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