Music In An Experiment In Love, By CS Lewis

“Let us try to discover how far it might be plausible to define a good book as a book which is read in one way, and a bad book as a book which is read in another” (Lewis 1). CS Lewis begins chapter one of An Experiment in Criticism changing the way books are judged. Instead of judging a book by the book itself, he introduces the idea of judging a book on how it is read. The book ends the book with a beautiful epilogue that captures the idea of a reader becoming more than one’s self. He ends the book like this, “Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do” (Lewis 141) The ways that Lewis go from the reader reading a book, to a reader becoming more than himself, is
Music is used similarly to art or literature. Lewis notes two ways we use music. First is that we use music as a social and organic response. And secondly, we use music to obtain an emotional response where we become the tune. However, he goes on to say that, “Once the emotion response is well aroused it begets imaginings. Dim ideas of inconsolable sorrows, brilliant revelry, or well-fought fields arise. The very tune itself, let alone the use the composer makes of it and the quality of the performance, almost sinks out of hearing” (Lewis 23). Those who appreciate music, let the music affect you emotionally. They few “don’t hum or whistle while the music is going on; only in reminiscence, as we quote our favorite lines or verse to ourselves” (Lewis
“The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves” (Lewis 137). Lewis shows through this passaged that in literature, we become more than the person we are each day. We cross a boundary into another universe where we can learn, we can see things that we would not usually see, and we experience things that we do not have the capacities to understand on a day to day basis. Another example Lewis uses is the power of a poem. He says, “Hence it is irrelevant whether the mood expressed in a poem was truly historically the poet’s one or own that he had imagined. What matters is his power to make us live it” (Lewis 139). A poem, like literature, is not judged on the way that it makes us feel. When a poet moves us to tears, whether they be of joy or of sadness, the poet makes us live it. We become a new, brighter, and more enhanced version of ourselves through the art that has moved us. Lewis discusses this when he says, “those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to the author” (Lewis 140). Without the beauty that authors create for us to receive, the literary would not be the people that they are. The literary have the view that “my eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others” (Lewis 140). And for this reason, they turn to art. Art