Jack: What’s happening to me, Warnie? I can’t see her anymore. I can’t remember her face.
Warnie: I expect it’s shock.
Jack: I’m so afraid of never seeing her again–thinking that suffering is just suffering after all. No cause, no purpose, no pattern.
Warnie: I…I don’t know what to tell you, Jack.
Jack: Nothing, there is nothing to say. I know that now. I’ve just come up against experience, Warnie. Experience is a brutal teacher…but you learn. My God you learn.
Category: Shadowlands
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Here now. That’s enough.
Joy: We almost made it.
Jack: Now I don’t want to be somewhere else anymore. Not waiting for anything new to happen. Not looking around the next corner, not the next hill. Here now. That’s enough.
Joy: That’s your kind of happy, isn’t it?
Jack: Yes. Yes it is.
Harry: Well, she is your friend of course. But, well she’s not…family.
Jack: She’s not my wife.
Harry: No of course not.
Jack: Of course not. It’s impossible. It’s unthinkable. How could Joy be my wife? I’d have to love her, wouldn’t I? I’d have to care more about her than anyone else in this world. I’d have to be suffering the torments of the damned. The prospect of losing her…
Harry: I’m so sorry, Jack. I didn’t know.
Jack: Nor did I, Harry.
Jack: I want to marry you Joy, I want to marry you before God and the world.
Joy: Make an honest woman out of me?
Jack: No not you. It’s me that hasn’t been honest. Look what it takes me to see sense.
Joy: You think I have overdone it?
Jack: Please don’t leave me, Joy.
Joy: You know Jack, back where I come from there’s this quaint old custom. When a guy makes up his mind to marry a girl, he asks her. It’s called proposing.
Jack: It’s the same here.
Joy: Did I miss it?
Jack: Will you marry this foolish, frightened old man… who needs you more than he can bear to say… who loves you, even though he hardly knows how?
Joy: Just this once.
Jack: I wonder what it is that everybody wants from me?
Peter: You know that is the first question I have ever heard you ask that sounds like you don’t know the answer.
Jack: Oh, is that good? Is that what you want? Ignorance? Confusion?
Peter: Look, I just don’t think I see my way ahead as clearly as you do.
Jack: Shadows.
Peter: What?
Jack: It’s one of my stories. We live in the Shadowlands. The sun is always shining somewhere else. Round a bend in the road. Over the bough of a hill.
Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
C.S. Lewis: Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers any more. Only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I’ve been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.