-----
"In the first of the four ages, the bike is entirely invisible to young Lewis as something that carries any meaning. At this point, he has experienced nothing, so his “un-enchantment” has no depth to it.
I can remember a time in early childhood when a bicycle meant nothing to me: it was just part of the huge, meaningless background of grown-up gadgets against which life went on.
In the second age, Lewis discovers the bicycle for the first time with a deep sense of joy and wonder.
Then came a time when to have a bicycle, and to have learned to ride it, and to be at last spinning along on one’s own, early in the morning, under trees, in and out of the shadows, was like entering Paradise. That apparently effortless and frictionless gliding—more like swimming than any other motion, but really most like the discovery of a fifth element—that seemed to have solved the secret of life. Now one would begin to be happy.
The enchantment of the bicycle, however, cannot last forever. With time, it becomes overly familiar, and the difficulties of riding it become apparent.
But, of course, I soon reached the third period. Pedalling to and fro from school (it was one of those journeys that feel up-hill both ways) in all weathers, soon revealed the prose of cycling. The bicycle, itself, became to me what his oar is to a galley slave.
Be careful to note that this state of dis-enchantment is distinct from the earlier un-enchantment. The world is full of un-enchanted people who mistake themselves for dis-enchanted. The dis-enchanted man, having already stepped through wonder, has a very different task ahead of him.
When Lewis goes back to riding his bike to work in adulthood, his perspective shifts again.
But again and again the mere fact of riding brings back a delicious whiff of memory. I recover the feelings of the second age. What’s more, I see how true they were—how philosophical, even. For it really is a remarkably pleasant motion. To be sure, it is not a recipe for happiness as I then thought. In that sense the second age was a mirage. But a mirage of something. . . . Whether there is, or whether there is not, in this world or in any other, the kind of happiness which one’s first experiences of cycling seemed to promise, still, on any view, it is something to have had the idea of it. The value of the thing promised remains even if that particular promise was false—even if all possible promises of it are false.
The first impression of the bike was something of a “mirage.” It promised a kind of joy that could never last. But this experience was something in and of itself, because the mirage was pointing at something true."
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen