Humour is a Serious Business

... our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.

- C. S. Lewis, from the essay The Weight of Glory

Merriment can be had between people who take each other seriously, and I believe the same is the case with merriment about things: you cannot laugh at something until at first you took it seriously; it wouldn't seem absurd otherwise.

The quote struck me when I first read it. I have always felt that really wise, serious people are the ones who are most funny. It doesn't surprise me, but I realise how ironic it may seem. I think of it as like Christ turning everything upside down; the last shall be first and all that. But it is no contradiction.

People who really understand how things are can see the humour best. Cynical people (whom we often call serious or some other such word) are not understanding, though they really think they are. Not being able to see the good is not 'understanding'. Yet, there is bad in life, and being blind to it will not help you laugh at life.

The merriment and humour I mean I will lamely call the good humour. I don't care for cheap humour, where people are trying to get attention in any way, and don't care about the joke that much. These people, especially in more apparently-prudish times, might use other than crass humour, but now it is very common to be crass. I know many people do it because others do it, at this point, but I suspect it is a kind of Inner Ring thing, where you desire to be in and so you do what everyone else is doing (I think Lewis has an essay on that in The Weight of Glory, which is where The Weight of Glory essay comes from. How confusing.).

Those people who have been really fun to listen to, and knew how to enjoy the absurdities of life, have often gone through the worst in life. It doesn't surprise me - perhaps a sign of my numbness - but it is amazing, beautiful, anyway. Meeting people like this, seeing this, lifts my mood more than most things can. There is nothing like seeing the formed pearl, the purified silver.

Die to Yourself

Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be truly yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Sticking this here because I ought to think about this now, and it helps if I publicly spit it out so that I can't avoid it.

I love the truth that if you look for yourself, you don't find anything good, but when you look to God and Truth, you gain yourself- your true purpose, and all the capability God meant for you to have, which is substantial. That capability in moments of feeling it seems infinite, perhaps because it is, due to its being God's strength in you, or perhaps it's because it's so vast compared to what we're used to that it seems infinite. But I bend towards the former because God is behind everything we contain and something like capability and strength given us would be in a way infinite... in that all choices of what we are logically capable of (and what is morally good) are open to us.

Ramble, ramble.