New York City people often joke about the fact that it’s very common to wake up from this dream: You’re walking through your apartment, notice a door you’ve never seen before, and open it to discover a large new room. (It’s a dream of people who live in small apartments.) Along those lines, I’ve often dreamed that I’ve discovered a new book by one of my favorite authors—one that, somehow, I’d never known about before.

Well, that very thing just happened to me in real life. I love the writing of C. S. Lewis (well, not all of it, but a lot of it, and what I like, I love). Decades ago, I read C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (Amazon, Bookshop), but I didn’t remember anything about this retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, except that I hadn’t enjoyed it. Then I listened to this episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Backlisted, where they discuss it—and I decided to give it a second chance. Wow. I’ve already read it once; I immediately listened to it, to experience it in a new way; and I’ll reread it soon. (Lewis himself said it was “far and away my best book.”)

Onward,

5 Things Making Me Happy

Reading this novel made me realize how much I love novels where an ordinary person, or an ordinary friend or family member, becomes a god or saint, and everyone has to grapple with the transformation. In this vein, I love each of these novels: Nevil Shute’s Round the Bend; Peter Dickinson’s Tulku; Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair; Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian; U. K. LeGuin’s The Tombs of Atuan; Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood; Scott Hawkins’s The Library at Mount Char. And of course, the memoir (and also deathbed sayings) of my spiritual teacher, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Saint Thérèse was a great saint, and she knew it, and her own family knew it.

I also love books that reach very deep into dark and mysterious places in the soul…to symbols beyond words. I’m reminded of many books I love, such as Carl Jung’s Memories, Dream, Reflections; Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head; James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough; Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power; Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway; Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.

I’m editing my draft of Project Empty Nest, my book about—you guessed it—the empty-nest transition. Till We Have Faces has a great deal of significance for this stage of life, and the sometimes smothering love of parents for children. I’m reminded of the role of the mother in the terrific true-crime five-part podcast The Idiot; Allen Gessen planned and paid for the crime, but his mother played a huge part in what he did and why—probably, she thought, out of love.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Eleusinian Mysteries, which are mentioned in Till We Have Faces. The secrets of those rites have never been revealed, to this day. Side note: I can’t help mentioning one of my favorite phrases, “mystical pigs,” learned in my study of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

I visit the Metropolitan Museum every day, and one of my favorite exercises is to look for works of art related to books I’ve been reading. I found three representations of Cupid and Psyche, by Auguste Rodin, Antonio Canova, and Pierre Reymond.