Northerness

Have you ever read something in a book and thought, "Wow. I have experienced that exact same thing!" That happened to me recently while I was reading a book called The Everything Guide to C.S Lewis and Narnia.

It says that one day Lewis, who at the time was in his mid-teens and drifting into atheism, had an experience while looking at a drawing by Arthur Rackham (who happens to be one of my favorite illustrators!) that illustrated a scene from Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, in a magazine. I read his account of it and was astounded.

"Pure 'Northerness' engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity." The book continues to say, "He immediately recognized this as something, some place he had been before, and the memory of Joy, "almost like heartbreak", flooded back."

I was so amazed, because I have experienced the exact same thing! Not from seeing that picture, but from other things...books, paintings, the way the sunlight touches a wall in the late afternoon. It's a feeling of deja vu...that you are seeing something that you've experienced before, long, long ago. It almost makes me think that some people really are spirited away to fairyland in their childhood, and that these feelings are those distant memories... Well, that theory is rather doubtful, but whatever it is, it's wonderful and inspiring. And what really surprised me is that he, too, described it as 'Northerness', which has always been one of the only ways I could describe it to myself.