The Significance of the Experience of Presence

In his autobiographical book Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis evokes the beneficial company of his friend, Arthur Greeves, who taught him to see intensely the beauty of ordinary things: a vegetable to be cooked, a farmyard “in its mid-morning solitude,” the movement of a grey cat “squeezing its way under the barn door,” or the “ bent old woman with a wrinkled, motherly face coming back with an empty bucket from the pigstye.” He also learned to be attentive to the various elements of a peaceful landscape during the time of sunset.1