Last year, I read the first book in C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy titled Out of the Silent Planet. It was really good. So when I finished I was eager to begin the second, Perelandra. It wasn’t as good. In fact, it was downright boring. I only got through five chapters before I couldn’t take it anymore and I went back to my theology books.

Well yesterday, after giving too much time to television, I thought I’d give the book a second chance. As it turns out, I stopped one chapter before things picked up.

In fact, what’s unrolled since has been quite exciting.

In any case, I came across a great little C.S. Lewis nugget as I was reading and thought I’d share.

In our story, Ransom, the main character, is on a strange planet unlike anything on earth. After nearly going hungry, he gets up some nerve to eat something that seemed to be a kind of fruit. Eating it, he realized that it had a profound kind of taste. One that he longed to eat and eat and eat. But, he abstains because he holds gluttony as a great evil.

When thinking about this later on in his journey, he has some interesting insights:

“This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards… was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself—perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defense against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of film.” (p.43)

Hmm… Perhaps our gluttonous behavior is more dangerous than we think it is. Maybe we should take a cue from Ransom and abstain—even if we don’t have to.