Kira Nelson: Hyoi's Perspective on Pleasure

“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The seroni could say it better that I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?”

When reflecting on this passage, found in chapter twelve of C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, I found that my own understanding of pleasure and the remembrance of it were the same as Ransom’s. Pleasure and its remembrance were two different things in my mind. While the remembrance of pleasure affords a pleasure of its own, this second pleasure in my mind was removed from the first. It was not so unusual to me to say that a pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. I can easily wrap my mind around that statement and agree with it, but thinking of the pleasure and the memory as a unified thing is not something that I was able to comprehend at first. Hyoi offers Ransom the example of their meeting, how it was over quickly but now grows into something more as it is remembered by the two. The work of this something more is making in him something that is not complete or understood until he lies down to die and the memory’s work is complete. With the aid of this example, I can more easily grasp how the significance of an event and it’s impact upon a life - in this case, the relationship formed between Hyoi and Ransom - can only be understood fully and rightly at the end of one’s life. It is here that the pleasure and memory of the meeting is sweetest and most rich with meaning and significance.