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The Curious Effect of Exposing Children to Beauty
Anybody who goes through life with an open mind and heart will encounter moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us. When they occur, it is as though, on the winding, ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world – a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter. There are many who dismiss this world as an unscientific fiction. I am not alone in thinking it real and important. – Sir Roger Scruton
When C.S. Lewis was a little boy, his brother Warnie showed him a miniature garden he had constructed in a “biscuit tin”. Something about that miniature world grabbed Lewis’ imagination and created in him what he later called “joy”, though one gets the impression from Lewis’ elaboration on the idea of “joy” that in some sense he meant “longing”. As an adult convert to Christianity, Lewis harkened back to that miniature garden as something that over time became a kind of a lodestar for him, because the beauty it represented planted a seed that was eventually instrumental in undermining his determined atheism.