Experience

It just occurred to me that one of the reasons I find C. S. Lewis so satisfying and so re-readable is that all his writings--by his own admission--convey solutions to problems which he himself had experienced. On things that he had never had a problem with or never perceived as a problem, he had little or nothing to say.

I think this gives some evidence to my own nature. For I find the same in St. Benedict, even though I don't live in a monastery. There is something, for me, in people who say nothing of what they have not derived from long and painstaking trial and error.

It is interesting, parenthetically, that one of Lewis's favorite pupils, a lad called Griffiths, became Dom Bede Griffiths, O.S.B.