When Lewis accepted theism and later Christianity, then, it was not so much because God was a foolproof answer to the problem of evil, as because He alone made it possible for us to experience evil as evil: to ask the sort of questions and feel the sorts of desire and indignation that define our human experience. This confident but open belief in God gave Lewis a rare boldness as a thinker and imaginative writer — a basic trust that rigorous probing of the world, including our own emotions, would uncover not less but more meaning, even if that meaning might not, at first sight, be simple or reassuring. Of nothing did Lewis think this truer than of the undefined and unquenchable longing which he found at the heart of Plato's philosophy, Shakespeare's late plays, Wagner's operas and to some extent all ordinary loves and ambitions. Much of Lewis's writing, both critical and imaginative, was an attempt to be true both to the impossibility and to the ineradicability of that desire. His essays "Transposition" and "The Weight of Glory", and above all perhaps his last novel, Till We Have Faces, are brilliant examples of the results.

This probing mind gave Lewis a certain unorthodox boldness as a person, too. After 50 years as an Oxford bachelor, he married an ex-Communist American Jew with two sons from a previous marriage. When she fell ill with cancer, he quietly accepted the consequences: "Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in that casket, it will change into something unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation." It is this uncompromising love of the world that draws one back to Lewis again and again.