Connie, it's from The Four Loves.

The Four Loves

Ah. I read that at some point. I think I even have a copy. It made me cry. I need to find it and read it again.

Back to the library!

Susan, I posted that in my LJ so I will see it and think about it often. Thank you.

As did I.

You're welcome. It's always been one of my favorite quotes.

Wild, "It's a sickness, Buffy" might be "It's like a sickness, Buffy," I'm never sure, and is from the beginning of one of the two hours of Graduation Day. Willow has just exchanged many phony, yet oddly heartfelt pleasantries with Harmony, and is saying she is going to miss Harmony.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to be sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safely in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken, it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy is damnation. The only place outside heaven you can be safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell.

I often wonder if Lewis would approve of a person like me using that quote for a raw, sexy feminist romance novel. But I figure if he has a problem with it, he can take it up with me once I'm dead too.

Gah, love him. Lewis in his time? Well, I don't know. Lewis perfected and invulnerable? He'd get over it. He is, after all, the one who wrote The Screwtape Letters, in which he (correctly, imo) pointed out (via Screwtape) that in say, adultery, it is not the pleasure that's the sin. The sin's already occured, but the pleasure is there by design. The sin's in the betrayal, and the awful feelings.

Of course, it's way better than that, because it's Lewis. If I can hunt it down (Oh, how I long to use Control+F on my books), I'll post it tomorrow.

I've been away for a few minutes, but I had to join in on the Lewis love. LWW was one of the first books my mom ever read to me, but I love his other stuff too. Shadowlands was a movie that moved me, although talking about it again makes me want to add it to my netflix queue

We know there is an afterlife, but Fred—perhaps uniquely among human beings—doesn't get one. Or if the best authority on the process is wrong, then what Fred gets is for little rotted shards of her self-awareness to exist forever mired in the midst of Illyria's far vaster self.

Ack. Good point. The rumours about Season Six seem to indicate that they might have gone with the latter, but we don't really know for sure. They never specifically said that Fred didn't get an afterlife (which is actually a pretty vague concept in the Jossverse; the only real time that it is discussed is Buffy in Season Six), but they did say that her soul was destroyed rather than flying off somewhere. In some belief systems (Gnosticism, I think, and maybe other branches of Christianity), people have a separate "soul" and a separate "spirit"; I'm not clear on the difference between those and the Jossverse only ever mentions "souls" but that is one slightly cheap way to give Fred an afterlife.

They never specifically said that Fred didn't get an afterlife

How else would one interpret "There's nothing left to bring back. Miss Burkle's soul was consumed by the fires of resurrection. Everything she was is gone" then?