Insects

Insects are both a concrete childhood terror and a revealing image in C. S. Lewis’s memoir: their angular, exposed machinery made them more frightening to him than ghosts, while later close study briefly loosened their hold. From a movable stag beetle in a nursery book to the remembered discovery of Lubbock’s entomology, the recollections trace fear’s imaginative force—and the partial relief offered by objective curiosity.

Childhood Fear and the Nursery Picture

Lewis recalls that his guarded, generally happy childhood had one striking exception: terrifying dreams. They came in two kinds, involving spectres and insects, but the insect dreams were incomparably worse. Even in later life, he says, he would rather meet a ghost than a tarantula. The contrast makes the fear more than a passing childhood fright: it remained vivid long after the dreams themselves.

He describes what made insects seem uncanny: angular limbs, jerky movements, and dry, metallic noises. Their visible workings suggested either machines that had come alive or life deteriorating into mechanism. He also associated the hive and anthill with two social fears—the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective. The insect’s form thus carried a double threat: an unsettling body and an image of social arrangements he dreaded for humanity.

Lewis locates a possible origin in a nursery-book illustration, though he allows that the image might itself have come from a nightmare. A miniature child, like Tom Thumb, stood on a toadstool beneath a stag beetle much larger than himself. Its horns were separate strips of cardboard mounted on a pivot; a device on the back of the page made them open and close like pincers. The illustration’s scale, threat, and mechanical movement concentrate the elements of the phobia in one remembered object. Lewis wonders how his mother could have allowed such a picture into the nursery, then leaves the memory’s origin slightly uncertain rather than claiming complete confidence in it.

Curiosity and Temporary Relief

The fear did not remain unchanged. In his teens, Lewis read Lubbock’s Ants, Bees and Wasps and developed a genuine, if brief, scientific interest in insects. Other studies soon displaced entomology, but during that period the phobia almost disappeared. He proposes that objective curiosity can have a cleansing effect: attention shifts from an imagined threat to the subject itself. The memoir presents this as a temporary reprieve, not a permanent cure.

The book’s place in the recollection makes that change especially concrete. Lewis found Ants, Bees and Wasps among the endless bookshelves at Mountbracken, while he and his brother were still prone to neglect their hostesses and explore on their own. The same household atmosphere of attics, indoor silences, and books that invited solitary exploration became the setting for an encounter that briefly transformed insects from nightmare material into objects of study.

Fear Across Remembered Worlds

Insects recur beyond the nursery and the account of adolescent reading, linking private fear to wider impressions of threat and estrangement. On the voyage from Belfast, Lewis remembers the oily water, the ship’s sounds, and the widening darkness between vessel and quay as familiar life fell away. In his first view of England, by contrast, flat land seemed imprisoning and suffocating; its unfamiliar landscape and voices prompted immediate hostility. The memoir repeatedly makes bodily and sensory impressions carry the force of belonging or alienation, and the insect memories belong to that larger way of seeing.

The insect image also returns in Lewis’s account of the Western Front. He recalls men horribly smashed by shells who were still moving like half-crushed beetles. The comparison draws upon the earlier association between insect life and mechanism, but now places that disturbing image inside the physical realities of war. Yet Lewis says the war’s horrors often seem cut off from the rest of his experience, whereas one imaginative moment—the first distant bullet, which signalled that this was the war Homer wrote about—seems to matter more in memory. The insect comparison therefore marks a vivid sensory intrusion without becoming the whole meaning of his wartime recollection.

Insects finally belong to the memoir’s account of divided experience. Looking back on school, Lewis insists that imaginative ecstasy and outer weariness were both true: the inward world could feel like a realm of gods and heroes, while ordinary life remained drab and exhausting. The phobia’s persistence and its temporary easing through study fit this structure. An insect can be at once a real creature, a nightmare image, and a subject of curiosity; the memoir preserves those different modes without forcing them into a single, settled explanation.