the Desirable

The Desirable is the object beyond the self that C. S. Lewis gradually recognizes as the true direction of Joy. Neither a thrill to be recovered nor an inward state to be cultivated, it is what makes the longing meaningful; the images of mythology and beauty can reflect it, but cannot contain it. This distinction turns Lewis’s account of lost imaginative pleasure into an inquiry about desire, attention, and the reality toward which desire reaches.

A remembered experience and its mistaken object

Lewis’s recognition begins with a memory of a hill walk on a misty morning. His father had just given him the other volumes of the Ring, and the prospect of reading them accompanied his cold and lonely walk. Recalling that occasion, Lewis remembered a longing so full that he had thought he tasted heaven. He wished the experience would return, but missed the fact that its return was already occurring in the act of remembering. The new longing was not possession of the past; rather, Lewis now understood that the earlier experience, too, had been a longing, and that in Joy wanting and having could not be separated in the ordinary way.

The scene also exposes the error in treating a particular image as the final destination of desire. Lewis had associated the Desirable with Valhalla, then looked for its return in the same imaginative setting. His attention was fixed on a temple already built, when what mattered was the act of longing that might arise again in another context. The memory of the walk therefore matters not as a formula for reproducing an old sensation, but as evidence that the desired reality can be encountered anew without repeating its original circumstances.

The thrill as a byproduct

Lewis’s fading experience of Northernness had led him to complain that the old thrill was becoming rarer. In making that complaint, he had quietly mistaken his aim: he treated Joy as a state of his own mind, something he could summon and hold. He came to see that the thrill arose only when attention and desire were directed elsewhere—toward a distant mountain, the past, or the gods of Asgard. It was a byproduct of attending to an object, not the object itself.

That distinction clarifies why Lewis’s efforts to recover the feeling so often defeated themselves. He made every poem, piece of music, and walk a test of whether Joy was beginning, watching his own mind for the desired response and trying to retain it. At times beauty swept aside this self-conscious monitoring and he again experienced Joy; more often, impatience frightened it away, while introspection disrupted it when it appeared. The Desirable could not be captured by turning attention inward to inspect the effect it produced.

False substitutions: erotic and magical desire

Lewis tested other explanations for what he wanted. When the imaginative worlds associated with Morris became frequent occasions of Joy, he sometimes mistook their forests and mythic settings for objects of erotic desire. Experience showed him that erotic pleasure and Joy were not the same thing: following that interpretation to its conclusion did not satisfy the longing he had initially mistaken. The distinction was not that beauty or its imagined inhabitants could never accompany Joy, but that they could not account for its deeper reach.

A later fascination with magic offered another false destination. Lewis describes this as a dangerous turn toward the secret and forbidden, and notes that he lacked a teacher and was also restrained by fear. More fundamentally, however, he found that the desire to cross boundaries and discover hidden knowledge had a different character from Joy. Even if magical practices had seemed to produce an extraordinary result, that result would not have been the real Desirable; the original longing would still have found it irrelevant. The episode sharpened the difference between intensity and fulfillment: a powerful appetite for an experience does not prove that the experience is what one truly wants.

From inward feeling to the naked Other

Lewis’s decisive realization comes when he asks whether Joy itself is the desired object. He had tried to identify what he wanted with an event in his own mind or body, and at last with aesthetic experience as such. That answer, too, failed. He concluded that the value did not lie in Joy considered merely as a mental occurrence, but in what Joy desired: something other than himself and external to his states of mind.

This conclusion carries him beyond the objects he can name or picture. The desired reality is not a sensory object, a biological or social need, an imagined scene, or an inward condition. Lewis calls it the naked Other: objective, yet not presented in the clothing of the senses; unknown and undefined, though the imagination may salute it with many images. The Desirable is therefore not simply one more beautiful thing among others. It is the reality toward which those images and desires point, without any image being identical to it.

Significance in Lewis’s account of Joy

The Desirable provides the organizing distinction in Lewis’s analysis of Joy. It explains why Joy cannot be deliberately produced as a private pleasure: the attempt reverses the proper direction of attention, making the response more important than what it responds to. The same mistake, Lewis observes, can distort both religious life and love by turning attention from another or from God toward the satisfaction of one’s own feelings. His account does not identify imaginative experience with religious belief; it treats imagination as a reflection of a higher reality, not as a step that automatically makes a person wiser or better.

The concept also marks a change in the movement of Lewis’s thought. He connects his understanding of Joy with his idealist philosophy, according to which human beings are appearances rooted in the Absolute, and interprets longing as a desire for unity beyond the separate self. This explanation seemed intellectually and emotionally satisfying, but it did not settle the question of the Desirable’s identity. Lewis says he had not yet asked who the desired was, only what it was. The inward investigation had nonetheless begun to draw together his experience of desire and his philosophy, preparing a later reconsideration of the beliefs he had treated as abstract ideas.