Epiphanies

One evening in September 1931, C. S. Lewis had one of those late night discussions about Christianity with his usual Oxford chums J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. The next day he had an epiphany on his way to the zoo. He was on the back of his brother's motorcycle. Lewis later tells how when he started off for the zoo “I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did." Lewis was 32 and had always been a skeptic.

Life is full of journeys, long and short, with and without epiphanies. But there are discoveries of one kind or another waiting just outside our door. Even the minor ones are pretty interesting. Not everyone gets to discover the Pacific from a peak in Darien or the moons of Jupiter from a hillside near Florence. Sometimes, like Graham Greene, we come across something ordinary like a reasonably priced meal when that's exactly what we need. There are a lot of discoveries in A Book of Ages. They can happen at any age.