Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women
1858
Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women
1858
The novel that changed C.S. Lewis forever begins with a young man on the morning of his twenty-first birthday. Anodos inherits his father's desk, discovers a hidden compartment, and awakens a pale fairy who promises to lead him into Fairy Land. What follows is a dreamlike pilgrimage through a realm where beauty and danger intertwine, where the protagonist encounters enchanted forests, luminous women, shadow-dwellers, and the strange mathematics of desire. This is not a children's fairy tale. Written in 1858, Phantastes is one of the first modern fantasy novels, and it operates on deeper registers, the fairy land becomes a mirror for the soul's reckoning with beauty, temptation, and ultimate surrender. MacDonald writes with a strange, luminous prose that feels less like storytelling than like dreaming aloud, and his protagonist's journey through wonder and loss mirrors the spiritual quest at the heart of all the deepest fantasy. The surrender that awaits is hard-won, rippling with joy, and absolutely worth the cost.
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“It is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness. I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over over any soul be loved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return. ””
— George MacDonald
“Past tears are present strength.””
— George MacDonald
“As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy.””
— George MacDonald
“Alas, how easily things go wrong!A sigh too much, a kiss too longAnd there follows a mist and a weeping rainAnd life is never the same again””
— George MacDonald
“And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.””
— George MacDonald
“I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal.””
— George MacDonald
“I watched her departure, as one watches a sunset. She went like a radiance through the dark wood, which was henceforth bright to me, from simply knowing that such a creature was in it.””
— George MacDonald
“Yet I know that good is coming to me”
— George MacDonald
“But words are vain; reject them all”
— George MacDonald
