If Lewis’s epistemology has a center, it is in fact, not truth, because truth is always about reality—one step removed from the thing itself.

Winged Lion Press is a small publisher concentrating on C. S. Lewis- and mythopoeic-related material. I received a free copy of Light: C. S. Lewis’s First and Final Short Story from publisher Robert Trexler.

Many, if not most, C. S. Lewis fans are familiar with a story called “The Man Born Blind,” published posthumously in 1977 by Lewis’s literary executor, Walter Hooper, in the book The Dark Tower and Other Stories.

A few years ago, a different version (and a later one, in the opinion of Charlie W. Star, author of Light) was acquired by a collector of Lewisiana. The manuscript’s provenance is cloudy, but handwriting and ink strongly indicate that it’s genuine. This story carries Lewis’s own title, “Light” (the title in Hooper’s volume was his own invention, as the version he had had none).

Of all Lewis’s writings, “Light” is probably the most enigmatic. It springs from his most profound thinking on meaning and reality, and these are deep waters indeed.

I should caution you that unless you’re a hard-core Lewis fan, you may find this book kind of hard going. The grass here is tall indeed. I couldn’t help thinking of A Canticle for Liebowitz, as Charlie Starr manages to find material for an entire (and not short) book in a four page story. But for the Inklings enthusiast, there’s much of interest here.

The story is examined from several directions, but perhaps the most fascinating are those of dating and meaning. The two are closely related, as Lewis’ friend Owen Barfield clearly remembered seeing a version of the story in the late 1920s, some time before Lewis’s conversion. But Starr argues (pretty convincingly) that this version was written around 1944. His argument is that Lewis must have nursed this story, re-writing it from time to time, over the course of his lifetime, so that it meant rather different things at the end than it did at the beginning.

Light is not for the casual reader, but I recommend it for the hard-core Lewis fan.