An alien understanding of pleasure
The inhabitants of C. S. Lewis’s OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET teach a human the true meaning of pleasure.
Imagine a world inhabited with sentient beings whose appreciation for life is driven by a complete understanding of pleasure rather than the selfish focus of personal pain. A conversation among creatures who inhabit Malacandra in C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet seems to be a product of such thought. In the narrative of this first entry into the Space Trilogy, Dr. Elwin Ransom is kidnapped and taken to Malacandra against his will. After escaping his human captors, Ransom meets and befriends such creatures and uses his knowledge of philology to learn how to speak with the hrossa, bipedal animals who enjoy creative arts like poetry and dance.
The language of the hrossa is the primary Old Solar tongue. Ransom becomes adept at communicating in the language after spending time among its native speakers. While learning how to communicate, Ransom takes particular note of how the hrossa live with each other. They love poetry and prose but do not write anything down, and the reason why is compelling.
In a conversation with Hyoi, the first hrossa Ransom meets, he first tries to discover what war is like on the strange planet. Knowing no words for ‘war,’ he asks if the…
