Part the first: Affection

I just finished reading Lewis' The Four Loves last night and would like to share a few of the passages I underlined. As an aside, I do realize that I am setting myself up with all these 'first in a series' and 'to be continued' entries for failure of completion but I truly would like to continue these posts and think that by showing my intent openly I might be forced to follow up. Time will tell.

In the chapter titled 'Affection' Lewis describes this love thus:

The especial glory of Affection is that it can unite those who most emphatically, even comically, are not; people who, if they had not found themselves put down by fate in the same household or community, would have had nothing to do with each other. If Affection grows out of this--of course it often does not--their eyes begin to open.

When we reach the point of fondness of others this

means that we are getting beyond our own idiosyncrasies, that we are learning to appreciate goodness or intelligence in themselves, not merely goodness or intelligence flavoured and served to suit our own palate.

He talks of how it is easy to like our friends but that:

The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has met every day.

However, he also points out (as he does with each form of love) that Affection--on its own--is neutral: it can be brought down by sin or raised by God's love. Lewis demonstrates that this is not the view most people hold toward love (I would venture to say that this is probably the result of common grace--that love is experienced or understood by most more often on the good side).

Affection is often assumed to be provided, ready made, by nature...We have a right to expect it. If the others do not give it, they are "unnatural"...

The "built-in" or unmerited character of Affection thus invites a hideous misinterpretation. So does its ease and informality...

the very same conditions of intimacy which make Affection possible also--and no less naturally--make possible a peculiar incurable distaste; a hatred as immemorial, constant, unemphatic, almost at times unconscious, as the corresponding form of love.

He describes courtesy, the outworking of true Affection:

The more intimate the occasion, the less the formalisation; but no therefore the less need of courtesy. On the contrary, affection at its best practices a courtesy which is incomparably more subtle, sensitive and deep than the public kind. In public a ritual would do. At home you must have the reality which that ritual represented...you must really give no kind of preference to yourself; at a party it is enough to conceal the preference...Those who leave their manners behind them when they come home...have no real courtesy even there. They were merely aping those who had.

And finally a few miscellaneous quotes that support his argument yet also stand well on their own (I feel as though I might as well write out the chapter in its entirety or just recommend you read the book yourself since Lewis is much better at representing himself than my mediatory comments and unfortunate gaps could ever hope to do)

-The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift.
-[All loves carry] in them the seeds of hatred. If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.
-The unappreciativeness of the others...enabled her to feel ill-used, therefore, to have a continual grievance, to enjoy the pleasures of resentment.
-The really surprising thing is not that these insatiable demands made by the unlovable are sometimes made in vain, but that they are so often met.
-Affection will arise and grow strong without demanding any very shining qualities in its objects. If it is given us it will not necessarily be given us on our merits; we may get it with very little trouble.
-Once when I had remarked on the affection quite often found between cat and dog, my friend replied, "Yes. But I bet no dog would ever confess it to the other dogs."
-Affection would not be affection if it was loud and frequently expressed.

And a final quote (I promise) on the world's ideas of normality:

Medicine labours to restore "natural" structure or "normal" function. But greed, egoism, self-deception and self-pity are not unnatural or abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven's name, would describe as natural or normal the man from whom these failings were wholly absent? "Natural", if you like, in a quite different sense; archnatural, unfallen. We have seen only one such Man. And He was not at all like the psychologist's picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can't really be very well "adjusted" to your world if it says you "have a devil" and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.