Lewis and Solzhenitsyn, a convergence

This morning on The Wardrobe [the C.S. Lewis fan page] someone had a long and good quote from Ivan Denisovich.

I briefly wondered if I had died and gone to heaven, then imagined Rubin saying "No, you are not in heaven, but still in hell. But you are in its First Circle."

The quote was the passage about Ivan Denisovich enjoying his two bowls of soup, "This was it! This was good! This was the brief moment for which a zek lives. " The poster added that this passage had a strong impact on him learning to appreciate even the barest threads of beauty in God's creation, and he even occasionally has Ivan Denisovich soup, clear broth with only a few herbs and bit of vegetable, to try to imagine savoring it as the zeks would.

Here is a passage from Lewis about learning to rejoice in the ordinary and common. Obviously Lewis never suffered like Solzhenitsyn suffered in Gulag (but Lewis did have some months in the human hell of WW I trenches), but I think the idea is still present, to rejoice in what goodness is available.

"[A.K. Hamilton Jenkin] continued … my education as a seeing, listening, smelling, receptive creature. …. [He] seemed to be able to enjoy everything; even ugliness. I learned from him that we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment; in a squalid town to seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day to find the most dismal and dripping wood, on a windy day to seek the windiest ridge [with] a serious, yet gleeful, determination to rub one’s nose in the very quiddity of each thing, to rejoice in its being (so magnificently) what it was." (Surprised by Joy, Harvest Book HB 102 edition, p. 199)

And I think this was the same thing I remember rereading Gulag, and how the sky over my morning commute was brighter the morning after I'd read about AIS rejoicing in the glimpse of the bit of sky condemned to float over the Lubyanka.