Water and wind

CS Lewis wrote about his early life in a book titled "Surprised by Joy".  The name of the book was most likely chosen from the first line penned by Wordsworth in his poem of the same name.  "Surprised by joy, impatient as the wind.  But back to CS Lewis.  Here is a small segment from the book.

I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, whilst most of my friends had and sometimes took me for a drive.  This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible desires, while they remained ordinary and as inaccessible as the Moon.  The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me.  I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the combustion engine.  I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed "infinite riches" in what would have been to motorists a "little room".  The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it "annihilates space".It does.  It annihilates the most glorious gifts we have been given.  It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels one hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from travelling ten.  Of course if man hates space and wants it annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once?  There is little enough space there.

Shortly after publishing, but sometime after writing "Surprised by Joy", CS Lewis met and later married Joy Gresham.