This idea about prayer led him to feel compelled to stay awake at night until he felt sufficiently convinced of his sincerity. It was at Wyvern that Lewis' religiosity began to be a burden to him because of a belief impressed upon him that prayer should come with a certain feeling of belief. His experience at the school taught Lewis both to be happy in the moments he was away from school and to endure those moments when he was not. Next Lewis spent a short time at a private school called Campbell, which he enjoyed and where he witnessed honest and fair bullying in an era which ran parallel to the time he spent with the cousins on his mother's side, who would teach him his few social graces. Lewis' description of his education starts at his time at a soon-to-fail private school under a master he called 'Oldie.' Oldie was slipping mentally and cruelly treated both his students and his family, but Lewis learned both a small amount of math from him and to take refuge in his reading. His father was a boisterous Welshman, clever, but distanced by the quirky mental habits that made communicating with the author a lifelong challenge. His mother was a mathematician from a refined, English family and died of cancer when he was young. Finally, after long searching for joy intellectually and aesthetically, those searches pointed to the transcendent Source and Author of joy, the God of Christian scripture. He follows the thread through his youth and into adulthood as he experiences Joy, first in his imaginary and literary world, later in nature. Lewis sets out to describe the ways in which his childhood and education shaped his mind and trained his thinking to lead ultimately to his concluding that Christianity was the most valid and comprehensive answer to his inherent longing for the experience he calls Joy.

In his book titled 'Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life', author and thinker C.S.

Cs lewis surprised by joy sparknotes