Prologue: The Secret Thread and the Lost Manuscript

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Narnia, radio talks, literary scholarship, poetry, science fiction, apologetics—what is the secret thread uniting C.S. Lewis’s incredibly diverse bookshelf? Everyone agrees that “what Lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything,” in Owen Barfield’s terms. To discover this secret thread—to discern the shape of Lewis’s thought—requires seeing with new eyes. In “Prologue: The Secret Thread and the Lost Manuscript,” readers are invited to walk through the door of imagination with an experiment in reading Lewis. The Prologue maps out the reading experiment, proposing that Lewis’s spiritual imagination is the unseen thread.</jats:p>