In the then Invincible Ignorance…

The following comes from C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy (p181):

“Up till now each visitation of Joy had left the common world momentarily a desert – “The first touch of the earth went nigh to kill.”  Even when real clouds or trees had been the material of the vision, they had been so only by reminding me of another world; and I did not like the return to ours.  But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged.  Or, more accurately, I saw the common things drawn into the bright shadow.  Unde hoc mihi?  In the depth of my disgraces, in the then invincible ignorance of my intellect, all this was given me without asking, even without consent.  That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer.  I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.”