How It Felt

Sometimes an author tells us not only what a character sees and hears but also how his unfamiliar surroundings make him feel. This is harder to convey and also something that we should remember while we read although we don't.

"Despite the desertion, Falkayn got a sense of raw, overwhelming vitality. Perhaps it came from the sheer scale of everything, or the ceaseless throbbing, or a more subtle clue like the proportions of what he saw, the sense of masses huge and heavy but crouched to pounce."

-Satan's World, XV, p. 482.

 

This whole chapter, with Falkayn pressing his thumb down on an unpinned grenade while he confronts Gahood in that being's battleship, is nightmarish.

 

"I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space, than I had ever known before: as if the sky were further off and the extent of the green plain wider than they could be on this little ball of earth. I had got 'out' in some sense which made the Solar System itself seem an indoor affair. It gave me a feeling of freedom, but also of exposure, possibly of danger, which continued to accompany me through all that followed. It is the impossibility of communicating that feeling, or even of inducing you to remember it as I proceed, which makes me despair of conveying the real quality of what I saw and heard."

-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1982), p. 26.

On a smaller scale than Lewis's, we remember the terror induced in Eric Wace by the wide horizon of the planet Diomedes in Poul Anderson's The Man Who Counts.