Have You Ever Noticed This Contrast?

Writing to his friend Owen Barfield, C. S. Lewis remarked:

Talking of beasts and birds, have you ever noticed this contrast: that when you read a scientific account of any animal's life you get an impression of laborious, incessant, almost rational economic activity . . . but when you study any animal you know—what at once strikes you is their cheerful fatuity, the pointlessness of nearly all they do. Say what you like, Barfield, the world is sillier and better fun than they make out.

—C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters: Books, Broadcasts, and War, 1931-1949, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 930, as cited in Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 57.