Perelandra

by

C. S. Lewis

Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man Character Analysis

Weston, an accomplished Cambridge physicist in his 50s, is the antagonist of the novel and Ransom’s nemesis. He is an arrogant man who is most at home while lecturing uninterrupted in a Cambridge classroom. His personality is otherwise somewhat whining and irritable; deep down, he is deeply fearful of death and what he suspects is the underlying meaninglessness of the universe. In the first volume of the Space Trilogy, he kidnapped Ransom and took him to Malacandra. According to Ransom, Weston exemplifies the view of conventional science fiction, which focuses on the desire to dominate other lands and species in the vain hope of cheating death—usually with deathly consequences for other species as well as humans. Weston brings this attitude with him to Perelandra, where he disregards the natural beauty surrounding him and instead sets to work trying to erode the Green Lady’s faith in Maleldil and tempting her to sin. Through this ordeal, it becomes obvious to Ransom that Weston has allowed a diabolical force to inhabit his body and that, with the exception of lingering fragments of his old personality, he has effectively become an “Un-man.” Weston and Ransom become locked in bitter, violent conflict as Ransom fights to prevent Weston from corrupting Perelandra forever; after a couple of attempts, Ransom finally succeeds in killing Weston and disposes of his body deep inside a cavern. He writes an epitaph for Weston on the cave wall.

Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man Quotes in Perelandra

The Perelandra quotes below are all either spoken by Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man or refer to Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Exploration, Wonder, and God’s Plan Theme Icon
).
Chapter 6 Quotes

He was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over our planet in obscure works of "scientifiction," in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs […] It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God's quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet poison of the false infinite—the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species—a dream begotten by the hatred of death[.]

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man
Page Number: 70
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

"My dear Ransom," said Weston, "I understand you perfectly. I have no doubt that my phraseology will seem strange to you, and perhaps even shocking. Early and revered associations may have put it out of your power to recognise in this new form the very same truths which religion has so long preserved and which science is now at last rediscovering. But whether you can see it or not, believe me, we are talking about exactly the same thing."

"I'm not at all sure that we are."

"That, if you will permit me to say so, is one of the real weaknesses of organised religion—that adherence to formula, that failure to recognise one's own friends. God is a spirit, Ransom. Get hold of that.”

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man (speaker), Lewis (speaker)
Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

"I have said already that we are forbidden to dwell on the Fixed Land. Why do you not either talk of something else or stop talking?”

"Because this forbidding is such a strange one,” said [Weston’s] voice. "And so unlike the ways of Maleldil in my world. And He has not forbidden you to think about dwelling on the Fixed Land. […] [I]n our world we do it all the time. We put words together to mean things that have never happened and places that never were: beautiful words, well put together. And then tell them to one another. We call it stories or poetry. […] It is for mirth and wonder and wisdom.”

"What is the wisdom in it?"

"Because the world is made up not only of what is but of what might be. Maleldil knows both and wants us to know both.”

Related Characters: Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Maleldil
Related Symbols: The Fixed Land
Page Number: 89
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

[The smile] seemed to summon Ransom, with horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence. It was beyond vice as the Lady was beyond virtue.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man, The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril
Page Number: 95
Explanation and Analysis:

"And will you teach us Death?" said the Lady to Weston's shape, where it stood above her.

"Yes," it said, "it is for this that I came here, that you may have Death in abundance. But you must be very courageous."

"Courageous. What is that?"

"It is what makes you to swim on a day when the waves are so great and swift that something inside you bids you to stay on land."

"I know. And those are the best days of all for swimming."

"Yes. But to find Death, and with Death the real oldness and the strong beauty and the uttermost branching out, you must plunge into things greater than waves."

Related Characters: Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom
Related Symbols: Waves
Page Number: 98
Explanation and Analysis:

"Your deepest will, at present, is to obey Him […] The way out of that is hard. It was made hard that only the very great, the very wise, the very courageous should dare to walk in it, to go on—on out of this smallness in which you now live—through the dark wave of His forbidding, into the real life, Deep Life, with all its joy and splendour and hardness."

"Listen, Lady," said Ransom. "There is something he is not telling you. […] Long ago, when our world began, there was only one man and one woman in it, as you and the King are in this. And there once before he stood, as he stands now, talking to the woman. […] And she listened, and did the thing Maleldil had forbidden her to do. But no joy and splendour came of it.”

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man (speaker), Lewis (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril, Maleldil
Related Symbols: Waves
Page Number: 102
Explanation and Analysis:

If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. […] On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

She stood like one almost dazed with the richness of a day-dream. She did not look in the least like a woman who is thinking about a new dress. The expression of her face was noble. It was a great deal too noble. Greatness, tragedy, high sentiment—these were obviously what occupied her thoughts. Ransom perceived that the affair of the robes and the mirror had been only superficially concerned with what is commonly called female vanity. The image of her beautiful body had been offered to her only as a means to awake the far more perilous image of her great soul. The external and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy's true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage. He had already written the play.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man, The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

Long since on Mars, and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact was purely terrestrial—was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the Fall. Even on earth the sacraments existed as a permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome nor final. The Incarnation had been the beginning of its disappearance. In Perelandra it would have no meaning at all. Whatever happened here would be of such a nature that earth-men would call it mythological. All this he had thought before. Now he knew it. The Presence in the darkness, never before so formidable, was putting these truths into his hands, like terrible jewels.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man, Maleldil
Page Number: 122
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

And the dark came. Horror of death such as he had never known, horror of the terrified creature at his side, descended upon Ransom: finally, horror with no definite object. In a few minutes he could see through the jet-black night the luminous cloud of foam. From the way in which it shot steeply upward he judged it was breaking on cliffs. Invisible birds, with a shriek and flurry, passed low overhead.

"Are you there, Weston?" he shouted. "What cheer? Pull yourself together. All that stuff you've been talking is lunacy. Say a child's prayer if you can't say a man's. Repent your sins. Take my hand. There are hundreds of mere boys on Earth facing death this moment. We'll do very well."

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

"They want to frighten me," said something in Ransom's brain, and at the same moment he became convinced both that the Un-man had summoned this great crawler and also that the evil thoughts which had preceded the appearance of the enemy had been poured into his own mind by the enemy's will. The knowledge that his thoughts could be thus managed from without did not awake terror but rage. Ransom found that he had risen, that he was approaching the Un-man, that he was saying things, perhaps foolish things, in English. “Do you think I’m going to stand this?" he yelled. "Get out of my brain. It isn’t yours, I tell you! Get out of it." As he shouted he had picked up a big, jagged stone from beside the stream. […]

"In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, here goes—I mean Amen," said Ransom, and hurled the stone as hard as he could into the Un-man's face.

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man
Page Number: 155
Explanation and Analysis:
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Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man Quotes in Perelandra

The Perelandra quotes below are all either spoken by Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man or refer to Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Exploration, Wonder, and God’s Plan Theme Icon
).
Chapter 6 Quotes

He was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over our planet in obscure works of "scientifiction," in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs […] It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God's quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet poison of the false infinite—the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species—a dream begotten by the hatred of death[.]

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man
Page Number: 70
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

"My dear Ransom," said Weston, "I understand you perfectly. I have no doubt that my phraseology will seem strange to you, and perhaps even shocking. Early and revered associations may have put it out of your power to recognise in this new form the very same truths which religion has so long preserved and which science is now at last rediscovering. But whether you can see it or not, believe me, we are talking about exactly the same thing."

"I'm not at all sure that we are."

"That, if you will permit me to say so, is one of the real weaknesses of organised religion—that adherence to formula, that failure to recognise one's own friends. God is a spirit, Ransom. Get hold of that.”

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man (speaker), Lewis (speaker)
Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

"I have said already that we are forbidden to dwell on the Fixed Land. Why do you not either talk of something else or stop talking?”

"Because this forbidding is such a strange one,” said [Weston’s] voice. "And so unlike the ways of Maleldil in my world. And He has not forbidden you to think about dwelling on the Fixed Land. […] [I]n our world we do it all the time. We put words together to mean things that have never happened and places that never were: beautiful words, well put together. And then tell them to one another. We call it stories or poetry. […] It is for mirth and wonder and wisdom.”

"What is the wisdom in it?"

"Because the world is made up not only of what is but of what might be. Maleldil knows both and wants us to know both.”

Related Characters: Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Maleldil
Related Symbols: The Fixed Land
Page Number: 89
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

[The smile] seemed to summon Ransom, with horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence. It was beyond vice as the Lady was beyond virtue.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man, The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril
Page Number: 95
Explanation and Analysis:

"And will you teach us Death?" said the Lady to Weston's shape, where it stood above her.

"Yes," it said, "it is for this that I came here, that you may have Death in abundance. But you must be very courageous."

"Courageous. What is that?"

"It is what makes you to swim on a day when the waves are so great and swift that something inside you bids you to stay on land."

"I know. And those are the best days of all for swimming."

"Yes. But to find Death, and with Death the real oldness and the strong beauty and the uttermost branching out, you must plunge into things greater than waves."

Related Characters: Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom
Related Symbols: Waves
Page Number: 98
Explanation and Analysis:

"Your deepest will, at present, is to obey Him […] The way out of that is hard. It was made hard that only the very great, the very wise, the very courageous should dare to walk in it, to go on—on out of this smallness in which you now live—through the dark wave of His forbidding, into the real life, Deep Life, with all its joy and splendour and hardness."

"Listen, Lady," said Ransom. "There is something he is not telling you. […] Long ago, when our world began, there was only one man and one woman in it, as you and the King are in this. And there once before he stood, as he stands now, talking to the woman. […] And she listened, and did the thing Maleldil had forbidden her to do. But no joy and splendour came of it.”

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man (speaker), Lewis (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril, Maleldil
Related Symbols: Waves
Page Number: 102
Explanation and Analysis:

If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. […] On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

She stood like one almost dazed with the richness of a day-dream. She did not look in the least like a woman who is thinking about a new dress. The expression of her face was noble. It was a great deal too noble. Greatness, tragedy, high sentiment—these were obviously what occupied her thoughts. Ransom perceived that the affair of the robes and the mirror had been only superficially concerned with what is commonly called female vanity. The image of her beautiful body had been offered to her only as a means to awake the far more perilous image of her great soul. The external and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy's true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage. He had already written the play.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man, The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

Long since on Mars, and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact was purely terrestrial—was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the Fall. Even on earth the sacraments existed as a permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome nor final. The Incarnation had been the beginning of its disappearance. In Perelandra it would have no meaning at all. Whatever happened here would be of such a nature that earth-men would call it mythological. All this he had thought before. Now he knew it. The Presence in the darkness, never before so formidable, was putting these truths into his hands, like terrible jewels.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man, Maleldil
Page Number: 122
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

And the dark came. Horror of death such as he had never known, horror of the terrified creature at his side, descended upon Ransom: finally, horror with no definite object. In a few minutes he could see through the jet-black night the luminous cloud of foam. From the way in which it shot steeply upward he judged it was breaking on cliffs. Invisible birds, with a shriek and flurry, passed low overhead.

"Are you there, Weston?" he shouted. "What cheer? Pull yourself together. All that stuff you've been talking is lunacy. Say a child's prayer if you can't say a man's. Repent your sins. Take my hand. There are hundreds of mere boys on Earth facing death this moment. We'll do very well."

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

"They want to frighten me," said something in Ransom's brain, and at the same moment he became convinced both that the Un-man had summoned this great crawler and also that the evil thoughts which had preceded the appearance of the enemy had been poured into his own mind by the enemy's will. The knowledge that his thoughts could be thus managed from without did not awake terror but rage. Ransom found that he had risen, that he was approaching the Un-man, that he was saying things, perhaps foolish things, in English. “Do you think I’m going to stand this?" he yelled. "Get out of my brain. It isn’t yours, I tell you! Get out of it." As he shouted he had picked up a big, jagged stone from beside the stream. […]

"In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, here goes—I mean Amen," said Ransom, and hurled the stone as hard as he could into the Un-man's face.

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man
Page Number: 155
Explanation and Analysis: