Life & Wisdom Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis treats "miracles" less like supernatural intrusions and more like readable annotations in a book most people are skimming. The line works because it refuses the cheap thrill of the anomalous. Instead, it reframes miracles as scaled-down versions of a larger, ongoing narrative already "written across the whole world". In other words: if you can’t see the pattern in the ordinary, you’ll miss it in the extraordinary, too.

The sly move is in the optics metaphor. We usually assume the problem is size: miracles are too big to ignore. Lewis flips it. The world is written in "letters too large for some of us to see" - so large they blur, like a billboard you’re standing too close to read. That’s a jab at modern habits of attention: we demand proof in the form of spectacle while living inside a constant, sprawling data set (beauty, order, conscience, longing, pain) that we explain away as background noise.

Context matters here. Lewis, a former skeptic turned Christian apologist, is arguing against the idea that miracles are violations of nature. He wants them to be coherent with nature’s meaning, not opposed to it. The subtext is pastoral and polemical: miracles aren’t meant to bully you into belief; they’re meant to make legible what was always there, for people whose vision has been trained by reductionism, distraction, or pride. The "small letters" aren’t a downgrade. They’re mercy: a concession to human nearsightedness.