Peanuts + aromatics have to be a winning combo. What’s the equivalent for other cultures? Between the cardamom, ginger, turmeric, etc., I have to imagine you could make a great Indian analogue.

Agreed. I thought I recognized the phenomena Lewis was describing up until this point, but this passage immediately contextualized several times in my life where I felt successful but unhappy: I wasn’t following his advice.

Maybe given that, I had hoped Lewis would spend more time talking about the cure and less about the diagnosis. But I can see the wisdom of the structure, as he gave this speech to students at Kings College who may not have enough lived experience to distinguish the Inner Ring from the “real inside…[which looks] exactly like an Inner Ring”. There’s tremendous value in setting the pattern and letting the human tendency towards apophenia take over.

Lewis’s Britishness exudes from the prose:

It would be polite and charitable, and in view of your age reasonable too, to suppose that none of you is yet a scoundrel.