John Piper on C.S. Lewis

Reading "Don't Waste Your Life" by John Piper tonight, I found this section very insightful, where Piper is explaining the deep impacts C.S. Lewis had on him in Piper's college years:

"He has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he
showed me that newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth
and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist.
Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valuable for
being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and
opened for me the wisdom of the ages. To this day I get most of
my soul-food from centuries ago. I thank God for Lewis’s compelling
demonstration of the obvious.
He demonstrated for me and convinced me that rigorous, precise,
penetrating logic is not opposed to deep, soul-stirring feeling
and vivid, lively—even playful—imagination. He was a
“romantic rationalist.” He combined things that almost everybody
today assumes are mutually exclusive: rationalism and
poetry, cool logic and warm feeling, disciplined prose and free
imagination. In shattering these old stereotypes, he freed me to
think hard and to write poetry, to argue for the resurrection and
compose hymns to Christ, to smash an argument and hug a
friend, to demand a definition and use a metaphor.
Lewis gave me an intense sense of the “realness” of things.
The preciousness of this is hard to communicate. To wake up in
the morning and be aware of the firmness of the mattress, the
warmth of the sun’s rays, the sound of the clock ticking, the sheer
being of things (“quiddity” as he calls it3). He helped me become
alive to life. He helped me see what is there in the world—things
that, if we didn’t have, we would pay a million dollars to have,
but having them, ignore. He made me more alive to beauty. He
put my soul on notice that there are daily wonders that will
waken worship if I open my eyes. He shook my dozing soul and
threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God
and heaven and hell broke into my world with glory and horror.
He exposed the sophisticated intellectual opposition to
objective being and objective value for the naked folly that it
was. The philosophical king of my generation had no clothes on,
and the writer of children’s books from Oxford had the courage
to say so.
You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole
point of seeing through something is to see something through
it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because
the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw
through the garden too? It is no use trying to “see through”
first principles. If you see through everything, then everything
is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible
world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.4
Oh, how much more could be said about the world as C. S.
Lewis saw it and the way he spoke. He has his flaws, some of
them serious. But I will never cease to thank God for this remarkable
man who came onto my path at the perfect moment."