Talking about Bicycles and the Secret to a Meaningful Life

If you’ve ever felt a wave of nostalgia so sharp it was almost painful, or wondered how a childhood joy could feel so magical then so mundane, then you’ve already begun the journey C. S. Lewis maps out in one of his wisest, most overlooked essays. Most know Lewis as the creator of Narnia or the author of Mere Christianity. But in a brief, conversational piece titled “Talking About Bicycles,” tucked in his 1946 collection Present Concerns, he offers a key to understanding not just faith, but love, art, and our very search for meaning.

Written in the weary aftermath of World War II, a time ripe for both cynicism and desperate hope, the essay transcends its immediate context. Framed as a chat with a friend, it uses the humble bicycle to chart what Lewis calls the “four ages” of our relationship with nearly everything that matters.

His friend explains: first, the Unenchanted Age of childhood indifference. Then, the Enchanted Age of learning to ride—a moment of “frictionless gliding” that seems to “have solved the secret of life.” This is inevitably followed by the Disenchanted Age, where the bike is just a tool for dreary commutes, its promise exposed as a mirage. But there is a fourth stage. In later life, even while doing dull errands, a “delicious whiff” of that early joy returns. This is the Re-enchanted Age—not a return to naive belief, but a hard-won realization: the original feeling, though attached to a flawed object, was a true signal of a real joy. The mirage was false, but the longing it awakened was genuine.

Lewis and his friend then apply this map everywhere: to romantic love (from infatuation, through marital strain, to deep, realistic commitment), to war (from patriotic glamour, through horrific disillusionment, to a somber respect for heroism that knows the cost), and even to social ideals like aristocracy. The crucial insight is the difference between Disenchantment and Unenchantment. Disenchantment is earned through lost illusion; it’s valuable. Unenchantment is the state of never having been enchanted at all—the cynic who sees love as only lust or war as only murder from the start. Lewis’s earnest warning: our culture often mistakes the shallow, unenchanted cynic for the profound, disillusioned realist.

So, what does this have to do with life’s biggest questions? Everything.

This is Lewis talking about religion. The “four ages” mirror a spiritual journey. The old myths and our innate sense of longing are the Enchantment. Modern skepticism represents Disenchantment (or worse, Unenchantment). And the Christian story, Lewis’s own faith, represents the ultimate Re-enchantment. It doesn’t ask us to ignore facts or return to childish credulity. Instead, it says: “That joy, that longing you felt—the ‘myth’ you were drawn to—was a true clue. It has now become Fact in history. The story you glimpsed in fragments has happened.”

Lewis isn’t just giving us a psychological observation; he’s providing a tool for discernment. In a world of competing narratives—scientific materialism, political utopianism, shallow hedonism—he asks us to judge them by this standard: Which story has the power to move you through all four ages? Which one can acknowledge the world’s drudgery and horror (Disenchantment) without cynicism, and recover a profound, mature joy (Re-enchantment) on the other side?

The story that can do that, Lewis argues, is the one that takes our deepest longings seriously, confronts the brutal reality of suffering head-on, and offers a resolution that fulfills rather than dismisses our original hope. For him, this was the story of the Word made flesh—the myth that became fact, the clue that explained all other clues.

“Talking About Bicycles” is more than an essay; it’s a map for the soul. It teaches us to cherish the “whiffs” of joy in our lives not as false promises, but as compass points. It warns us against the dead end of a cynicism that never loved anything, and guides us toward a state of mature gratitude, where we can look at our lives—with all their disappointments and mundane commutes—and see within them the faint, enduring glimmer of a far-off country we were always meant to find.