What the eldils had told [Ransom] about the possibility of such discovery he had received, while they were with him, almost without wonder. In their eyes, the normal Tellurian modes of being—engendering and birth and death and decay—which are to us the framework of thought, were no less wonderful than the countless other patterns of being which were continually present to their unsleeping minds. To those high creatures whose activity builds what we call Nature, nothing is “natural.” From their station, the essential arbitrariness (so to call it) of every actual creation is ceaselessly visible; for them there are no basic assumptions: all springs with the willful beauty of a jest or a tune from that miraculous moment of self-limitation, wherein the Infinite, rejecting a myriad possibilities, throws out of Himself the positive and elected invention.

—C.S. Lewis, writing in That Hideous Strength, 1945