lewisiana

[lewisiana]

On this day in 1963, C.S. Lewis died. His brother was with him. He was preceded by his wife three years earlier.

Once very near the end I said, ‘If you can—if it is allowed—come to me when I too am on my death bed.’ ‘Allowed!’ she said. ‘Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I’d break it into bits.’

-C.S. Lewis

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'Dumbocrats'

Does anyone in America understand American politics?...

I thought I was going to learn something from an old lady in Connecticut the other day, but at the end of eight pages so hot that they nearly burnt my fingers, all I could gather was that the ‘Dumbocrats’ as she called them, are a sort of mixture of Hitler, the Russian secret police, and the inmates of the village lunatic asylum: but no doubt this view is a little prejudiced.

-C.S. Lewis, July 1952

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Merry as a Cricket

Thanks for your good wishes on my marriage. It is as good as the first one was bad.

With Bill I lived in perpetual anxiety; if it wasn’t women it was drink, and if it wasn’t drink it was bad temper and smashed crockery and public scenes, and always it was money; just getting him out of bed in the morning and coaxing him to do a little work meant three hours’ exacting work for me!

With Jack the only problem is to keep him from working too hard and sacrificing himself to all the rest of us. He is really a saint, and that’s not a word I use lightly.

In addition, he’s got ten times Bill’s charm and brains and talent and wit, and he’s as merry as a cricket—and, as you can see, I’m overwhelmingly in love with him!

-Lewis' wife Joy writes to her cousin, May 1958

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When God made space and worlds that move in space, and clothed our world with air, and gave us such eyes and such imaginations as those we have, He knew what the sky would mean to us.

-C.S. Lewis

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One day I made a mild complaint about the dullness of the Cambridge countryside contrasted with other places I had known and loved. He turned on me quite gravely.

"You should never condemn any genuine countryside in that way," he said almost severely to me. "In every landscape you should try to feel for its real nature and quality and let it grasp hold of you. The day is coming when, beyond this life, we shall recognize that quality in the eternal fulfillment in which it will have its true place."

-Simon Barrington-Ward, friend of C.S. Lewis

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I hate and distrust reactions not only in religion but in everything. Luther surely spoke very good sense when he compared humanity to a drunkard who, after falling off his horse on the right, falls off it next time on the left.

-C.S. Lewis

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Not Enough

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated.

The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others.

Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented.

Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality.

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

-C.S. Lewis - An Experiment in Criticism

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'Let's Do It Again!'

Lewis describes his first meeting with his future stepsons -

Last week we entertained a lady from New York for four days, with her boys, aged nine and seven respectively. Can you imagine two crusted old bachelors in such a situation? It however went swimmingly, though it was very, very exhausting; the energy of the American small boy is astonishing. This pair thought nothing of a four mile hike across broken country as an incident in a day of ceaseless activity, and when we took them up Magdalen tower, they said as soon as they got back to the ground, ‘Let’s do it again!’

The 'American lady' describes the same event -

We had a very relaxed and friendly visit, though physically strenuous enough; long walks through the hills, during which Jack reverted completely to schoolboy tactics and went charging ahead with the boys through all the thorniest, muddiest, steepest places; Warnie and I meanwhile toiling behind and feeling very old. Also we climbed Magdalen Tower to the top, up a twisty spiral medieval staircase barely wide enough, and a steep ladder; and the boys were let into the deer park and spent half an hour stalking the deer. Jack gave them the typescript of the next Narnia book, The Horse and His Boy, which is dedicated to them. I shouldn't dream of visiting Jack often — we’re much too exhausting an experience for that quiet bachelor household; but a little of it’s probably good for them.

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Vale

I have seen great beauty of spirit in some who were great sufferers. I have seen men, for the most part, grow better not worse with advancing years, and I have seen the last illness produce treasures of fortitude and meekness from most unpromising subjects.

I see in loved and revered historical figures, such as Johnson and Cowper, traits which might scarcely have been tolerable if the men had been happier.

If the world is indeed a “vale of soul making” it seems on the whole to be doing its work.

-C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

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Pain

You would like to know how I behave when I am experiencing pain, not writing books about it. You need not guess, for I will tell you; I am a great coward.

When I think of pain — of anxiety that gnaws like fire and loneliness that spreads out like a desert, and the heartbreaking routine of monotonous misery, or again of dull aches that blacken our whole landscape or sudden nauseating pains that knock a man’s heart out at one blow, of pains that seem already intolerable and then are suddenly increased, of infuriating scorpion-stinging pains that startle into maniacal movement a man who seemed half dead with his previous tortures — it "quite o’ercrows my spirit." If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find it.

But what is the good of telling you about my feelings ? You know them already: they are the same as yours.

I am not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means.

I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made “perfect through suffering” is not incredible.

-C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

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Tolkien managed to get the discussion round to the English Prelim. I had a talk with him afterwards. He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap... No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.

-first mention of Tolkien in C.S. Lewis' diary, May 11, 1926

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I cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of all non-conductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop. I felt just the same after my own mother's death when my father mentioned her. I can't blame them. It's the way boys are. -C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I have always wanted the opportunity to explain one small thing that is in this book and which displays a misunderstanding. Jack refers to the fact that if he mentioned Mother, I would always seem to be embarrassed. He did not understand, which was very unusual for him. I was fourteen when Mother died and the product of almost seven years of British Preparatory School indoctrination. The lesson I was most strongly taught throughout that time was that the most shameful thing that could happen to me would be to be reduced to tears in public. British boys don't cry. But I knew that if Jack talked to me about Mother, I would weep uncontrollably and, worse still, so would he. This was the source of my embarrassment. It took me almost thirty years to learn how to cry without feeling ashamed. -Douglas Gresham, Introduction to A Grief Observed

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The rest of my war experiences have little to do with this story. How I “took” about sixty prisoners—that is, discovered to my great relief that the crowd of field-gray figures who suddenly appeared from nowhere, all had their hands up—is not worth telling, save as a joke. -C.S. Lewis

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Reality

Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the spiritualists bait their hook! ‘Things on this side are not so different after all.’ There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored.

And that, just that, is what I cry out for, with mad, midnight endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air.

-A Grief Observed

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Once, I carried the ale to the common room to find them both sitting still, tears rolling down their faces. Alarmed, I cried out, "What's wrong? what's the matter?" "Nothing's wrong, Doug," said Jack, smiling through his tears. "We're reading the poems of A.E. Housman and they always do this to us." -Douglas Gresham, Lenten Lands, about his mother and C.S. Lewis

Oh Stay at Home, My Lad, and Plough

by A.E. Housman

Oh stay at home, my lad, and plough The land and not the sea, And leave the soldiers at their drill, And all about the idle hill Shepherd your sheep with me. Oh stay with company and mirth And daylight and the air; Too full already is the grave Of fellows that were good and brave And died because they were.