#lewis letters

[lewisian]

Despondent Devil

Remember what St. John says ‘If our heart condemn us, God is stronger than our heart.’ The feeling of being, or not being, forgiven & loved, is not what matters. One must come down to brass tacks.

If there is a particular sin on your conscience, repent & confess it. If there isn’t, tell the despondent devil not to be silly.

You can’t help hearing his voice (the odious inner radio) but you must treat it merely like a buzzing in your ears or any other irrational nuisance.

-C.S. Lewis

[lewisian]

Get a cat. They’re more suitable to us old people than dogs, and a cat makes a house into a home.

-C.S. Lewis

[lewisian]

My own feeling is that a literary idea ought to belong to anyone who can use it and that literary property is a sort of Simony. But you might find my publisher taking a different view.

-C.S. Lewis

[lewisian]

'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.

[lewisian]

Prigs

Dorothy Sayers wrote a series of plays that portrayed Biblical stories in a more contemporary fashion. For this she faced quite a bit of criticism. Lewis responded:

The reason why they don’t like either the narrative element or low comedy is that these have obvious immediate entertainment value.

These prigs, starting from the true proposition that great art is more than entertainment, reach the glaring non sequitur ‘entertainment has no place in great art’ – like people who think music can’t be ‘classical’ if there is a catchy tune in it.

It is as if, having learned that religious emotion is not the whole spiritual life and erotic pleasure not the whole of marriage, they then concluded that dryness and impotence were essentials.

Pack of muddle-headed manichaeans who got marks at their prep. school for reading ‘good’ books which they didn’t enjoy. Pah!

-C.S. Lewis

[lewisian]

Pathos

I’m the worst person in the world to write to someone who is feeling weak and listless, not because I have never been in that condition but because I don’t myself dislike it nearly as much as most people.

To lie in bed–to find ones eyes filling with facile tears at the least hint of pathos in ones book–to let the book drop from ones hand as one sinks deeper and deeper into reverie–to forget what you were thinking about a moment ago and not to mind–and then to be roused by the unexpected discovery that it is already tea-time–all this I do not find disagreeable!

... Jane Austen, Scott, and Trollope are my own favourites when ill. I hope you can read this: I become daily less capable of forming the letters I intend. ‘I write by scratches now; when age comes on may hardly write at all.'

Now, go to sleep. Blessings.

-C.S. Lewis

[lewisian]

Comics

I wonder do we blame TV and the Comics too much? Was not a certain sort of boy in a certain sort of home wasting his time just as badly in other ways before they were invented?

It annoys me when parents who read nothing but the newspapers themselves - i.e. nothing but lies, libels, poppycock, propaganda, and pornography - complain of their children reading the Comics! Upon my soul I think the children's diet is healthier than their parents'.

-C.S. Lewis

[lewisian]

I can picture very few of the things I believe in – I can’t picture will, thought, time, atoms, astronomical distances, New York, nor even (at the moment) my mother’s face.

-C.S. Lewis

September 1959