Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W): TS

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 5th February 1953.

      Dear Mrs. Van Deusen,

      I am writing to Genia, and you have my deepest sympathy. Of course you all have my prayers. No doubt by this time you have had my answer to your last letter.

      Yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD): TS

      REF.28/53.

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 6th February 1953.

      My dear Bles,

      Thanks for the highly satisfactory statement and the cheque for £793-12-3.1 would like very much to come up to lunch and go through the new illustrations when they arrive.

      We are both pretty well thanks: I had no more of the ‘flu than could be settled by a week-end of aspirin and early hours. I hope you have both been equally fortunate. How many more false springs are we to have before the real one?

      Yours,

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

      REF.53/53.

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 7th February 1953.

      My dear Edward,

Many thanks for your letter of the 2nd. Your point about the internal combustion engine and the lady-bird is both true and interesting. Yes, ‘gentleman’ is a word which has ceased to have any particular meaning; with us it now means ‘male’ and lady ‘female’.^* There are of course many more, e.g. any boat in which it is possible to spend the night, and which is privately owned is ‘luxury-yacht’, every cinema is ‘Super-cinema’ and so on. Please give our belated congratulations to your mother on her birthday, with our wishes for many more happy ones.

      This is indeed good of you about the tea and sugar, and I think you have just about hit the right proportions; the business of payment on delivery is rather erratic, sometimes one is charged, sometimes not. But I’ll let you know what happens.

      Please excuse such a short and scrappy note, but I am snowed under with a vast stack of examination papers for correction.

      All the best.

      Yours,

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD): ³⁸

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. Feb 9th 1953

      Dear Miss Bodle

Thanks for your interesting letter of Feb 1st wh. arrived today. It is difficult to one, who, like me, has no experience, to give an opinion of these problems, which, I see, are v. intricate. The story about the girl who had reached the age of 16 under Christian teachers without hearing of the Incarnation is an eye-opener. For ordinary children (I don’t know about the Deaf) I don’t see any advantage in presenting the Gospels without some doctrinal comment. After all, they weren’t written for people who did not know the doctrine, but for converts, already instructed, who now wanted to know a bit more about the life and sayings of the Master. No ancient sacred books were intended to be read without a teacher: hence the Ethiopian eunuch in the Acts says to St. Philip ‘How can I understand unless someone tells me?’³⁹

Could the bit–and I think there must be something-about people I don’t like come in as a comment on the Forgive clause in the Lord’s Prayer?⁴⁰

      It is freezing hard here and one takes ones life in one’s hand every time one walks.

      What an excellent work you are doing! All blessings.

      Yours sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO ARTHUR C. CLARKE (BOD):⁴¹

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Feb. 14th [?] 1953

      Dear Mr. Clarke

I hope I shd. not be deterred by the danger!⁴² The fatal objection is that I should be covering ground I have already covered in print and on which I have nothing to add. I know that is how many lectures are made, but I never do it. I might at a pinch show great fortitude about the boredom of the audience, but then there’s my own. But thank your society very much for the invitation and convey my good wishes to them as regards everything but interplanetary travel.

      Yours very sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

      Probably the whole thing is only a plan for kidnapping me and marooning me on an asteroid! I know the sort of thing.

      

TO ROBIN OAKLEY-HILL (M): ⁴³

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Feb 16th 1953

      Dear Oakley-Hill

It came over me like a thunderclap about 30 seconds after I had left you in the Lodge this afternoon that I must seem to you to have committed, in one very short conversation, all the most unprovoked and indeed inexplicable kinds of rudeness there are.⁴⁴ I implore you to try to understand–and believe–how it came about with no such intention.

      The starting point was the fact that I have never noticed the slightest inequality in your gait. Seeing it for the first time when I was waiting behind you to cross the street I therefore immediately assumed some temporary mishap to be the cause: no alternative explanation entered my head. My evil genius then led me to ask you about it-largely because two people who see each other once a week can’t very well meet on an ‘island’ and say just nothing. After your answer I ought of course to have apologised and dropped the subject at once: but by that time I had completely lost my head.

You are not the first to suffer this kind of thing from me: I am subject to a kind of black-out in conversation which every now and СКАЧАТЬ