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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ In Perelandra, ch. 16, p. 202, during the attempt to make themselves visible to Ransom, the eldila or Oyéresu of Mars and Venus appear as ‘concentric wheels moving with a rather sickening slowness one inside the other’. This imagery was inspired by the appearance of angels in Ezekiel 1:16: ‘Their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.’ We should notice too Miracles, ch. 14, pp. 120-1: ‘[Jahweh’s] appearance to Ezekiel is attended with imagery that does not borrow from Nature, but (it is a mystery too seldom noticed) from those machines which men were to make centuries after Ezekiel’s death. The prophet saw something suspiciously like a dynamo’

* This is not an afterthought. Mycroft funked it!

69 ‘Apiciarí had been added in Lewis’s hand.

70 W. K. Scudamore was writing from 3 Maurice Road, Seaford, Sussex.

71 This was Lewis’s ‘mangling’ of Scudamore’s name.

72 Sir Scudamour is the lover of Amoret in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, as well as the name of Lewis’s hero in The Dark Tower.

73 Bodleian Library.

74 Jane (‘Janie’) Agnes McNeill (1889-1959) was a close friend from Strandtown. See her biography in CL I, p. 117n.

75 In his letter of 16 March 1953 Bles said: ‘With some trepidation I venture to address you again on the gender of mythological creatures…On returning to the galleys of “The Silver Chair”…I find the same thing has happened again, not only with the Dwarf but with that curious creature, the Marsh-wiggle…It looks to me as though the discrepancies are due to the fact that, although, for some philological reason, you try to keep Dwarf and Marsh-wiggle neuter, you naturally think of them as persons–as indeed most readers would. If I may say so, this neuter business seems strained and artificial, and in places reminds me of Mark Twain’s joke about the German language, “The girl took the spoon and fork. It laid him and her on the table’” (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 20).

76 Bles replied on 18 March 1953: ‘I am so glad that you agree to a “he” for the Dwarf and the Marshwiggle. I would suggest this Rule: when mythological creatures speak like human beings, masculine/feminine gender; when they are personae mutai [silent characters] neuter’ (ibid., fol. 22).

77 Lewis probably had in mind the following three statements regarding natural law. The classical definition is found in St Thomas Aquinas: ‘The natural law is nothing other than the light of understanding placed in us by God; through it we know what we must do and what we must avoid. God has given this light or law at the creation’ (Collationes in decent praeceptis, 1). Cicero (51 BC) said in De Republica, 11:33: ‘There is in fact a true law–namely, right reason–which is in accordance with nature, applies to all men and is unchangeable and eternal.’ The chief New Testament text on which natural law is based is Romans 2:14-15: ‘When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness.’ Lewis’s writings on natural law include the first book of Mere Christianity, The Abolition of Man, and ‘The Poison of Subjectivism’ and ‘On Ethics’ in Christian Reflections.

78 These reflections were to be repeated the following year in Lewis’s inaugural lecture at Cambridge, ‘De Descriptione Temporum: ‘It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warn us that we are “relapsing into Paganism”. It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan’t. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity “by the same door as in she went” and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past’ (SLE, p. 10). See ‘A Cliché Came Out of Its Cage’, CP, p. 17, which begins: ‘You said “The world is going back to Paganism”. Oh bright Vision!’

79 i.e., the tale which was eventually to be titled The Horse and His Boy.

80 P. Vergili Maronis: Opera, ed. Frederick Arthur Hirtzel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), p. [iii]: ‘Eager to correct what they consider errors, they more often trample upon the most delicate flowers of the Muses.’

81 Delirium tremens.

82 Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, iv, 140: ‘My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time.’

83 Michael was an American schoolboy.

84 In her letter to Lewis of 18 March, Gebbert wrote: ‘A physical condition…caused my mind to wander and speculate for too long now, and recently drove me to a doctor. He told me in no uncertain terms that my husband and I can expect an heir or heiress in a month or two! And all along I had been blaming everything on seasickness!’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 238).

85 Lewis ends SBJ, ch. 12, ‘Guns and Good Company’ with these same words.

86 In her letter of 18 March Gebbert continued: ‘I was so dismayed at the doctor’s diagnosis that, for a moment, I wished it had not happened–that I was not going to have a child. I know I was guilty of the lowest form of ignorance: fear, and that night, as I was dining alone in my library, my eyes fell upon the Bible I keep open on the table. It had been open to Psalms for several days-1 had been reading them off and on and had not turned or disturbed the pages in any way. Nor had anyone else. This night, then, as I glanced from the food to the Book, I saw and read the verse: “Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the Lord: shall I cause to bring forth, and shut the womb? saith thy God.” Isaiah, Chap. 66, Verse 9. How did the pages get turned from Psalms? And by whom? In such ways, at times, do we receive the miracle of His rebuke, His admonition, His comfort, and the workings of His plan? Am I wrong to take the words I read as a rebuke? Am I wrong in assuming my eye fell on the chapter and verse it was supposed to?’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 238).

87 Matthew 10:29: Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.’

СКАЧАТЬ