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

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СКАЧАТЬ in the papers that their only move so far has been a lot of gas about ‘civil defence’ (all v. well as far as it goes, but they ought to be arming) and a resolution to seize this golden opportunity of stealing a few more of our liberties from us. Try not to judge us by our rulers. There is another side to the picture.

      The other day I was listening to some working men talking in a pub. They were all of such ages as to have seen two wars and fought in one. One would have expected (and indeed excused) the attitude ‘Oh, not a third time! Three times in my life is too much.’ But there was not a trace of it. Merely a unanimous, and quite unemotional, view that ‘I’ reckon these—Russians are going the same—way as ‘Itler did’ and ‘We don’t want no bloody Appeasement this time’ and ‘The sooner they’re taught a lesson the better.’ Of course it is partly ignorance: they don’t know anything about the resources of the Russians. But then it was equally ignorance last time; they had no conception of Germany’s strength. But anyway, they’re obviously perfectly game.

      Do you think ‘wishful thinking’ is as dangerous as people make out now-a-days? All our people (I don’t know about yours?) got through the miseries of the last war by a series of wishful delusions. They always thought it was going to be over next month or next spring or next year. Did this do harm? I am inclined to think it helped them to get through bit by bit what they couldn’t have faced at all if they had formed any true estimate of its extent. And I think I remember something like that as a boy—successfully completing a walk far too long for one and feeling ‘If I’d known it was that length I could never have done it at all.’ I suspect that modern psychology—at least, modern semi-popular psychology—plays about with the reserves of the soul very dangerously.

I am spending most of my time at present ploughing through back numbers of learned periodicals less in the hope of fresh knowledge than in the fear I’ve missed something.¹³³ In your subject, which is experimental, I suppose one doesn’t have to poke back so far, because everything before a certain date wd. be definitely superseded. With us literary blokes of course this absolutely decisive ‘supersession’ occurs only very rarely—say, as the result of a windfall like the discovery of a new MS., and views often disappear not because someone has proved them false but merely because they have gone out of fashion. In any forgotten article the really illuminating thing might lie hid: tho’ about 90 to 10 against. So that I mainly pass the hours reading rubbish. The worst rubbish being the pseudo-scientific—the attempt to apply, or the pretence of applying, the methods of your disciplines to ours.

      The old lady whom I call my mother is now permanently in a Nursing Home, and I visit her daily. It is my first experience of this stage of paralysis; and, do you know, I am rather cheered by it. It does look so like childhood, only working backwards: the mind gradually withdrawing from the body in the last years as it was gradually settling in during the first. She was for many years of a worrying and, to speak frankly, a jealous, exacting, and angry disposition. She now gets gentler—I dare to hope not only through weakness. Certainly, I think she is a little happier, or a little less unhappy, than she usually was in health. You’d know more about all this than I do. My brother also has been ill (his old trouble) but is now better.

Is there any chance of your visiting England this year? If you want to meet plenty of fellow countrymen Oxford is the place! Indeed, not only Americans at present, but all nations—Medes (or at any rate Swedes) Parthians and Elamites.¹³⁴ Also, torrential rain.

      God bless you My dear friend. Have us all in your prayers.

      Yours ever

      C. S. Lewis

      

      And thanks (which you forbid) for the hams (which I mustn’t mention). No two are quite alike and each has its individual beauties.

      

TO RALPH E. HONE (W):¹³⁵ TS

      REF.50/287.

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 29th July 1950.

      Dear Mr. Hone,

      I am sorry, but it so happens that you could hardly have struck a worse time. I am working at high pressure, and in the intervals have a Conference to attend, an invalid to look after, and several visitors. I’m afraid in the circumstances a meeting is hardly possible.

      With thanks, good wishes, and regrets,

      yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO CHAD WALSH (W): ¹³⁶

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 5/8/50

      My dear Walsh

      Thank you for your letter of July 20th. I’m glad to hear about the ‘revolution’ in poetry, but I moderate my hopes. I think what really separates me from all the modern poets I try to read is not the technique, with all its difficulties, but the fact that their experience is so very unlike my own. They seem to be so constantly writing about the same sort of things that articles are written about: e.g. ‘the present world situation’. That means, for me, that they can only write for the top level of the mind, the level on which generalities operate. But even this may be a mistake. At any rate I am sure I never have the sort of experiences they express: and I feel them most alien where I come nearest to understanding them.

      I am just back from attending a Russian Orthodox Eucharist. The congregation walk about a lot!

      My brother joins me in all best wishes to you and yours.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD): ¹³⁷

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 8/8/50

      My dear Cecil

      Thank you for your letter which is one of the most useful I have ever received. It brings home to me that aspect of Death which is now most neglected—Death as a Rite or Initiation Ceremony. And certainly something does come through into this world, among the survivors, at the time and for a little while after.

I am sorry about John’s Class¹³⁸–and also that I feel I failed him badly at our last meeting. I had been wondering for about 24 hours whether the lightness of head and extreme lassitude that I was feeling were the beginning of an illness. After a day in which I had had no leisure at all and which had ended with a visit to the Nursing Home I had got back to College feeling ‘all in’. At that moment came his knock. It was the moment of all others (midway between his mother’s funeral and his own viva) at which a chap might expect some moral support from an older man even if that older man were not his tutor and a family friend. But I could make no response at all. I’m sorry.

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