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

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СКАЧАТЬ the other question (what one is loving in loving a country) I do find v. difficult. What I feel sure of is that the personifications used by journalists and politicians have v. little reality. A treaty between the Govts. of two countries is not at all like a friendship between two people: more like a transaction between two people’s lawyers.

      I think love for one’s country means chiefly love for people who have a good deal in common with oneself (language, clothes, institutions) and is in that way like love of one’s family or school: or like love (in a strange place) for anyone who once lived in one’s home town. The familiar is in itself a ground for affection. And it is good: because any natural help towards our spiritual duty of loving is good and God seems to build our higher loves round our merely natural impulses—sex, maternity, kinship, old acquaintance, etc. And in a less degree there are similar grounds for loving other nations—historical links & debts for literature etc (hence we all reverence the ancient Greeks). But I wd. distinguish this from the talk in the papers. Mind you, I’m in considerable doubt about the whole thing. My mind tends to move in a world of individuals not of societies.

I’m afraid I have not read E. Gough’s book.¹⁰⁰ With all blessings.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO SEYMOUR SPENCER (P):

      Magdalen College.

      29/5/51

      Dear Dr. Spencer

Thank you v. much for letting me see the MS. of your article.¹⁰¹ My reading confirms the view I formed on hearing the earlier form of it read, that it is a most interesting and important piece of work.

      On p. 3, para 4 the first sentence is a little obscure. It might mean that we shd. expect the admission of conscious mind to exclude freedom but it doesn’t inevitably do so. I take it that is not what you meant. Wd. it run better ‘the mere admission of a conscious mind leaves open the possibility of freedom’?

I still disagree with yr. view that bodily procreation is a consequence of the Fall, taking my stand, if you like, on Aquinas (Summa Theol. Pars I^a. Quaest xcviii):¹⁰² and I think it a grave, tho’ not a fatal objection to your view that the same command crescite et multiplicamini¹⁰³ is addressed to beasts (Gen. I.22)¹⁰⁴ and to Man (ibid 1.28). But I hope your view will be published, and discussed by better authors than me. I’m sorry that I have no record of the Number of the XXth Century in wh. my article appeared: and as you see, the silly asses don’t put it on the off-print.

      With all good wishes and many thanks.

      Yours sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (P):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 29th May 1951

      Dear Starr

This is the sort of thing that makes my blood boil. The events at Rollins College¹⁰⁵ seem to me to concentrate into one filthy amalgam every tendency in the modern world which I most hate and despise. And, as you say, this kind of thing will put an end to American scholarship if it goes on. Why then did I not cable to an American paper as you suggested?

      My dear fellow, consider. What could unsolicited advice from a foreigner do except to stiffen the Wagnerian party by enlisting on its side every anti-British and every anti-God element in the state? You are asking me to damage a good cause by what would, from an unauthorised outsider like me, be simply impertinence. In a cooler moment (I don’t expect you to be cool at present) you will be thankful I didn’t. God help us all. It is terrible to live in a post-civilised age.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

      Dear Starr

      If you think there is anything to be gained by publishing my letter, you are at liberty to do so. My brother thanks you for your remembrances, and sends his lively sympathy.

      But not the condemnatory part without the parts saying it wd. be impertinent of me to address a public on the matter.

      C.S.L.

      

       TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

      RER25/51.

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 4th June 1951.

      My dear Mr. Allen,

      That perfection of packing, parcel no. 184 has just arrived, and I have spent a pleasant ten minutes dismembering it. Normally we won’t open your parcels when we get them, but reserve them for that moment of domestic crisis which so constantly arrives–‘We shall have to open one of Edward Allen’s parcels’ we say. But I tackled this one at once on account of the clothes.

      The suit is just the thing I want for the summer, if there should happen to be a summer, which at the moment looks unlikely. (My brother skilfully annexed the last one you sent, and is still wearing it: on the strength of which he has the impudence to recommend this one to me)! Very welcome too was the sugar, for we are reduced to saccharine at the moment. We of course have our sugar ration, but it is never sufficient, and has to be ‘nursed’. I’ve no doubt that during the course of the week I shall find a grateful recipient for the dress. In fact an excellent parcel all round, for which I thank you very much.

      Term is nearing its end in a whirlwind of work, and I shall be very glad to see the last of it. I always am, but this time especially, because I hope to be able to fit two holidays into the vacation—a week by the sea in the extreme west, Cornwall, a county I don’t know at all well, but which is very lovely: and then three weeks in the north of Ireland, two of them also seaside. I don’t think I have had so much holiday since I was a young man. I suppose you and Mrs. Allen will be thinking of going back to that bathing beach of yours? I looked with much envy last year at the photos you sent of yourselves there. We have already had quite a considerable American invasion of Oxford, and I’m sorry that our visitors will take away such a dreadful impression of our weather–for it can be fine in England in the early summer though not often. Of course Americans in Oxford are no novelty, but what I notice this year is the absence of the obviously very wealthy ones—who are I suppose on the continent; we are getting the nice, homely, quiet not so rich type (between ourselves a much nicer type), attracted I suppose by the devaluation of the pound. (On second thought I believe I should’nt have used the word ‘homely’. Does’nt it mean ugly in American? We mean by homely, just ordinary folk of our own kind of income etc.).

      War and inflation are still the background of all ordinary conversation over here, to which has just been added the railway jam; our new railway organization has succeeded, so far СКАЧАТЬ