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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ we have been exceedingly lucky (in more senses than one) over your parcels, and the customs took no notice of the things you mention; I think with all articles they take the view that as long as you are not making a business of it, a little of this that or the other thing may now be passed. But this is only a guess, I really don’t know.

      Of course I’ll try my hand at commenting on a short story, but don’t attach much importance to what I say. I’ve never had any professional (i.e. academical) connection with modern literature, and the short story is a genre I’m particularly bad on. That is, I accept the job, not because I can do it, but because you have such high claim to anything we can even try to do.

      With all best wishes from us both to you both for a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year,

      yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      P.S. My brother asks me to add that he too looks forward to seeing the story, and that unfortunately he does’nt know India at all; he was once under orders to go there for five years, but with his usual ingenuity, managed to persuade the War Office to send him to West Africa for twelve months instead.

      

       TO WARHELD M. FIROR(BOD):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford Dec. 20th 1951

      My dear Firor

How the years flick past at our time of life: don’t they: like telegraph posts seen from an express train: and how they crawled once, when the gulf between one Christmas and another was too wide almost for a child’s eye to see across. If ever I write a story about a long-liver, like Haggard’s She or the Wandering Jew¹⁵⁹ (and I might) I shall make that point. The first century of his life will, to the end, seem to him longer than all that have followed it: the Norman Conquest, the discovery of America and the French Revolution are all muddled up in his mind as recent events.

My year ‘off’ has been, as it was meant to be, so far a year of very hard work, but mostly congenial. The book really begins to look as if it might be finished in 1952 and I am, between ourselves, pleased with the manner of it—but afraid of hidden errors. In that way I rather envy you for being engaged in empirical inquiry where, I suppose, mistakes rise up in the laboratory and proclaim themselves. But a mistake in a history of literature walks in silence till the day it turns irrevocable in a printed book and the book goes for review to the only man in England who wd. have known it was a mistake. This, I suppose, is good for one’s soul: and the kind of good I must learn to digest. I am going to be (if I live long enough) one of those men who was a famous writer in his forties and dies unknown—like Christian going down into the green valley of humiliation.¹⁶⁰ Which is the most beautiful thing in Bunyan and can be the most beautiful thing in life if a man takes it quite rightly–a matter I think and pray about a good deal. One thing is certain: much better to begin (at least) learning humility on this side of the grave than to have it all as a fresh problem on the other. Anyway, the desire wh. has to be mortified is such a vulgar and silly one.

Most of us are v. much cheered by having got rid of the Labour government and at finding that we have done so without yet plunging into a period of strikes and sedition and ‘cold’ revolution, which we feared. There are some, not Labour, who feel quite differently. Have you ever heard of Captain Bernard Acworth R. N., a distinguished submarine commander in World War I and v. good Christian of the Evangelical type—but his head absolutely buzzing with Bees? He was with me the other day explaining that the whole American-English-UNO¹⁶¹ set up is absolutely fatal and part of a plot engineered (so far as I cd. make out) by the Kremlin, the Vatican, and Jews, the Freemasons and–subtlest foe of all—the Darwinians. So I suppose you must be in it too. But there was a core of rationality in it. He thinks our strategy ought to be purely naval, that we can ruin ourselves by trying to keep up an army in Europe and, even so, cannot succeed on those lines.

      Have you given up visiting these parts? I (and others) have a very warm memory of your one descent upon Oxford and would greatly welcome another. You are a naturally mobile organism, you know, unlike me. Whether you come or not, all very best wishes and, as always, hearty thanks. I’m sorry for the handwriting: the harder I try, the worse it gets now-a-days.

      Yours ever

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

      E Collegio S. Mariae Magdalenae

      apud Oxonienses Die S. Stephani MCMLI[26 December 1951]

      Dilectissime Pater

      Grato animo epistulam tuam hodie accepi et omnia bona spir-itualia et temporalia tibi in Domino invoco. Mihi in praeterito anno accidit magnum gaudium quod quamquam difficile est verbis exprimere conabor.

      Mirum est quod interdum credimus nos credere quae re verâ ex corde non credimus. Diu credebam me credere in remissionem peccatorum. Ac subito (in die S. Marci) haec veritas in mente mea tam manifesto lumine apparuit ut perciperem me numquam antea (etiam post multas confessiones et absolutiones) toto corde hoc credidisse. Tantum distat inter intellectûs mera affirmatio et illa fides medullitus infixa et quasi palpabilis quam apostolus scripsit esse substantiam.

      Fortasse haec liberatio concessa est tuis pro me intercessionibus! Confortat me ad dicendum tibi quod vix débet laicus ad sacerdotem, junior ad seniorem, dicere. (Attamen ex ore infantium: immo olim ad Balaam ex ore asini!). Hoc est: multum scribes de tuis peccatis. Cave (liceat mihi, dilectissime pater, dicere cave) ne humilitas in anxietatem aut tristitiam transeat. Mandatum est gaude et semper gaude. Jesus abolevit chirographiam quae contra nos erat. Sursum corda! Indulge mihi, precor, has balbutiones. Semper in meis orationibus et es et eris. Vale.

      C. S. Lewis

      *

      from the College of St Mary Magdalen

      Oxford St Stephen’s Day [26 December] 1951

      Dearest Father

      Thank you for the letter which I have received from you today and I invoke upon you all spiritual and temporal blessings in the Lord.

      As for myself, during the past year a great joy has befallen me. Difficult though it is, I shall try to explain this in words. It is astonishing that sometimes we believe that we believe what, really, in our heart, we do not believe.

For a long time I believed that I believed in the forgiveness of sins. But suddenly (on St Mark’s day)¹⁶² this truth appeared in my mind in so clear a light that I perceived that never before (and that after many confessions and absolutions) had I believed it with my whole heart.

So great is the difference between mere affirmation by the intellect and that faith, fixed in the very marrow and as it were palpable, which the Apostle wrote was substance.¹⁶³

      Perhaps I was granted this deliverance in response to your intercessions on my behalf!

This emboldens me to say to you something that СКАЧАТЬ