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

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СКАЧАТЬ target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_7db91123-4b04-5b42-b3df-3cdee1f53796">51 Lewis was reading the manuscript of what was published as D. E. Harding, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe, with a preface by C. S. Lewis (London: Faber, 1952). Lewis’s preface was reprinted as ‘The Empty Universe’ in Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Fount, 1986) and EC.

52 ibid., ch. 9, ix, pp. 95-6: ‘Only beings who consider the possibility of breaking laws can comply with them. Earth does both. To determine her orbit, the scientist supposes that, disobeying for a while the law of gravity and obeying the law of inertia, she flies off at a tangent; and that then, reversing her disobedience, she falls towards the sun; and he adds that these illegalities are in practice so brief that her ratchet-shaped path is smoothed out into the compromise of a curve, which respects both laws alike. Now I take this mathematics more seriously than the scientist himself; for (a) I link Earth, not merely with the original data and the final result of the calculation, but with the intermediate stages as well, and (b) I say that all three are her function.’

53 ibid., ch. 18, vii, p. 188.

54 In Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy, eldila (singular, eldil) are angels who inhabit ‘Deep Heaven’. Their bodies are as swift as light, and hence they are usually invisible to human beings. They are first mentioned in Out of the Silent Planet, ch. 13. See the letter to Mary Willis Shelburne of 4 March 1953.

55 Perelandra (London: Bodley Head, 1943; HarperCollins, 2000), ch. 17, p. 223.

56 ‘The “ferly” ‘, wrote Pitter, ‘is a sort of vision in the engraving by Joan Hassall…the figure of the Muse stands with flowers & vine-leaves in her arms, in the calm twilight landscape full of symbols: she points downward to a kind of visionary sphere containing images of violence: it is this that someone thought was like a concrete-mixer’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 100).

57 Pitter said of this: ‘I had expressed mild pain at the idea of the spectacle-case lurking so long undiscovered in the crease of the armchair. Never cleaned—didn’t know they had to be?!!!’ (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 100).

58 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1872), ch. 4, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’: ‘“The time has come,” the Walrus said,/”To talk of many things:/Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax–/Of cabbages—and kings

59 Cardinal Schwanda was the Sayers’ cat.

60 Homer (fl. 8th century BC) is the author of the Greek epics, The Odyssey and The Iliad.

61 ‘The same rule applies to things that do not exist and to things that are not apparent.’ This is a standard legal maxim.

62 Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857), ch. 40: ‘The painter put a veil over Agamemnon’s face when called on to depict the father’s grief at the early doom of his devoted daughter.’

63 Nicholas Hardie (b. 12 November 1945), to whom The Silver Chair is dedicated, is the eldest son of Colin and Christian Hardie. Nicholas was educated at Magdalen College School and Balliol College, Oxford. After taking his BA in 1970, he took an MBA from Lancaster University.

64 Victor Drew ran the little barber’s shop now called High St Barbers at 38 High Street, Oxford.

65 John 16:22: ‘Ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.’

66 George Herbert, The Temple (1633), ‘The Tempter’, I, 3-4: ‘If what my soul doth feel sometimes,/My soul might ever feel!’

67 See the biography of Robert William Chapman in CL II, p. 203n.

68 Legend relates that Stesichorus (c. 640-c. 555 BC), a Greek lyrical poet, was struck blind for having censured Helen in one of his poems. His sight was restored after he had written his Palinodia or recantation, in which he claims that it was not Helen, but her phantom, that accompanied Paris to Troy. This version of events was adopted by Euripides who used it in his play, Helen. Lewis was later to use this theme in his unfinished ‘After Ten Years’, published in The Dark Tower and Other Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1977; Fount, 1983).

69 Horace, Odes, I, ix, 21-4: ‘nunc et latentis proditor intimo/gratus puellae risus ab angulo/pignusque dereptum lacertis/aut digito male pertinaci’: ‘Now too the lovely laugh betraying the girl hiding in the secret corner, and the token snatched from her arm or her scarcely resisting finger.’

70 Chad Walsh, C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (1949).

71 i.e., Warnie’s drinking.

72 Sister Madeleva CSC was a teacher of English at St Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, who had attended some of Lewis’s lectures in 1934. See her biography in CL II, p. 140n.

73 Sister Madeleva, A Lost Language (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1951), p. 17: ‘This practice of prayer was something of a habit with Chaucer…It was, of course, one of the writer’s conventions of his day. Had it not been, there is a probability that he would have practiced it. But, as a convention, the devotional sincerity of his prayers is frequently questioned. Conventions are a badly libelled lot. One knows they are devices; one concludes that they are deceits with an immediacy to be recommended rather for speed than for logic. Particularly is this true of the conventional medieval writing. Without going into digression on this matter, it may be volunteered that the fourteenth century writer probably used the convention to say what he meant rather than to say the exact opposite of what he meant.’

74 Mrs Lisbeth Greeves (1897-1982), née Lizzie Snowden Demaine, was the wife of Arthur’s cousin, Lt.-Col. John Ronald Howard Greeves (1900-). She was a devout and enthusiastic member of the Bahai faith, and was keen to discuss it with Lewis through the post.

75 One of Greeves’s dogs.

76 ‘No ham yet.’ See the letter to Greeves of 23 April 1951.

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