Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
C.S. Lewis
Read between
March 20 - June 23, 2018
You never know what you can do until you try, and very few try unless they have to.
I have nearly finished The Morte D’arthur. I am more pleased at having bought it every day, as it has opened up a new world to me. I had no idea that the Arthurian legends were so fine (The name is against them, isn’t it??)
The very names of the chapters, as they spring to meet the eye, bear with them a fresh, sweet breath from the old-time, faery world, wherein the author moves. Who can read ‘How Launcelot in the Chapel Perilous gat a cloth from a Dead corpse’ or ‘How Pellinore found a damosel by a Fountain, and of the Jousts in the Castle of Four Stones’, and not hasten to find out what it’s all about?
I am deep in Morte D’Arthur by this time, and it is really the greatest thing I’ve ever read.
Feelings ought to be kept for literature and art, where they are delightful and not intruded into life where they are merely a nuiscance.
Sentiment, you see, is a distinct mark of age.
Your little edition is very nice, but rather too small, and not enough of a library-looking book.
‘One might a book make of it in a story’
I quite agree with what you say about buying books, and love all the planning and scheming beforehand, and if they come by post, finding the neat little parcel waiting for you on the hall table and rushing upstairs to open it in the privacy of your own room. Some people–my father for instance–laugh at us for being so serious over our pleasures, but I think a thing can’t be properly enjoyed unless you take it in earnest, don’t you? What I can’t understand about you though is how you can get a nice new book and still go on stolidly with the one you are at: I always like to be able to start the
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the temptation to get a nice new book for the longed for Sunday rest is overwhelming.
Terreauty (a word I’ve coined to mean terror and beauty)
wet walk of ours, although the scene was different: it represented a dull, gloomy pool in a wood in autumn, with a fierce scudding rain blown slantways across it, dashing withered leaves from the branches and beating the sedge at the sides. I don’t suppose that makes you realize it at all, but there was a beautiful dreariness about it that would have appealed to you.
Kelsie
Name
cheer up, and whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.
you must know that it is impossible to write one’s best if nobody else ever has a look at the result.
In particular, what could be better for Lyonesse–glorious name–as we imagine it, than this simple sentence: ‘Climbing to the top of the cliff he saw a land full of vallies where forest stretched itself without end.’
And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off. Painting can only express visible beauty, poetry can only express feeling that can be analysed–conscious feeling in fact: but music–however if I let myself go on such a fruitful subject I should take up the rest of this letter, whereas I have other things to tell you.
But still we have both much experience and practice gained, and we got a lot of pleasure out of them while they lasted: the danger is that we get to turn too easily from one thing to another and never get anything done.
With all its faults, in small doses this book is tip-top: those mystic parts are very good to read late at night when you are drowsy and tired and get into a sort of ‘exalted’ mood.
Anything MAY exist: but until we know that it does, we can’t make any assumptions.
that sort of ‘fey’ state of mind which I described, or tried to describe, as coming on when one is very drowzy.
How’s the poor, miserable, ill-fated, star-crossed, hapless, lonely, neglected, misunderstood puppy getting along?
As to ‘Malory’ I liked it so awfully this time–far better than before–that I don’t know what to say. How can I explain?
But the Round Table is different: it was a hundred years ago & shall be a hundred years hence.
if a person was really a book-lover, however ignorant, he wouldn’t go and look up a text book to see what to buy, as if literature was a subject to be learned like algebra: one thing would lead him to another & he would go through the usual mistakes & gain experience. I hate this idea of ‘forming a taste’.
as you like Shakespeare but I don’t like reading him?
As a matter of fact I am at present reading a real ‘old french’ romance ‘The High History of the Holy Graal’ translated in the lovely ‘Temple Classics’.196 If I dared to advise you any longer–. It is absolute heaven: it is more mystic & eerie than the ‘Morte’ & has [a] more connected plot. I think there are parts of it even you’d like.
I intend to read all Hawthorne after this. What a pity such a genius should be a beastly American!
After all ‘The love that I shall never see’ is better both in body and soul than all the real women on earth.
I never sleep well on the nights of writing–all the ideas buzzing in my head keep me awake.
How sad that so interesting a girl is not beautiful (tho’ she is certainly not nearly so plain as I at first imagined) Even sadder that she should like Browning and have a morbid appetite for photography!!
You can’t imagine how I have grown to love Univ., especially since I left. Last Saturday evening when I was sleeping there alone, I spent a long time wandering over it, into all sorts of parts where I had never been before, where the mullioned windows are dark with ivy that no one has bothered to cut since the war emptied the rooms they belong to. Some of these rooms were all dust sheeted, others were much as the owners had left them–the pictures still on the wall and the books dust covered in their shelves. It was melancholy in a way, and yet very interesting. I have found one room that I
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Catholic Christianity is certainly more picturesque than puritanism.
those old happy hours when I sat surrounded by my little library and browsed from book to book.
A book must find you in the right mood, and its mere presence on a shelf will not create that mood, tho’ it lie there for years: as well, when you meet ‘in a strange land’38 a book that is associated with home, it has for that very reason an attraction which it would not have at ordinary times.
‘Prose is when the lines go on to the end of the page: poetry is when they don’t.’
At another house we tried we met a Miss Tennyson, niece of the poet.
If only one had time to read a little more: we either get shallow & broad or narrow and deep.
I have already been asked to join a Theosophist, a Socialist, and a Celtic society.
do not give in to depression–and give everything up as soon as difficulties arise.
Across the water is the hazy outline of Wales–the Arthurian country round Kaerleon and the Usk, I believe.
And Ireland itself–much as I love and ‘desire it all my days’ as Homer says, if other things were equal–I think there is some truth in my own ‘Irish Nocturne’.
At least I have reached a state from which I usually augur well–that wherein one looks back on the first version (once pleasing enough) as impossible, and thanks the gods for having escaped it.
This town has a church of St. Dubricius who, you may remember, crowned and annointed Arthur. (I forget whether this is in Malory, but it certainly is in the guide book.)
Watching the foamdrops break In fire from her prow: Passing a moon-drencht island, pale, a Hesperian clime Where the apple hangs on the bough And the blood-red life, with no repining Is full of shouting, a giant, terrible, shining, Till the guttering of the candle and the gathering home of time.
Looking back you saw the sea in the V shaped opening between the hills.
celtic dreariness
The hills never rise into mountains,
A big lacuna occurs here:
Just one word about Paradise Regained–surely the real reason for the shrinkage of Satan is the very proper one that since the great days of P. Lost, he has spent sixty centuries in the Miltonic Hell?
