Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
C.S. Lewis
Read between
March 20 - June 23, 2018
I envy him his routine work–in itself apparently not uninteresting and finished definitely at four o’clock with the rest of the day free for general reading, with no uncertainties or anxieties. Despite the frittering away of time over drinks and gossip in the mess and the low mental level of the society, I cannot help feeling that for him the military life has solved the problem of existance very well.
Well, it is poorly paid and temporary and under the shadow of Farquharson, but it is better to be inside than out, and is always a beginning. The experience will be valuable.
It really is typical of a change–the medieval town where the shops and houses huddle at the foot of the cathedral, and the modern city where the churches huddle between the sky scraping offices and the appalling ‘stores’.
English people have not the talent for graceful ceremonial. They go through it lumpishly and with a certain mixture of defiance and embarrassment as if everyone felt he was being rather silly and was at the same time ready to shoot the first man who said so. In a French or Italian university now, this might have gone off nobly.
No one is more convinced than I that reason is utterly inadequate to the richness and spirituality of real things: indeed this is itself a deliverance of reason.
I, at any rate, am at present inclined to believe that we must be content to feel the highest truths ‘in our bones’: if we try to make them explicit, we really make them untruth.
Nightmares are rather delightful things afterwards. As remembered (not heaven help us, as endured) they often have a sublimity and strangeness which one couldn’t reach with the waking mind.
on windy nights groaned and creaked like a ship under sail and kept me awake.
The actual book is going to be about mediaeval love poetry and the mediaeval idea of love which is a very paradoxical business indeed when you go into it: for on the one hand it is extremely super-sensual and refined and on the other it is an absolute point of honour that the lady should be some one else’s wife, as Dante and Beatrice, Lancelot and Guinevere etc.
the leader of a column of flies.
Four fat and spongy clergymen, two on each side, in a little week day chapel at the back of the main altar, scampered and simpered through the job in a way that really disgusted me.
the wind was hurrying the fog like smoke from a chimney on a stormy day.
It does one good to see the fine side of people we’ve always seen the worst of.
It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself–to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed, & then to find yourself still in bed.
Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood–they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air & later corn, and later still bread, really was in them.
The beauty of the actual world, the vague longings wh. it excites, the inevitable failure to satisfy these longings, and over all the haunting sense of time & change making the world heart breakingly beautiful just because it slips away (‘Oh death that makest life so sweet’ as he says) all this, I thought, he gave to perfection: but of what this longing really pointed to, of the reason why beauty made us homesick, of the reality behind, I thought he had no inkling.
Thats what we want, isn’t it? Emigration from the uneducated class into ours only swells the intellectual unemployed: but to have education transforming people & yet leaving them wth their roots in the earth (which then they will be able to appreciate) is the way to make class disappear altogether.
In fact she behaved about Ireland as Americans behave about America, and finally went off with her head in the air as who shd. say Hoity-Toity!
and often when I pray I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existent address.
the fact that one feels entirely righteous oneself only when one is angry. Then the other person is pure black, and you are pure white. But in real life sanity always returns to break the dream.
Odd, what different notes we different souls draw from the organ of nature.
I am so hungry for my real, private work,21 that I grudge every moment from my books.
I hope you can see the whole scene–the light slanting through the fir trees, the long elder branches swaying and then swooping down with a rustle of leaves, the click-click of the shears, and the heavy odour of crushed vegetation. What pleasures there are in the world. I seem to have more than anyone could deserve
We began (in Addison’s walk just after dinner) on metaphor and myth–interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing almost as you would.
Like his brother, he preferred his enjoyment of places to come through books. When asked if he would like to visit Versailles he said ‘Oh no! That would ruin it!’
