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S. Lewis¹⁶⁵

       TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. July 23rd 53

      Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

      I think your decision ‘a rule of life, without membership’ is a good one. It is a great joy to be able to ‘feel’ God’s love as a reality, and one must give thanks for it and use it. But you must be prepared for the feeling dying away again, for feelings are by nature impermanent. The great thing is to continue to believe when the feeling is absent: & these periods do quite as much for one as those when the feeling is present.

It sounds to me as if Genia had a pretty good husband on the whole. So much matrimonial misery comes to me in my mail that I feel those whose partner has no worse fault than being stupider than themselves may be said to have drawn a prize! It hardly amounts to a Problem. I take it that in every marriage natural love sooner or later, in a high or a low degree, comes up against difficulties (if only the difficulty that the original state of ‘being in love’ dies a natural death) which force it either to turn into dislike or else to turn into Christian charity. For all our natural feelings are, not resting places, but points d’appui, springboards. One has to go on from there, or fall back from there. The merely human pleasure in being loved must either go bad or become the divine joy of loving. But no doubt Genia knows all this. It’s all quite in the ordinary run of Christian life. See I Peter iv, 12 ‘Think it not strange etc.’¹⁶⁶

      I don’t remember any question of Genia’s to wh. the answer wd. have been ‘Read my children’s books’! I have to guard against making my letters into advertisements, you know!

      The sinusitis is much better, if not quite gone. You are all in my prayers: and now I must go to my work.

      Yours ever

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

      Magdalen etc.

      Aug. 1st [1953]

      Dear Mrs. Shelburne–

      Thanks for yours of the 16th. Our climatic troubles are just the opposite of yours; one of the coldest and wettest summers I remember. But I’d dislike your heat v. much more than our cold.

I am so glad you gave me an account of the lovely priest. How little people know who think that holiness is dull. When one meets the real thing (and perhaps, like you, I have met it only once) it is irresistible.¹⁶⁷

      If even 10% of the world’s population had it, would not the whole world be converted and happy before a year’s end?

      Yes, I too think there is lots to be said for being no longer young: and I do most heartily agree that it is just as well to be past the age when one expects or desires to attract the other sex. It’s natural enough in our species, as in others, that the young birds shd. show off their plumage–in the mating season. But the trouble in the modern world is that there’s a tendency to rush all the birds on to that age as soon as possible and then keep them there as late as possible, thus losing all the real value of the other parts of life in a senseless, pitiful attempt to prolong what, after all, is neither its wisest, its happiest, or most innocent period. I suspect merely commercial motives are behind it all: for it is at the showing-off age that birds of both sexes have least sales-resistance!

      Naturally I can have no views on a choice between Richmond and Washington any more than on one between Omsk and Teheran! But of course you shall have my prayers.

      Sorry to hear about the fall: they’re nasty things. I must stop now, for I’m dead tired from standing at catalogue-shelves in a library all morning verifying titles of books & editions. I think, like the Irishman in the story ‘I’d sooner walk 10 miles than stand one’. I go to Ireland on the 11th so don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me again till the end of September. All blessings.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO LAURENCE HARWOOD (BOD):

      Magdalen

      Aug 2nd 53

      My dear Lawrence–

I was sorry to hear from Owen Barfield that you have taken a nasty knock over History Prelim.¹⁶⁸ Sorry, because I know it can’t be much fun for you: not because I think the thing is necessarily a major disaster. We are now so used to the examination system that we hardly remember how very recent it is and how hotly it was opposed by some quite sincere people. Trollope (no fool) was utterly sceptical about its value: and I myself, tho’ a don, sometimes wonder how many of the useful, or even the great, men of the past wd. have survived it. It doesn’t test all qualities by any means: not even all qualities needed in an academic life. And anyway, what a small part of life that is. And if you are not suited for that, it is well to have been pushed forcibly out of it at an earlier rather than a later stage. It is much worse to waste three or more years getting a Fourth or a Pass. You can now cut your losses and start on something else.

At the moment, I can well imagine, everything seems in ruins. That is an illusion. The world is full of capable and useful people who began life by ploughing in exams. You will laugh at this contre temps¹⁶⁹ some day. Of course it wd. be disastrous to go to the other extreme and conclude that one was a genius because one had failed in a prelim-as if a horse imagined it must be a Derby winner because it couldn’t be taught to pull a four-wheeler!-but I don’t expect that is the extreme to which you are temperamentally inclined.

      Are you in any danger of seeking consolation in Resentment? I have no reason to suppose you are, but it is a favourite desire of the human mind (certainly of my mind!) and one wants to be on one’s guard against it. And that is about the only way in which an early failure like this can become a real permanent injury. A belief that one has been misused, a tendency ever after to snap and snarl at ‘the system’-that, I think, makes a man always a bore, usually an ass, sometimes a villain. So don’t think either that you are no good or that you are a Victim. Write the whole thing off and get on.

      You may reply ‘It’s easy talking.’ I shan’t blame you if you do. I remember only too well what a hopeless oyster to be opened the world seemed at your age. I would have given a good deal to anyone who cd. have assured me that I ever wd. be able to persuade anyone to pay me a living wage for anything I cd. do. Life consisted of applying for jobs which other people got, writing books that no one wd. publish, and giving lectures wh. no one attended. It all looks perfectly hopeless. Yet the vast majority of us manage to get in somewhere and shake down somehow in the end.

      You are now going through what most people (at any rate most of the people I know) find in retrospect to have been the most unpleasant period of their lives. But it won’t last: the road usually improves later. I think life is rather like a lumpy bed in a bad hotel. At first you can’t imagine how you can lie on it, much less sleep in it. But presently one finds the right position and finally one is snoring away. By the time one is called it seems a v. good bed and one is loth to leave it.

      This is a devilish stodgy letter. There’s no need to bother answering it. I go to Ireland on the 11th. Give my love to all & thank Sylvia for my bathing suit.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO MRS EMILY MCLAY (W):

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