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& blessings from

      Yours

       Aeterno devinctus amore ²⁵

      Jack

      

       TO BELLE ALLEN (L):

      [Magdalen College]

      Jan 9th ’54

      Dear Mrs Allen.

      Thank you for your nice woody and earthy (almost like Thoreau or Dorothy Wordsworth) letter of the 6th. I think I go with you in preferring trees to flowers in the sense that if I had to live in a world without one or the other I’d choose to keep the trees. I certainly prefer tree-like people to flower-like people–the staunch and knotty and storm-enduring to the frilly and fragrant and easily withered…

      I think what makes even beautiful country (in the long run) so unsatisfactory when seen from a train or a car is that it whirls each tree, brook, or haystack close up into the foreground, soliciting individual attention but vanishing before you can give it…Didn’t someone give a similar explanation of the weariness we feel in a crowd where we can’t help seeing individual faces but can do no more than see them so that (he said) ‘it is like being forced to read the first page, but no more, of a hundred books in succession’?…

       TO SARAH NEYIAN (T):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 16/i/54

      My dear Sarah

      Thanks for your most interesting letter. It sounds as if you were having a much nicer time at school than most of us remember having, and if you reply ‘I should hope so too’, well, I can’t agree with you more. I particularly envy you having half a pony and learning to ride. I can’t, but I love the sight and sound and smell and feel of a horse and v. much wish that I could. I’d sooner have a nice, thickset, steady-going cob that knew me & that I knew how to ride than all the cars and private planes in the world.

      I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice²⁶ on and off all my life and it doesn’t wear out a bit. Lamb, too. You’ll find his letters²⁷ as good as his essays: indeed they are almost exactly the same, only more of it.

      I don’t believe anyone is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at languages. If you ever want really badly to read something which you can’t get in English, you’ll find you can learn a foreign language alright.

      I liked the account of yr. XII Night Party, a ceremony I knew nothing about. Where I grew up the great thing was Halloween (eve of All Saints’ Day). There was always a slightly eerie, spooky feeling mixed with games, events, and various kinds of fortune telling–not a good night on which to walk through a churchyard. (Tho’ in fact Irish people, believing in both, are much more afraid of fairies than of ghosts).

      I’ve been having a sebacious (no, not Herbacious) cyst lanced on the back of my neck: the most serious result is that I can never at present get my whole head & shoulders under water in my bath. (I like getting down like a Hippo with only my nostrils out). Give my love to all and I hope you’ll have a grand year in 1954.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 16/i/54

      My dear Dom Bede

      Thanks for interesting articles: I couldn’t agree with you more.²⁸ I suspect that a great going-to-meet-them is needed not only on the level of thought but in method. A man who had lived all his life in India said ‘That country might be Christian now if there had been no Missions in our sense but many single missionaries walking the roads with their begging bowls. For that is the sort of Holy Man India believes in and she will never believe in any other.’ Of course we must beware of thinking of ‘the East’ as if it were homogeneous. I suppose the Indian and the Chinese ethos are as alien to each other as either is to us.

      The article on Tolerance in that same issue made my flesh creep.²⁹ What do they mean by ‘Error has no rights?’ Of course Error has no rights, because it is not a person: in the same sense Truth has no rights. But if they mean ‘Erroneous persons have no rights’, surely this is as contrary to the plain dictates of Natural Law as any proposition could be?

      Quite a different question. Has any one composed prayers for children NOT in the sense of special prayers supposed suitable for their age (which easily leads to wish-wash) BUT simply in the sense of translations of ordinary prayers into the easiest language? And wd. it be worth doing?

      Yours

      Jack Lewis

      

       TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 18/i/54

      Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

      Charles is changing, and for the better! There is less of the Tycoon. He smiles. He is learning to relax. ‘Years have brought the philosophic mind.’³⁰ Did you know that your upbringing of perpetual rocking & teetering had the authority of Plato? I couldn’t find the place but I’m almost sure he says that continual rhythmic motion is the thing for children and a ship at sea wd. be the best nursery.³¹ (This wd. re-introduce yr. old confusion between mal-de-mer and mal de mere with a vengeance!)³²

      Yes–great volleys of New Thought and Higher Thought (new enough to be raw, and ‘high’ enough to be as full of maggots as gorgonzola, but why call it thought?) do reach us even here from your shores. It solves all problems by declaring that there never were any problems to solve.

      Of course one cd. say that the Incarnation was God’s ‘weak moment’: when Omnipotence becomes a baby in a manger it has ‘weakened’ itself. That’s the great joke and pathos of our faith. But I’m afraid your friend didn’t mean anything of the sort. N.B. The temptation (can’t she see it?) is precisely a temptation to evade the self-imposed weaknesses, to be strong, omnipotent, again–to make stones into bread,³³ to be emperor of the world,³⁴ to do ‘lévitations’.³⁵ The weakness was the strength.

      We had a v. odd few days this Vacation: a lady & two sons (aged 91/2, 8) staying with us. A tough ‘assignment’–I talk American like a native, don’t I?–for two old bachelors. Phew! We never respected married people enough before. We had led a sheltered life & just didn’t know! Not that the boys weren’t absolute charmers: but I had no conception of the tempo- nor of the Sabbath calm³⁶ wh. descends when the little whirlwinds have gone to bed. Longfellow was quite wrong: he shd. have written ‘A pause in the day’s occupations wh. is known as the grown-ups hour’.³⁷ You’ll know all about it in a few years’ time. My brother joins me in affectionate good wishes to all there.

      Yours,

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO ARTHUR C. CLARKE (BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Jan. 20/54

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