Remember what St. John says ‘If our heart condemn us, God is stronger than our heart.’ The feeling of being, or not being, forgiven & loved, is not what matters. One must come down to brass tacks.
If there is a particular sin on your conscience, repent & confess it. If there isn’t, tell the despondent devil not to be silly.
You can’t help hearing his voice (the odious inner radio) but you must treat it merely like a buzzing in your ears or any other irrational nuisance.
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Today I have been revisiting old haunts, taking one of the long rambles that made me so happy in my bachelor days.... Every stile or clump of trees, summoned me into a past kind of happiness, my pre-Joy happiness.
But the invitation seemed to me horrible. The happiness into which it invited me was insipid. I find that I don’t want to go back again and be happy in that way.
It frightens me to think that a mere going back should even be possible. For this fate would seem to me the worst of all; to reach a state in which my years of love and marriage should appear in retrospect a charming episode — like a holiday — that had briefly interrupted my interminable life and returned me to normal, unchanged. And then it would come to seem unreal — something so foreign to the usual texture of my history that I could almost believe it had happened to someone else. Thus Joy would die to me a second time; a worse bereavement than the first. Anything but that.
Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared.
The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.
Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.
Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.
It is very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here’s my attempt.
(1) Turn off the Radio.
(2) Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines.
(3) Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.
(4) Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about…)
(5) Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn’t, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding.
In a story it is terribly easy just to forget that you have not told the reader something that he needs to know–the whole picture is so clear in your own mind that you forget that it isn’t the same in his.
(6) When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier.
(7) Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.
(8) Be sure you know the meaning (or meanings) of every word you use.
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On Easter morning we had the biggest crowd at 8 o'clock that I've ever seen - I was one of four in our pew; trying to rejoice in spirit that there should be so many communicants but very far from comfortable in the flesh - my hip being tightly wedged against the pillar and my bottom resting on the angle at the end of the bench.
No veils should hide the truth, no truth should cow
The dear self-pitying heart...
Young Lewis wrote two long narrative poems. Dymer was the second.
A first impression is one of inner conflict within the author. The hatred of systems and yet the hopelessness of rebellion. The love of beauty, and yet the betrayal of it. The love of nature, and nature's indifference. The ultimate tragedy of existence.
Overall, I would not call it great poetry, but poetic beauty lies largely in the eye of the beholder.
Even with knowledge of lewisian themes, the meaning of the poem is a tad obscure. Thankfully, another edition was issued in 1950 in which Lewis himself outlined his intentions. (He stated that nobody noticed the reprint and it sold less than a hundred copies, but at least we have his thoughts on the work.)
Dymer got a few good reviews, but no real readership. Lewis later stated:
"...I gave up. The old wound aches just a little at the touch. Though in graver moods I wonder what on earth or out of it would have happened to me if I really had become a successful poet in my twenties."
Lewis' two narrative poems are now in the public domain and are available on Gutenberg.org. If you are at all interested, I suggest reading it first (how else can you judge whether a work stands on its own?) and then going back to read Lewis' own preface. But if you're more interested in enjoyment than unbiased evaluation, do it the other way around.
You can see foreshadows of his later beliefs about beauty and the source of it. But here he feels it is a deception.
“Ah, but the earth never did sing for joy....
There is a glamour on the leaf and flower
And April comes and whistles to a boy
Over white fields: and, beauty has such power
Upon us, he believes her in that hour,
For who could not believe? Can it be false,
All that the blackbird says and the wind calls?..."
He had worshipt earth, and this
—The venomed clouds fire spitting from the abyss,
This was the truth indeed, the world’s intent
Unmasked and naked now, the thing it meant....
“She said, for this land only did men love
The shadow-lands of earth. All our disease
Of longing, all the hopes we fabled of,
Fortunate islands or Hesperean seas
Or woods beyond the West, were but the breeze
That blew from off those shores: one farspent breath
That reached even to the world of change and death....
"She shone like flame
Before me in the dusk, all love, all shame—
Faugh!—and it was myself.....
“So beautiful, she seemed
Almost a living soul. But every part
Was what I made it—all that I had dreamed—
No more, no less: the mirror of my heart..."
“To obey that springtime and my blood,
This was to be unarmed and off my guard
And gave God time to hit once and hit hard."
Dymer is not quite as angry as his previous Spirits in Bondage; it is more sad, conflicted, and concerned with dashing illusions. Both works are most interesting as studies of Lewis himself.
At its original appearance in 1926, Dymer, like many better books, found some good reviews and almost no readers. The idea of disturbing its repose in the grave now comes from its publishers, not from me, but I have a reason for wishing to be present at the exhumation.
Nearly a quarter of a century has gone since I wrote it, and in that time things have changed both within me and round me; my old poem might be misunderstood by those who now read it for the first time.
I am told that the Persian poets draw a distinction between poetry which they have 'found' and poetry which they have 'brought': if you like, between the given and the invented, though they wisely refuse to identify this with the distinction between good and bad. Their terminology applies with unusual clarity to my poem.
What I 'found', what simply 'came to me', was the story of a man who, on some mysterious bride, begets a monster: which monster, as soon as it has killed its father, becomes a god. This story arrived, complete, in my mind somewhere about my seventeenth year.
To the best of my knowledge I did not consciously or voluntarily invent it, nor was it, in the plain sense of that word, a dream. All I know about it is that there was a time when it was not there, and then presently a time when it was. Every one may allegorise it or psychoanalyse it as he pleases: and if I did so myself my interpretations would have no more authority than anyone else's.
The Platonic and totalitarian state from which Dymer escapes in Canto I was a natural invention for one who detested the state in Plato's Republic as much as he liked everything else in Plato, and who was, by temperament, an extreme anarchist. I put into it my hatred of my public school and my recent hatred of the army.
But I was already critical of my own anarchism. There had been a time when the sense of defiant and almost drunken liberation which fills the first two acts of Siegfried had completely satisfied me. Now, I thought, I knew better. My hero therefore must go through his Siegfried moment in Cantos I and II and find in Canto IV what really comes of that mood in the end.
For it seemed to me that two opposite forces in man tended equally to revolt. The one criticises and at need defies civilisation because it is not good enough, the other stabs it from below and behind because it is already too good for total baseness to endure.
The hero who dethrones a tyrant will therefore be first fêted and afterwards murdered by the rabble who feel a disinterested hatred of order and reason as such. Hence, in Canto IV, Bran's revolt which at once parodies and punishes Dymer's.
It will be remembered that, when I wrote, the first horrors of the Russian Revolution were still fresh in every one's mind; and in my own country, Ulster, we had had opportunities of observing the daemonic character of popular political 'causes'.
In those days the new psychology was just beginning to make itself felt in the circles I most frequented at Oxford. This joined forces with the fact that we felt ourselves (as young men always do) to be escaping from the illusions of adolescence, and as a result we were much exercised about the problem of fantasy or wishful thinking.
The 'Christiana Dream' as we called it (after Christiana Pontifex in Butler's novel), was the hidden enemy whom we were all determined to unmask and defeat. My hero, therefore, had to be a man who had succumbed to its allurements and finally got the better of them. But the particular form in which this was worked out depended on two peculiarities of my own history.
(1) From at least the age of six, romantic longing - Sehnsucht - had played an unusually central part in my experience. Such longing is in itself the very reverse of wishful thinking: it is more like thoughtful wishing. But it throws off what may be called systems of imagery.
One among many such which it had thrown off for me was the Hesperian or Western Garden system, mainly derived from Euripides, Milton, Morris, and the early Yeats.
By the time I wrote Dymer I had come, under the the influence of our common obsession about Christiana Dreams, into a state of angry revolt against that spell. I regarded it as the very type of the illusions I was trying to escape from. It must therefore be savagely attacked.
Dymer's temptation to relapse into the world of fantasy therefore comes to him (Canto VII) in that form. All through that canto I am cutting down my own former 'groves and high places' and biting the hand that had fed me. I even tried to get the sneer into the metre; the archaic spelling and accentuation of countrie in vii. 23 is meant as parody.
In all this, as I now believe, I was mistaken. Instead of repenting my idolatry I spat upon the images which only my own misunderstanding greed had ever made into idols. But 'the heresies that men leave are hated most' and lovers' quarrels can be the bitterest of all.
(2) Several years before I wrote the poem, back in my teens, when my mind, except for a vigilant rejection of Christianity, had no fixed principles, and everything from strict materialism to theosophy could find by turns an entry, I had been, as boys are, temporarily attracted to what was then called 'the Occult'.
I blundered into it innocently enough. In those days every one was reading Maeterlinck, and I wanted to improve my French. Moreover, from Yeats's early poetry it was natural to turn to his prose; and there I found to my astonishment that Yeats, unlike other romantic poets, really and literally believed in the sort of beings he put into his poems. There was no question here of 'symbolism': he believed in magic.
And so for a time Rosa Alchemica took its turn (along with Voltaire, Lucretius, and Joseph McCabe) among my serious books. You will understand that this period had ended a long time (years are longer at that age) before I set about writing Dymer.
By then, so far as I was anything, I was an idealist, and for an idealist all supernaturalisms were equally illusions, all 'spirits' merely symbols of 'Spirit' in the metaphysical sense, futile and dangerous if mistaken for facts. I put this into vii. 8.
I was now quite sure that magic or spiritism of any kind was a fantasy and of all fantasies the worst. But this wholesome conviction had recently been inflamed into a violent antipathy. It had happened to me to see a man, and a man whom I loved, sink into screaming mania and finally into death under the influence, as I believed, of spiritualism.
And I had also been twice admitted to the upper room in Yeats's own house in Broad Street. His conversation turned much on magic. I was overawed by his personality, and by his doctrine half fascinated and half repelled because of the fascination.
The angel in the last canto does not of course mean that I had any Christian beliefs when I wrote the poem, any more (si parva licet componere magnis) than the conclusion of Faust, Part II, means that Goethe was a believer.
This, I think, explains all that the reader might want explained in my narrative. My hero was to be a man escaping from illusion. He begins by egregiously supposing the universe to be his friend and seems for a time to find confirmation of his belief.
Then he tries, as we all try, to repeat his moment of youthful rapture. It cannot be done; the old Matriarch sees to that.
On top of his rebuff comes the discovery of the consequences which his rebellion against the City has produced. He sinks into despair and gives utterance to the pessimism which had, on the whole, been my own view about six years earlier.
Hunger and a shock of real danger bring him to his senses and he at last accepts reality.
But just as he is setting out on the new and soberer life, the shabbiest of all brides is offered him; the false promise that by magic or invited illusion there may be a short cut back to the one happiness he remembers. He relapses and swallows the bait, but he has grown too mature to be really deceived. He finds that the wish-fulfilment dream leads to the fear-fulfilment dream, recovers himself, defies the Magician who tempted him, and faces his destiny.
The physical appearance of the Magician in vi. 6-9 owes something to Yeats as I saw him. If he were now alive I would ask his pardon with shame for having repaid his hospitality by such freedom. It was not done in malice, and the likeness is not, I think, in itself, uncomplimentary.
Since his great name here comes before us, let me take the opportunity of saluting his genius: a genius so potent that, having first revivified and transmuted that romantic tradition which he found almost on its death-bed (and invented a new kind of blank verse in the process), he could then go on to weather one of the bitterest literary revolutions we have known, embark on a second career, and, as it were with one hand, play most of the moderns off the field at their own game.
If there is, as may be thought, a pride verging on insolence in his later work, such pride has never come so near to being excusable. It must have been difficult for him to respect either the mere Romantics who could only bewail a lost leader or the mere moderns who could see no difference between On Baile's Strand and the work of Richard le Gallienne.
Some may be surprised at the strength of the anti-totalitarian feeling in a poem written so long ago. I had not read Brave New World or Land Under England or The Aerodrome: nor had we yet tasted the fruits of a planned economy in our own lives. This should be a warning for critics who attempt to date ancient texts too exactly on that kind of internal evidence.
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I can't say I am ever quite happy about the funeral service: the "hearty thanks" for the "deliverance of our brother out of this sinful world" seems to me to have about it a perilous touch of something not far removed from humbug.
To all, Christians or not, death is terrible, and why ignore the fact? Which of us wants deliverance out of this sinful world?
I at any rate was very conscious of the sweetness of the wind in my face as I went down the path under the rustling trees to get the bus back into town, and I cannot feel that there was anything sinful in my feelings.
-from the diary of W.H. Lewis
It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges, that it should be resistant, should be itself. Dream-furniture is the only kind on which you never stub your toes or bang your knee.
You and I have both known happy marriage. But how different our wives were from the imaginary mistresses of our adolescent dreams! So much less exquisitely adapted to all our wishes; and for that very reason (among others) so incomparably better.
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The purported inspiration behind the character of Lucy in the Chronicles of Narnia has died.
The character was named after Owen Barfield's daughter Lucy, but was said to be patterned after a teenager who stayed at the Kilns during WWII. Her name was Jill Flewett (she later married a Freud), although the Lewis brothers called her June. She impressed them both.
Warnie wrote in his diary:
"Our dear, delightful June Flewett leaves us tomorrow... She is not yet eighteen, but I have met no one of any age further advanced in the Christian way of life... She is one of those rare people to whom one can venture to apply the word 'saintly.'
C.S. Lewis wrote to Jill's mother:
When June goes the only bright spot in our prospect goes with her. But, putting ourselves out of it, I think she ought to go [to drama school]... in talking to June it is no use to appeal to selfish motives (she is, without exception, the most selfless person I have ever known) I told her she had a duty to you and her father in the matter...
Lewis paid for her schooling.
Jill later recounted:
Of course I fell madly in love with him. It was a tremendous crush. I was 16. And I would have lain down and he could have walked all over me for the next two years... I'm sure I made a complete idiot of myself.
He was a very honourable man - he wouldn't have taken any sort of advantage of it.... Every smile, every kind word was like daylight, like the summer...
Lewis was the first person who made me believe that I was an intelligent human being and the whole of the time I was there he built up my confidence in myself and in my ability to think and understand. He never put me down. He never made me feel foolish, no matter how small my contribution towards any conversation might be... He built up my self-esteem.
In an ironic twist of fate, she was scheduled to come visit Lewis for the first time in many years the very night he died.
Jack had not been well and the night President Kennedy was assassinated I rang the Kilns to say I was coming. I actually telephoned within half an hour of Jack's death.
Her daughter Emma produced a tribute which aired on BBC 4. Jill's coffin was decorated by her granddaughter Martha.
There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books.
Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about "isms" and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said.
The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him.
But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.
It has always therefore been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.
-C.S. Lewis, Introduction to De Incarnatione Verbi Dei