Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963

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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) (This wd. re-introduce yr. old confusion between mal-de-mer and mal de mere with a vengeance!)

(#litres_trial_promo)

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,

(#litres_trial_promo) to be emperor of the world,

(#litres_trial_promo) to do ‘lévitations’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 calm

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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

Dear Clarke (let us not Mister one another)

Thanks v. much for yr. letter and for the E to A.,

(#litres_trial_promo) wh. I look forward to with pleasure. I meant the English cognoscenti of course: I don’t see American papers.

If you will let me know which bits of my letter your people want to use,

(#litres_trial_promo) I am sure I shall have no objection–as you know one doesn’t like to give a free hand for selection. It is sometimes so done as to credit one with ungrammatical or even nonsensical sentences. Are you ever in this city? If so, be sure to let me know and we will make a tryst. I know where the best beer & the best cider and the only draught stout are.

It was a grand book and I shall be interested to see where you go from there. Not, I devoutly hope, into the kind where we leap forward to a date at wh. space-travel has become as common & dull as tramways and within that framework we get an ordinary spy-story, or wreck-story, or love-story wh. might as well, or better, be located in present-day Hampstead. With all good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR C. CLARKE (BOD):

Great Western Royal Hotel

Paddington,

London, W.2