The Reading Life Read online

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  The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses

  (from “The Weight of Glory”)

  Pleasure

  For a great deal (not all) of our literature was made to be read lightly, for entertainment. If we do not read it, in a sense, ‘for fun’ and with our feet on the fender, we are not using it as it was meant to be used, and all our criticism of it will be pure illusion. For you cannot judge any artifact except by using it as it was intended. It is no good judging a butter-knife by seeing whether it will saw logs. Much bad criticism, indeed, results from the efforts of critics to get a work-time result out of something that never aimed at producing more than pleasure.

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  Christian Reflections

  (from “Christianity and Culture”)

  Originality

  No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work’s sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.

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  The Weight of Glory

  (from “Membership”)

  The Up-to-Date Myth

  The more up to date the Book is, the sooner it will be dated.

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  Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

  (from Chapter 2)

  Keeping Up

  Incidentally, what is the point of keeping in touch with the contemporary scene? Why should one read authors one doesn’t like because they happen to be alive at the same time as oneself? One might as well read everyone who had the same job or the same coloured hair, or the same income, or the same chest measurements, as far as I can see.

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  Letter to Ruth Pitter, January 6, 1951

  Wide Tastes

  By having a great many friends I do not prove that I have a wide appreciation of human excellence. You might as well say I prove the width of my literary taste by being able to enjoy all the books in my own study. The answer is the same in both cases—‘You chose those books. You chose those friends. Of course they suit you.’ The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop. The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has to meet every day.

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  The Four Loves

  (from Chapter III, “Affections”)

  Real Enjoyment

  After a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books. The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not impotent. And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,

  The child whose love is here, at least doth reap

  One precious gain, that he forgets himself.

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  The World’s Last Night

  (from “The Lilies That Fester”)

  Literary Snobs

  Some critics write of those who constitute the literary ‘many’ as if they belonged to the many in every respect, and indeed to the rabble. They accuse them of illiteracy, barbarism, ‘crass’, ‘crude’ and ‘stock’ responses which (it is suggested) must make them clumsy and insensitive in all the relations of life and render them a permanent danger to civilisation. It sometimes sounds as if the reading of ‘popular’ fiction involved moral turpitude. I do not find this borne out by experience. I have a notion that these ‘many’ include certain people who are equal or superior to some of the few in psychological health, in moral virtue, practical prudence, good manners, and general adaptability. And we all know very well that we, the literary, include no small percentage of the ignorant, the caddish, the stunted, the warped, and the truculent. With the hasty and wholesale apartheid of those who ignore this we must have nothing to do.

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  An Experiment in Criticism

  (from Chapter 2, “False Characteristics”)

  Re-reading Favorites Each Decade

  Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.

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  Letter to Arthur Greeves, August 17, 1933

  Reading and Experience

  You ask me whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not quite such a fool as all that. But if one is only to talk from firsthand experience on any subject, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the thing they call love, I have what is better—the experience of Sappho, of Euripides of Catullus of Shakespeare of Spenser of Austen of Brontë of, of—anyone else I have read. We see through their eyes. And as the greater includes the less, the passion of a great mind includes all the qualities of the passion of a small one. Accordingly, we have every right to talk about it.

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  Letter to Arthur Greeves, October 12, 1915

  Free to Skip

  It is a very silly idea that in reading a book you must never ‘skip’. All sensible people skip freely when they come to a chapter which they find is going to be no use to them.

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  Mere Christianity

  (from Chapter 3, “Time and Beyond Time”)

  Free to Read

  The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden—that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.

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  Mere Christianity

  (from Chapter 8, “Is Christianity Hard or Easy?”)

  Huck

  I have been regaling myself on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I wonder why that man never wrote anything else on the same level? The scene in which Huck decides to be ‘good’ by betraying Jim, and then finds he can’t and concludes that he is a reprobate, is really unparalleled in humour, pathos, & tenderness. And it goes down to the very depth of all moral problems.

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  Letter to Warfield M. Firor (BOD), December 6, 1950

  The Glories of Childhood—Versus Adolescence

  About re-reading books: I find like you that those read in my earlier ’teens often have no appeal, but this is not nearly so often true of those read in earlier childhood. Girls may develop differently, but for me, looking back, it seems that the glories of childhood and the glories of adolescence are separated by a howling desert during which one was simply a greedy, cruel, spiteful little animal and imagination, in all but the lowest form, was asleep.

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  Letter to Rhona Bodle, December 26, 1953

  Jane Austen

  I am glad you think J. Austen a sound moralist. I agree. And not platitudinous, but subtle as well as firm.

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  Letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, May 5, 1952

  I don’t believe anything will keep the right reader & the right book apart. But our literary loves are as diverse as our human! You couldn’t make me like Henry James or dislike Jane Austen whatever you did.

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  Letter to Rhona Bodle, September 14, 1953

  I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice on and off all my life and it doesn’t wear out a bit.

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  Letter to Sarah Neylan, January 16, 1954

  Art and Literature

  I
do most thoroughly agree with what you say about Art and Literature. To my mind they can only be healthy when they are either (a) admittedly aiming at nothing but innocent recreation or (b) definitely the handmaids of religious or at least moral truth. Dante is alright and Pickwick is alright. But the great serious irreligious art—art for art’s sake—is all balderdash; and incidentally never exists when art is really flourishing. One can say of Arts as an author I recently read said of love (sexual love I mean), ‘It ceases to be a devil when it ceases to be god.’ Isn’t that well put?

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  Letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, April 16, 1940

  Art Appreciation

  Many modern novels, poems, and pictures, which we are brow-beaten into ‘appreciating’, are not good work because they are not work at all. They are mere puddles of spilled sensibility or reflection. When an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing taste, interests, and capacity of his audience. These, no less than the language, the marble, or the paint, are part of his raw materials, to be used, tamed, sublimated, not ignored or defied. Haughty indifference to them is not genius or integrity; it is laziness and incompetence.

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  The World’s Last Night and Other Essays

  (from “Good Work and Good Works”)

  Look. Listen. Receive.

  The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)

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  An Experiment in Criticism

  (from Chapter 3, “How the Few and the Many Use Pictures and Music”)

  Talking About Books

  When one has read a book, I think there is nothing so nice as discussing it with some one else—even though it sometimes produces rather fierce arguments.

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  Letter to Arthur Greeves, March 14, 1916

  The Blessing of Correspondence

  It is the immemorial privilege of letter-writers to commit to paper things they would not say: to write in a more grandiose manner than that in which they speak: and to enlarge upon feelings which would be passed by unnoticed in conversation.

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  Letter to Arthur Greeves, November 10, 1914

  In Praise of Dante

  I think Dante’s poetry, on the whole, the greatest of all the poetry I have read: yet when it is at its highest pitch of excellence, I hardly feel that Dante has very much to do. There is a curious feeling that the great poem is writing itself, or at most, that the tiny figure of the poet is merely giving the gentlest guiding touch, here and there, to energies which, for the most part, spontaneously group themselves and perform the delicate evolutions which make up the Comedy. . . . I draw the conclusion that the highest reach of the whole poetic art turns out to be a kind of abdication, and is attained when the whole image of the world the poet sees has entered so deeply into his mind that henceforth he has only to get himself out of the way, to let the seas roll and the mountains shake their leaves or the light shine and the spheres revolve, and all this will be poetry, not things you write poetry about.

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  Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature

  (from “Dante’s Similes”)

  On Alexandre Dumas

  I tried, at W’s [Lewis’s brother Warren’s] earnest recommendation, to read the Three Musketeers, but not only got tired but also found it disgusting. All of these swaggering bullies, living on the money of their mistresses—faugh! . . .You are in an abstract world of gallantry and adventure which has no roots—no connection with human nature or mother earth. When the scene shifts from Paris to London there is no sense that you have reached a new country, no change of atmosphere. I don’t think there is a single passage to show that Dumas had ever seen a cloud, a road, or a tree.

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  Letter to Arthur Greeves, March 25, 1933

  The Delight of Fairy Tales

  Curiously enough it is at this time [age 12], not in earlier childhood, that I chiefly remember delighting in fairy tales. I fell deeply under the spell of Dwarfs—the old bright-hooded, snowy-bearded dwarfs we had in those days before Arthur Rackham sublimed, or Walt Disney vulgarized, the earthmen. I visualized them so intensely that I came to the very frontiers of hallucination; once, walking in the garden, I was for a second not quite sure that a little man had not run past me into the shrubbery. I was faintly alarmed, but it was not like my night fears. A fear that guarded the road to Faerie was one I could face. No one is a coward at all points.

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  Surprised by Joy

  (from Chapter III, “Mountbracken and Campbell”)

  Language as Comment

  Mere description is impossible. Language forces you to an implicit comment.

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  Present Concerns

  (from “Prudery and Philology”)

  Communicating the Essence of Our Lives

  The very essence of our life as conscious beings, all day and every day, consists of something which cannot be communicated except by hints, similes, metaphors, and the use of those emotions (themselves not very important) which are pointers to it.

  * * *

  Christian Reflections

  (from “The Language of Religion”)

  Mapping My Books

  To enjoy a book like that thoroughly I find I have to treat it as a sort of hobby and set about it seriously. I begin by making a map on one of the end leafs: then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page: finally I index at the end all the passages I have for any reason underlined. I often wonder—considering how people enjoy themselves developing photos or making scrapbooks—why so few people make a hobby of their reading in this way. Many an otherwise dull book which I had to read have I enjoyed in this way, with a fine-nibbed pen in my hand: one is making something all the time and book so read acquires the charm of a toy without losing that of a book.

  * * *

  Letter to Arthur Greeves, February 1932

  On Plato and Aristotle

  To lose what I owe to Plato and Aristotle would be like an amputation of a limb.

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  Rehabilitations and Other Essays

  (from “The Idea of an ‘English School’”)

  Imagination

  It seems to me appropriate, almost inevitable, that when that great Imagination which in the beginning, for Its own delight and for the delight of men and angels and (in their proper mode) of beasts, had invented and formed the whole world of Nature, submitted to express Itself in human speech, that speech should sometimes be poetry. For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

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  Reflections on the Psalms

  (from Chapter I, “Introductory”)

  If Only

  If only one had time to read a little more: we either get shallow & broad or narrow and deep.

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  Letter to Arthur Greeves, March 2, 1919

  On Shakespeare

  Where Milton marches steadily forward, Shakespeare behaves rather like a swallow. He darts at the subject and glances away; and then he is back again before your eyes can follow him. It is as if he kept on having tries at it, and being dissatisfied. He darts image after image at you and still seems to think that he has not done enough. He brings up a whole light artillery of mythology, and gets tired of each piece almost before he has fired it. He wants to see the object from a dozen different angles; if the undignified word is pardonable, he nibbles, like a man trying a tough biscuit now from this side and now from that. You can find the same sort of contrast almost anywhere between these two poets.