Оценить:
 Рейтинг: 4.67

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

Год написания книги
2018
<< 1 ... 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 ... 148 >>
На страницу:
105 из 148
Настройки чтения
Размер шрифта
Высота строк
Поля

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF.53/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

7th February 1953.

My dear Edward,

Many thanks for your letter of the 2nd. Your point about the internal combustion engine and the lady-bird is both true and interesting. Yes, ‘gentleman’ is a word which has ceased to have any particular meaning; with us it now means ‘male’ and lady ‘female’.

(#ulink_fbdb81ec-946c-5aec-988d-7c8bb192f7f1) There are of course many more, e.g. any boat in which it is possible to spend the night, and which is privately owned is ‘luxury-yacht’, every cinema is ‘Super-cinema’ and so on. Please give our belated congratulations to your mother on her birthday, with our wishes for many more happy ones.

This is indeed good of you about the tea and sugar, and I think you have just about hit the right proportions; the business of payment on delivery is rather erratic, sometimes one is charged, sometimes not. But I’ll let you know what happens.

Please excuse such a short and scrappy note, but I am snowed under with a vast stack of examination papers for correction.

All the best.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD):

(#ulink_4ade5411-abab-5045-ab39-b9300cbdf030)

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb 9th 1953

Dear Miss Bodle

Thanks for your interesting letter of Feb 1st wh. arrived today. It is difficult to one, who, like me, has no experience, to give an opinion of these problems, which, I see, are v. intricate. The story about the girl who had reached the age of 16 under Christian teachers without hearing of the Incarnation is an eye-opener. For ordinary children (I don’t know about the Deaf) I don’t see any advantage in presenting the Gospels without some doctrinal comment. After all, they weren’t written for people who did not know the doctrine, but for converts, already instructed, who now wanted to know a bit more about the life and sayings of the Master. No ancient sacred books were intended to be read without a teacher: hence the Ethiopian eunuch in the Acts says to St. Philip ‘How can I understand unless someone tells me?’

(#ulink_de91d222-e2ff-5f60-9e37-376c75ba653b)

Could the bit–and I think there must be something-about people I don’t like come in as a comment on the Forgive clause in the Lord’s Prayer?

(#ulink_cdf812f3-5838-56af-ace8-5767dc9579ef)

It is freezing hard here and one takes ones life in one’s hand every time one walks.

What an excellent work you are doing! All blessings.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR C. CLARKE (BOD):

(#ulink_14de4ef9-677c-5646-8fbd-0994d4442346)

Magdalen College

Oxford

Feb. 14th [?] 1953

Dear Mr. Clarke

I hope I shd. not be deterred by the danger!

(#ulink_90102421-854c-50e5-b415-5d1d3b33f137) The fatal objection is that I should be covering ground I have already covered in print and on which I have nothing to add. I know that is how many lectures are made, but I never do it. I might at a pinch show great fortitude about the boredom of the audience, but then there’s my own. But thank your society very much for the invitation and convey my good wishes to them as regards everything but interplanetary travel.

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

Probably the whole thing is only a plan for kidnapping me and marooning me on an asteroid! I know the sort of thing.

TO ROBIN OAKLEY-HILL (M):

(#ulink_a154489c-d46b-531e-961c-32dbe1a7b4d6)

Magdalen College

Oxford

Feb 16th 1953

Dear Oakley-Hill

It came over me like a thunderclap about 30 seconds after I had left you in the Lodge this afternoon that I must seem to you to have committed, in one very short conversation, all the most unprovoked and indeed inexplicable kinds of rudeness there are.

(#ulink_447996c7-901d-563d-9320-5fabdc3a0062) I implore you to try to understand–and believe–how it came about with no such intention.

The starting point was the fact that I have never noticed the slightest inequality in your gait. Seeing it for the first time when I was waiting behind you to cross the street I therefore immediately assumed some temporary mishap to be the cause: no alternative explanation entered my head. My evil genius then led me to ask you about it-largely because two people who see each other once a week can’t very well meet on an ‘island’ and say just nothing. After your answer I ought of course to have apologised and dropped the subject at once: but by that time I had completely lost my head.

You are not the first to suffer this kind of thing from me: I am subject to a kind of black-out in conversation which every now and then leads me to ask and say the utterly wrong thing–the Brobdingnagianly tactless thing.

(#ulink_d40dc049-811a-5cc6-bfea-7cbce41ef8db) I have (quite against my will) made many enemies this way. I hope very much you will not become one of them: give me a fool’s pardon.

If I raised a subject which may be painful to you, I am now punished by having to deal with one that is equally painful for me. It is an old sore: it began in my almost nursery days: and if we could find a suitable magician I think I’d gladly swop my Tendency to the Faux Pas for your leg. Please accept my sincere, and greatly embarrassed, apology.
<< 1 ... 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 ... 148 >>
На страницу:
105 из 148