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(#ulink_a860de55-50c9-540b-b2e6-09180a938a14) But for the moment:–the trichotomy is not Hesperian, Aerial, or Celestial, but Terrestrial (Men), Aerial (Aerial Genii or daemons), Aetherial (Angels). At death Man goes from 1 to 2: from which, if they make the grade, they go on to 3, but if ploughed relapse into 1. 1 and 2 are mortal, 3 immortal. It’s at one’s second death (or an Aerial) that one either goes up or falls back.
Hence 11. 459-472
(#ulink_d2799685-206a-59d5-b4fe-ff38f9e3d077) really mean (I believe) ‘Chastity carries us safely from terrestrial thro’ aerial up to aetherial, but sensuality draws us back to terrestrial. Ghosts are “ploughed” aerial longing to get back to their terrestrial state.’
The Attendant Spirit
(#ulink_e2e83db9-6eca-5ce4-a182-ad682f3dda41) is an aerial (i.e. a native aerial not an ex-human who has been promoted). For he lives not in the highest heaven but only ‘before’ its ‘threshold’ (l.)
(#ulink_796a18fd-7fd6-5083-b728-33978da53710) among ‘aerial spirits’ (3.)
(#ulink_8b877d2a-7e11-5a76-9001-cce008e284e3) in ‘serene air’ (4.)
(#ulink_3f2b0281-2b1f-500a-aec7-aa5d9a18fea8) is called ‘daemon’ in Trinity MS., & returns to ‘suck the liquid air’ (980)
(#ulink_9f451b13-4ed7-5259-97b2-cb004fec723b) wh. Aerials live on, in a region still subject to mutability where Venus mourns Adonis (999-1002) and it is ‘far above’ (1003) his realm that Celestial Love consummates His marriage with human soul (1004-1011). That ought to keep them going for a bit! I am so glad you have a happy job.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARGARET SACKVILLE HAMILTON (BOD):
(#ulink_e384c3ea-007a-5881-9347-bf7e2fc12fc6)
Magdalen College,
Oxford
23/9/52
Dear Mrs. Hamilton
The ancient books which put this view best are Plato’s Timaeus and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Book V. (The Loeb Library edition of the latter has a nice 17th century English translation on the right hand pages).
(#ulink_9165e36e-e277-58e2-86d2-140ff6517998) There is, however, no need to go back to the original sources. Modern statements will be found in Kant’s Critique ofPure Reason: (in the part called ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’)
(#ulink_f47024f3-b746-5bb8-846a-484ea1ede2d5) and in Von Hügel’s Eternal Life
(#ulink_363374db-c05d-5ed1-8b31-d9b9ab06dd4f)– the latter, I think, far easier. From the scientific angle try Eddington’s Nature of the Physical Universe.
(#ulink_6be6dc99-781f-56d5-ad14-573a8c04b1b8), There are what maybe regarded as evidences for the theory in Dunne’s Experiment with Time,
(#ulink_36b6505e-119e-5677-904b-57138bf223b9) tho’ he (wrongly I believe) treats them as evidence for a different and unnecessarily complicated theory of what he calls Serialism.
(#ulink_46b78ac8-8f6c-50ee-bb52-03a2bfcd959c)
The nearest we get to scriptural support is II. Peter 8-9 where St. Peter transforms the simple Old Testament saying that 1000 years are only one day to God (which in itself might mean only that God is permanent in time) by adding the new and important point that to God one day is like 1000 years.
(#ulink_83d11ad2-71a5-5be6-af4f-8a809ab6511b)
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
Joy Gresham at this time was a 37-year-old New Yorker who had begun a correspondence with Lewis in 1950.
(#ulink_5e4d66da-03fd-5ab5-b7f0-3a9c0a7dc4c0) Her marriage to the novelist, William Lindsay Gresham, was under strain, and in August she had left their two children, David (b. 1944)
(#ulink_44326edd-5f2a-5501-8931-9f6d38aab9e5) and Douglas (b. 1945),
(#ulink_00d20050-1eb9-5808-a584-d795d85872cb) with their father and a cousin, Renée Pierce, to go to London for a few months, hoping during that time to meet Lewis.
During August and September she stayed in London with her old friend, Phyllis Williams. They invited Lewis to have lunch with them in Oxford, and on 24 September Lewis met Joy and Phyllis at the Eastgate Hotel, across the road from Magdalen College. A few days later Lewis invited them to lunch in his College rooms. Warnie was invited too, but when he withdrew George Sayer took his place. Sayer recalled the luncheon in Magdalen in his biography of Lewis:
The party was a decided success. Joy was of medium height, with a good figure, dark hair, and rather sharp features. She was an amusingly abrasive New Yorker, and Jack was delighted by her bluntness and her anti-American views. Everything she saw in England seemed to her far better than what she had left behind. Thus, of the single glass of sherry we had before the meal, she said: ‘I call this civilized. In the States, they give you so much hard stuff that you start the meal drunk and end with a hangover.’ She was anti-urban and talked vividly about the inhumanity of the skyscraper and of the new technology and of life in New York City…She attacked modern American literature…‘Mind you, I wrote that sort of bunk myself when I was young.’ Small farm life was the only good life, she said. Jack spoke up then, saying that, on his father’s wise, he came from farming stock. ‘I felt that,’ she said. ‘Where else could you get the vitality?’
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TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
Coll. Magd.
26/9/52
My dear Roger–
I find Miss Graham’s criticism rather hard to understand. ‘Tone’ might conceivably refer to the emphasis on poaching or the poacher’s religious hypocrisy, but quite possibly masks some objection which she herself cannot understand. I don’t know what to advise, for the books you fail to publish seem to me sometimes better than, and sometimes no different from, your published ones. I shouldn’t be surprised if it all depends on the time of the month at which Miss G. reads the MS. I am old enough now to realise that one always has to reckon with that.
We also have had visitors. For heaven’s sake don’t let June increase her toils by bothering to write to me. But let me have her and your advice on my immediate problem wh. is the title of the new story. Bles, like you, thinks The Wild Waste Lands bad, but he says Night Under Narnia is ‘gloomy’. George Sayer & my brother say Gnomes Under N wd. be equally gloomy, but News under Narnia wd do. On the other hand my brother & the American writer Joy Davidman (who has been staying with us & is a great reader of fantasy and children’s books) both say that The Wild Waste Lands is a splendid title. What’s a chap to do?
Yours
Jack
TO MICHAEL IRWIN (P): TS
REF.52/373.
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
26th September 1952.
Dear Michael,
Thank you for writing. I am so glad you liked the Voyage. Your idea of a story about Asian in England is a good one, but I think it would be too hard for me to write—it would have to be so different. Perhaps you will write it yourself when you are grown up,
Love from
C. S. Lewis
TO PATRICK IRWIN (P):
(#ulink_2158692c-67cc-5559-9245-8fbae15242d7)TS
REF.52/373.
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
26th September 1952.
Dear Mr. Irwin,
I have written to Michael approving the idea, but saying it would be too difficult for me to do. I did’nt add that the story of Asian in this world (if not in England) has been written already. His letter gave me great pleasure, and so does yours.
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS
REF.52/103.
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
30th September 1952.
Dear Mrs. Gebbert,
We are both delighted to hear that it is Proposition B, and are looking forward eagerly to your visit; and we note that, as one would expect from you, you come laden with gifts: which however you will have the novel experience of sharing with the recipients!
Yes, the dates suit excellently; I hope you will come down on one of the morning trains, in time for us all to have lunch here in my rooms before we go out to the house. Let me know in due course.
Is Andy the Antelope with you? Does he like iced water for breakfast? What brand of hay does he use?
With all best wishes to you both,
yours anticipatorily,
C. S. Lewis
TO CHARLES MOORMAN (L):
(#ulink_b61384a0-4a91-51e1-80f8-cf656aa1e1d1)
Magdalen
2/10/52
Dear Mr Moorman,
I am sure you are on a false scent.
(#ulink_22d95b25-821b-54f9-be0f-4fed4019725b) Certainly most, perhaps all the poems in Williams’s Taliessin volume were written before the last novel, All Hallows Eve, was even conceived,
(#ulink_856402d1-728b-55fc-8733-ba30d10f29e6) and there had been Arthurian poems (not of much value) in his earlier manner long before. I can’t tell you when he first became interested in the Arthurian story, but the overwhelming probability is that, like so many English boys, he got via Tennyson into Malory in his ‘teens. The whole way in which he talked of it implied a life-long familiarity. Much later (but even so, before I met him) came the link-up between his long-standing interest in Arthuriana and a new interest in Byzantium.
Everything he ever said implied that his prose fiction, his ‘pot boilers’, and his poetry all went on concurrently: there was no ‘turning from’ one to the other. He never said anything to suggest that he felt his themes ‘would not fit with ease into tales of modern life’. What would have expressed the real chronological relation between the novels would have been the words (tho’ I don’t think he ever actually said them) ‘I haven’t got much further with my Arthurian poems this week because I’ve been temporarily occupied with the idea for a new story’
The question when did he first come across the doctrine of ‘Caritas’ puzzled me. What doctrine do you mean? If you mean the ordinary Christian doctrine that there are three theological virtues and ‘the greatest of these is charity’
(#ulink_4c6984b8-8819-59e0-89df-581e683046d4) of course he would never remember a time when he had not known it. If you mean the doctrine of Coinherence and Substitution, then I don’t know when he first met these.
(#ulink_c59ed595-5e75-5460-85db-e0dc4d293632) Nor do I know when he began the Figure of A.
(#ulink_49cc245e-737c-5fbe-bc59-e60346d803bb) His knowledge of the earlier Arthurian documents was not that of a real scholar: he knew none of the relevant languages except (a little) Latin.
The VII Bears and the Atlantean Circle (in That Hideous Strength) are pure inventions of my own, filling the same purpose in the narrative that ‘noises off wd in a stage play.
(#ulink_e81f6fe1-5936-5d45-ae9b-cf24be47fe44) Numinor is a mis-spelling of Numenor which, like the ‘true West’, is a fragment from a vast private mythology invented by Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.
(#ulink_9f3d2030-2cd1-5445-a5c4-e14a21328991) At the time we all hoped that a good deal of that mythology would soon become public through a romance which the Professor was then contemplating. Since then the hope has receded…
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TO PHOEBE HESKETH (W):
(#ulink_13bab1a1-7901-58a1-b703-2dd6a8ab7b52)
Magdalen College,
Oxford
Oct 4th 1952
Dear Miss Hesketh–
You will have given up expecting any acknowledgement of No Time for Cowards
(#ulink_3ad6ed1c-183f-5541-a3e9-abdb36baadc7) which you so kindly sent me, and must think me no end of a curmudgeon. But you know what the alternative is—either to write a wholly perfunctory letter at once, or else to wait for that rare day and hour (it’s rarer as I get older) when one is receptive of a new book of poems. I now can really say Thank you, for I’ve got many real delights. You are a superb phrase-maker: ‘the bell-noised streams’
(#ulink_4a84c4b9-a121-5c10-a429-fd8916013c1d) and ‘infant fists of fern’
