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As I may have said before, I don’t know much about the Existentialists.
(#ulink_8e4a60fd-f272-57ee-abc2-f368ad0e2a35) I have read Sartre’s L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme:
(#ulink_15b94923-dcd9-5806-98d8-6a3dae581848) that seemed, if pressed, to be the Berkleyan metaphysic
(#ulink_c49e6b63-8a84-561b-a5c3-467ee1943fb1) in the mind of an atheist with a bad liver!
(#ulink_dab31939-a24b-5189-97b7-484f6c3a469b) I’ve both heard of and met Marcel.
(#ulink_70b00ed5-159b-501b-a079-4c8702ac5c90) To see him is to love him: but it appeared to me that his thesis
(#ulink_f094fe36-7315-5293-af17-83f3e3b7e25f) if taken seriously, shd. reduce him and us to perfect silence—as the philosophy of Heraclitus did his disciples. The same holds of Buber. What they mean by calling Aquinas and Augustine Existentialists I can’t understand: nor do I much like such labels. I’m sorry about my handwriting wh. seems to have completely collapsed in the last few years. God bless you, my old friend. Pray for me,
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO RHONA BODLE (BOD):
Magdalen College
Oxford
11/4/50
Dear Miss Bodle
God bless you and send you many happy Easters. As for my part in it, remember that anybody (or any thing) may be used by the Holy Spirit as a conductor. I say this not so much from modesty as to guard against any danger of your feeling, when the shine goes out of my books (as it will) that the real thing is in any way involved. It mustn’t fade when I do.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO RHONA BODLE (BOD):
Magdalen College
Oxford
12/4/50
Dear Miss Bodle
I will indeed pray for you.
(#ulink_d719b4b8-6e7f-5f74-b6b9-0f8e19909d90) So often after a period of exaltation and comfort (such as, I think, you were having at Easter) round the very next corner something horrid lies in wait for us, either in ourselves or outside. I suppose the preceding comfort was sent, partly, to prepare us for the other: like (to use a crude simile) the rum-issue before the battle. Courage!
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO WARHELD M. FIROR(BOD):
Magdalen etc
14/4/50
My dear Firor
What a vision!
(#ulink_fd95a50b-b939-5e5a-8f34-903bd9affd85) Not that my attempts to ride and fish wd. give pleasure to anyone except the spectators (I don’t know, though. Perhaps the horse and the fish wd. find them mildly amusing) but I’d love walking in the sort of places where better men do ride and fish.
But it’s all visionary. I’ve told you what chains bind me to England.
(#ulink_fd8505d2-f8e1-5ef9-9b65-792bc661870e) If I can succeed in getting just over a fortnight away this summer (as I was prevented from doing last year)
(#ulink_1603d389-62c9-574b-85f4-6c0676b26be8) I shall have realised more freedom than I have had since 1929. But I do get a real and strange pleasure out of the invitation. You are a fairy-tale character: your bounty (as Cleopatra says) is an autumn that grows the more by reaping.
(#ulink_f3c47e16-4b47-5205-ade4-b598cb842104) (Autumn here, rather oddly, means harvest not the fall of the leaf). And I can’t understand why I should be selected for it all. However, this verges on a subject you have forbidden me.
Romanes has hitherto been to me more the name of a lecture than a man, by which I see I have done him a grave injustice.
(#ulink_696702e5-65aa-50b0-b742-44f5c8847c18) (Odd that things left as the memorial of a man often in fact obliterate him like this). Have I confessed to you that an inability to read biography is one of my defects? Except Boswell, of course.
I’ve a pile of letters this afternoon, and this is just a note of thanks and regrets. We’re all well, and frequently asking when that next visit of yours is to be looked for.
All blessings.
Yours,
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY MARGARET MCCASLIN (W):
(#ulink_42e92a46-b912-5f3b-808d-867e3861a53d)TS
REF.50/188.
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
20th April 1950.
Dear Mrs. McCaslin,
Many thanks for your most kind and encouraging letter of the 17th. It gives me great pleasure to know that my books have been of some service to you.
With all best wishes for the success of your work,
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS
REF.50/81
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
22nd April 1950.
My dear Miss Mathews,
Your delightful parcel and the English spring arrived together this morning to supply badly needed cheer on the first day of Term: always a somewhat gloomy moment. From what I know of my native climate, the contents of the parcel will last longer than the fine weather.
Our latest food news is that fish has been ‘decontrolled’ as official English has it: which means that one’s fishmonger can select what he wants instead of having to take what our rulers think is good for his customers. The immediate result was a huge increase in the price of the better kinds of fish, but things have since settled down, and now the prices are in many cases below pre-war.
With many thanks for the huge parcel and all best wishes,
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
Magdalen College
Oxford
29/4/50
Dear Roger–
I like it very much indeed: less haunting than the Wood that Time Forgot
(#ulink_c0c4b926-0297-5c04-9fc4-aee5a4599b2c) but richer. There are about four alterations I will try to persuade you to make, three of them quite easy.
Can you come & dine Thurs. May 11th to talk of that & other things?
Yours
Jack Lewis
Lewis’s friend, Mrs Janie King Moore–‘Minto’–was now 78. She had been bed-ridden for several years, and it had become impossible for Lewis to look after her. On 29 April 1950 she was moved to Restholme, the Oxford nursing home run by Dorothy Watson. Warnie wrote about Mrs Moore’s first day there, ‘The first news from Restholme is…[Minto’s] “very strong language”: and M wants to know how soon she will be able to escape from this hell on earth in which she is imprisoned. On the whole the outlook is as black as it well can be.’
(#ulink_cf1c1fe9-75ba-5289-b0c5-a8bf4df46bcb)
But there Mrs Moore was to remain for the rest of her life, visited almost every day by Lewis.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):
(#ulink_20f88ba4-5f09-52ac-9bd6-a36af72d0b0b)
Magdalen College
Oxford
2/5/50
My dear Arthur
Once again the axe has fallen. Minto was removed to a Nursing Home last Saturday and her Doctor thinks this arrangement will probably have to be permanent. In one way it will be an enormous liberation for me.
The other side of the picture is the crushing expense—ten guineas a week wh. is well over £500 a year. (What on earth I shall do if poor Minto is still alive nine years hence when I have to retire, I can’t imagine.) The order of the day thus becomes for me stringent economy and such things as a holiday in Ireland are fantastically out of the question. So cancel all. I hardly know how I feel—relief, pity, hope, terror, & bewilderment have me in a whirl. I have the jitters! God bless you. Pray for me.
Yours
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):
[Magdalen College]
May 6/50
My dear Arthur
Thanks for your wise and kind letter. Of course you’re perfectly right and I do try to ‘consider the lilies of the field’.
(#ulink_20847f5b-4212-5e55-a1bc-e670874917d8) Nor do I doubt (with my reason: my nerves do not always obey it!) that all is sent in love and will be for all our goods if we have grace to use it aright. And thanks too for your immensely generous offer. I can’t accept it. She is miserable enough without being deprived of my daily visits. When you and I are meant to meet we shall.
God bless you.
Yours
Jack
TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):
(#ulink_191c070a-c85f-5cb2-9d9e-b98ce2f9aa7a)
[The Kins]
22/5/50
