Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Walter Hooper
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Биографии и Мемуары
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780007332663
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whatever else it may be, is no diminution of the friendship. I think you pointed out to me once that it was natural we should write more easily in the old days, when everything was new and our correspondence was really like two explorers signalling to one another in a new country. Also—neither of us had any other outlet: we still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way.

      I think I mentioned the skating in my last letter. Since then life has gone on in a pretty smooth way. Warnie sinks deeper and deeper into the family life: it is hard to believe he was not always here. What a mercy that the change in his views (I mean as regards religion) should have happened in time to meet mine—it would be awkward if one of us were still in the old state of mind. He has an excellent gramophone and is building up a complete set of the Beethoven symphonies, one of which (complete) he often plays us on a Sunday evening. I have quite foresworn the old method of hearing one’s favourite bits played separately, and I am sure one gains enormously by always hearing one symphony as a whole and nothing else. By the way which is the one that contains the beautiful slow movement you played me—the one whose quality you defined as ‘compassion’? I have been waiting for it eagerly but so far W. has not produced it. I am getting back more of my old pleasure in music all the time.

      I had to abandon Lockhart at the beginning of last term and have not yet resumed it. It is most annoying when the last few volumes of a long book have to be left over like that. One somehow feels a disinclination to begin them again and to find how many names and facts one has forgotten: yet it is uncomfortable not to polish the book off. You will have the laugh of me this time.

      Do try to write me a long letter soon. You are constantly in my mind even when I don’t write, and to lose touch with you would be like losing a limb.

      Do write. W. in bed with flu’ (mild) but otherwise all well here

      Yours

      Jack

      Give my love to your mother: I hope she is well.

       TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

      [The Kilns],

      March 28th 1933

      My dear Barfield—

18 so much that I find it difficult—through the din—to discover what it is really like. But this is, of course, much more than a war book. My chief complaint is that it stops too soon, without pulling the threads (the philosophical ones) together. Is it, by any chance, the first of a trilogy? As that, it would be capital. There are, as it stands, several things I want to know more about, e.g.

      1. Courage used to be less conscious, more in the blood: that is why our ancestors did not have to exhaust on keeping brave all the conscious energy needed for the fighting. Good! But does the author’s solution by discipline mean that nature was simply wrong in transferring courage from the blood to the mind? For this discipline (sharply distinguished from regimental spirit etc) is just a method of putting the courage-problem back on the unconscious: i.e. he says to nature ‘I don’t want this freedom. All you have done is to put me to the trouble of inventing an elaborate machinery for making myself again un-free in this matter—freedom in this matter having turned out to be such a job that if I attend to it I have no time to attend to anything else.’ Is this what H-S’s position comes to? And