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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is far beyond the work you did in Schools.

      This is cold comfort to you with the world to face!—but at least it is said quite sincerely and not merely for the sake of consoling you.

      Try to forgive me both as an examiner and as a tutor. If there should at any time be any way in which I can be of use to you, let me know at once. Till then, good-bye and good luck.

      Yours very sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

       TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

      The Kilns,

      Headington Quarry,

      Oxford.

      Aug. 17th. 1933.

      My dear Arthur,

      I have been silent for a terribly long time, I know, but it has not really been my fault. I had a solid month’s examining after term ended, and then I went away for my sea holiday. I had pictured myself writing to you on the boat, but this turned out to be practically impossible: so that I am really writing if not on the first possible day, at any rate on the second or third. Before I go on to anything else I must answer one point in your last letter:—you comment on my saying nothing about your having come so near me without visiting me. The fact is I deliberately said nothing about it because I feared that, if I did, it might seem that my intention of not visiting you this year was a kind of tit-for-tat—that I was offended and was thus taking my revenge, or, at least, was excusing my intention by your action. I would have liked you to come and see me, of course: but I never thought that England ought to be forbidden ground to you if you were not seeing me for any reason. I have no wish to reduce you to stealing past Oxford with a false beard on—like you and me stealing past Leeborough from Bernagh in the old days.

      The rest of the tour I shall not describe in detail. The bit I should most like to have shared with you was the departure from Waterford. The sail down the river, peppered with v. early Norman castles, was good, but what was better was the next three hours out to sea. Imagine a flat French grey sea, and a sky of almost the same colour: between these a long fish-shaped streak of pure crimson, about 20 miles long, and lasting, unchanged or changing imperceptibly, for hours. Then add three or four perfectly transparent mountains, so extraordinarily spiritualised that they absolutely realised the old idea of Ireland as the ‘isle of the saints’. Like this—I do not remember that I have ever seen anything more calm and spacious and celestial. Not but what we had some wonderful sunsets at other times in the voyage. You with your dislike of the sea will hardly admit it, but from a boat out of sight of land one does get effects hardly to be got elsewhere. For one thing the sky is so huge and the horizon is uninterrupted in every direction, so that the mere scale of the sky-scenery is beyond anything you get ashore: and for another, the extreme simplicity of the design—flat disk and arched dome and nothing else—produces a kind of concentration. And then again to turn suddenly from these huge sublimities as one passes a staircase head and hear the sound of plates being laid or the laugh of a boy coming up on the warmer air from below, gives that delicious contrast of the homely and familiar in the midst of the remote, which is the master-stroke of the whole thing.