Seeing new worlds

     

True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.

      Does that sound like Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963), surely the most famous defender and explainer of Christian beliefs in the twentieth century? Yes.

      About twenty-five years ago, I thought my spiritual education through C.S. Lewis was complete. I had studied everything from Surprised By Joy to Mere Christianity to The Screwtape Letters to A Grief Observed, and and I had seen the movie Shadowlands (with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger) twice.

      I heartily agreed with The New Yorker: “If wit and wisdom, style and scholarship are requisites to passage through the pearly gates, Mr. Lewis will be among the angels.”

      Then came a more recent venture from the ever-enterprising HarperOne, three volumes republishing reflections and essays from a wide range of Lewis’s writings —How to Pray, How to be a Christian, and The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others’ Eyes (October 2019).

      My grasp of the Bible and the pathway to spiritual healing were about to be expanded in dozens of new directions!

      The goal of The Reading Life is delightfully encapsulated in a preface by David Downing and Michael Maudlin who rejoice in the breadth of Lewis’s passions, never forgetting his childhood joy in discovering that books are portals to other worlds.

      As Lewis himself explained, “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. … In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.”

      He adds: “One must read every good book at least once every ten years.”

      The table of contents in The Reading Life might well entrap more readers than Lewis would ever have imagined:

      Why Movies Sometimes Ruin Books;

      How to Know if You Are a True Reader;

      The Case for Reading Old Books;

      Free to Skip; etc.

      On skipping, Lewis writes: “It is a very silly idea that in reading a book you must never ‘skip.’ All sensible people skip freely when they come to a chapter which they find is going to be no use to them.”

      And he reminds us: “You cannot judge any artifact except by using it as it was intended. It’s no good judging a butter-knife by seeing whether it will saw logs.”

      There’s also a neat remark from Mortimer Adler: “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”

      The Reading Life is what I call a “Listen-to-this” book. You can’t turn more than two or three pages without calling to someone within earshot, “Hey, listen to this,” and immediately read aloud the line that has grabbed you.

      For example: “The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.”

      “A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print or spelling.”

      And, “I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice on and off all my life and it doesn’t wear out a bit.”

      Clearly, like the opening quote in this blog post, there are lines in C.S. Lewis that will never wear out!   

      You are never too old to set another goal, or to dream a new dream.

      I wonder what HarperOne will dream up next.