[lit-ideas] Two important guys
- From: cblists@xxxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 15:19:47 +0100
On 22 Nov 2014, at 23:40, a friend wrote to me privately:
> Nov. 22, 1963 -- two important guys died on this date.
Actually, (at least) three.
Although I did know some of the circumstances surrounding his death, I hadn't
known that Aldous Huxley died the same day as JFK. And in reading of that, I
learned that C.S. Lewis died the same day. (Apparently news of both Lewis's and
Huxley's death was eclipsed by the reporting of the assassination and its
aftermath.)
Both Huxley & Lewis have been significant authors in my life - indeed I
characterize myself as Will Farnaby in Huxley's ISLAND did: the kind of man who
won't take 'yes' for an answer.
And I take guidance for this latter phase in life from a few passages in
Lewis's OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET:
“And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for
one day or one year to come back--if we did not know that every day in a life
fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?”
“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking...as if
the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing... what
you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure.”
“When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it
is growing something as we remember it, what will it be when I remember it as I
lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real
meeting. The other is only the beginning of it.”
For most of my adult life I have been attributing some form of "It is a bit
embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and
find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be
a little kinder'" to H.G. Wells rather than Huxley! I now stand corrected (and
feel even further in Huxley's debt).
Chris Bruce,
with his feet firmly planted
on this brave new world, in
Kiel, Germany------------------------------------------------------------------
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