[lit-ideas] Re: Two important guys
- From: Ursula Stange <ursula@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 11:54:11 -0500
Thank you so much, Chris, for posting these quotations. How did you know I
needed them?
> On Nov 24, 2014, at 9:19 AM, cblists@xxxxxxxx wrote:
>
>
> 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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