Vor einiger Zeit habe ich ausschnittsweise Einblick in den Alltag von Lewis mit 50 Jahren gegeben. Vor kurzem las ich erneut seine Briefe von 1950 (enthalten in Volume 3, Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, Seitenzahlen in Klammern) und habe einige “Snippets” zusammengestellt.
(Neujahrsgruss 1950, in einer schwierigen Lebenskurve) «I’m not liking the new year much so far, but wish you very well in it.» (3)
(über ein geplantes, nie realisiertes Buch mit Tolkien) “My book with Professor Tolkien–any book in collaboration with that great but dilatory and unmethodical man…” (5)
(Häusliche Sorgen: Einschläfen des alten Hundes) “Minto has at last allowed Bruce to be euthanised.» (13) (Minto im Heim, der Bruder nach Alkoholexzessen in einem Erholungsheim) «Warnie is now quite restored again. My daily visits to Minto are v. grievous to me.» (37) “Warnie is back in the Nursing Home again.» (42) (über die vergangenen schlimmen Jahre zu Hause) “She was for many years of a worrying and, to speak frankly, a jealous, exacting, and angry disposition.” (45) “The old lady’s retirement to a Nursing Home has made me a good deal freer in a small way. I can plan my days and count on some domestic leisure as I have not been able to do these last fifteen years.» (66) (über den inneren Zwiespalt) «I visit her, normally, every day, and am divided between a (rational?) feeling that this process of gradual withdrawal is merciful and even beautiful, and a quite different feeling (it comes out in my dreams) of horror.» (78)
(theologisch spekulativ) «(As I hope) the new earth contains beasts they will not be a mere continuation of (the present) biological life but a resurrection, a participation (to their appropriate degree) in Zoe.” (21)
(liest keine Biografien) “Have I confessed to you that an inability to read biography is one of my defects?» (26)
(über das Unbehagen mit zeitgenössischen Poeten) “I think what really separates me from all the modern poets I try to read is not the technique, with all its difficulties, but the fact that their experience is so very unlike my own.» (46)
(wenn das Schreiben einem überkommt) «The right mood for a new poem doesn’t come so often now as it used to. There is so little leisure, and when one comes to that leisure untried–well, you know, Ink is a deadly drug. One wants to write. I cannot shake off the addiction.» (56)
(Reaktion auf Lob) «I should need to be either of angelic humility or diabolical pride not to be pleased at all the things you say about my books.» (60)
(Äussere Frucht und innerer Antrieb) «The bad (natural) tree cannot produce good fruit. But oddly, it can produce fruits that by all external tests are indistinguishable from the good ones: the act done from one’s own separate and unredeemed, tho’ ‘moral’ will, looks exactly like the act done by Christ in us. And oddly enough it is the tree’s real duty to go on producing these imitation fruits till it recognises this futility and despairs and is made a new (spiritual) tree.» (62)
(Gefühle) «Obedience is the key to all doors: feelings come (or don’t come) and go as God pleases. We can’t produce them at will and mustn’t try.» (69)
