On disagreeable, nasty people

[soso]

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On disagreeable, nasty people; and on avoiding obsessing about their bullying.

10 March 1954

I am sorry () things are not better.

I am very puzzled by people like your Committee Secretary, people //who are just nasty. 

I find it easier to understand the great crimes, for the raw material of them exists in us all; 

[the mere disagreeableness //which seems to spring from no recognisable passion] is mysterious. 

(Like the total stranger in a train of whom I once asked ‘Do you know when we get to Liverpool’ 

and who replied ‘I’m not paid to answer your questions: ask the guard’).

 I have found it /more among boys than anyone else. 

That makes me think () it really comes from inner insecurity

—a dim sense that one is Nobody, a strong determination to be Somebody, 

  and a belief that this can be achieved by arrogance. 

Probably you, who can’t hit back, come in //for a good deal of resentful arrogance /aroused by others

//on whom she doesn’t vent it, because they can. 

(A bully in an Elizabethan play, having been sat on by a man () he dare not fight, says ‘I’ll go home and beat all my servants’). 

But I mustn’t encourage you to go on thinking about her: 

that, after all, is almost the greatest evil () nasty people can do us—to become an obsession, to haunt our minds. 

A brief prayer for them, and then away to other subjects, is the thing, if one can only stick to it. 

I hope () the other job will materialise. . .

I too had mumps after I was grown up. 

I didn’t mind it /as long as I had the temperature: 

but when one came to convalescence and a convalescent appetite and even thinking of food started the salivation and the pain—ugh! I never realised ‘the disobedience in our members’ so clearly before [Romans 7:23]. 

Verily ‘He //that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it,

hath already committed breakfast /with it /in his heart’ (or in his glands) [Matthew 5:28].

I shall wait anxiously for all your news, 

always praying not only for a happy issue but that you may be supported in all interim anxieties.

From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III
Compiled in Yours, Jack