Today's Reading
I admit that some writers have told me /for the first
time of heavens and hells () I never met before; but many, equally great
or greater, have told me only of those () we all have to bear /whether we
choose to call them “unbearable” or not.
What hells can be harder to
bear than those //in which many of our unpoetic fellow creatures live?
What man, after forty years in the world, has not experienced enough (if
that were all //that was needed) to be raw material for all the tragedies
of Shakespeare?
Once again, the view I am fighting depends on a gross
under-estimation of common things and common men.
“To be a man,” as
Professor Tolkien recently reminded us, “is tragedy enough.”
Yes, and
comedy enough too. The Naturalistic doctrine is a mere assumption, first
made by the arrogance of poets and since accepted by the misdirected
humility of an irreligious age.
From The Personal Heresy
The Personal Heresy: A Controversy. Copyright © 1939 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.