Today's Reading
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.
* Dim ; not bright; obscure from lack of light or emitted light:
dim person ; Someone who's not very bright is dim or a dimwit.
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. . .
* The thing is - used to introduce an important fact, reason, or explanation:
The thing is A = A is the thing.
The thing about~ = This is the thing about~
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
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 2008 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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