I think this is making it onto my favs list, every essay is so excellent! It’s really cool reading his opinions on the current events and issues of his day.

Here’s the first post I did on this book, and I’ll just continue giving a few quotes from each essay. I don’t summarize, because he states things more clearly and eloquently in one sentence than I could explain to you with a paragraph.

Modern Man and His Categories of Thought: “The effect of removing this [classical] education has been to isolate the mind in its own age, to give it, in relation to time, that disease which, in relation to space, we call Provincialism.”

“Where God gives the gift, the “foolishness of preaching” is still mighty. But best of all is a team of two: one to deliver the preliminary intellectual barrage, and the other to follow up with a direct attack on the heart.”

Talking About Bicycles: Lewis discusses four periods of enchantment in relation to riding bicycles. The first stage is un-enchantment. As a toddler, a bicycle was just another strange machine in an adult world. As a boy who could now learn how to ride and experience the freedom that came with it, he became enchanted. Soon, dis-enchantment came, when riding was not always freedom, but peddling up-hill “to and from school, in all weathers.” After many years came the re-enchantment, where the bicycle brought him back to those first feelings of joy and freedom, giving him an almost greater joy than what was originally experienced. Lewis quotes Owen Barfield saying that “Each great experience (enchantment) is ‘a whisper, which memory will warehouse as a shout (re-enchantment).’”

On Living in An Atomic Age: “For really, the naturalistic conclusion is unbelievable. For one thing, it is only through trusting our own minds that we have come to know Nature herself. If Nature when fully known seems to teach us (that is, if the sciences teach us) that our own minds are chance arrangements of atoms, then there must have been some mistake; for if that were so, then the sciences themselves would be chance arrangements of atoms and we should have no reason for believing in them.”

“She [Nature] has got nothing to teach us. It is our business to live by our own law, not by hers: to follow in private or in public life, the law of love and temperance even when they seem to be suicidal, and not the law of competition and grab, even when they seem necessary to our survival…Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than determination to survive at all costs.”

Prudery and Philogy: “It is the words, not the things, that are obscene.”

“When authors rail too much (we must allow them to rail a little) against public taste, do they perhaps betray some insufficiency?…Great work can be done in a difficult metre; why not also under difficult restraints of another kind?”

Interim Report: Lewis compares Oxford and Cambridge : “You were never safe from the philosopher at Oxford; here, never from the critic.”

Is History Bunk?: “We cannot, pending a real discussion, let pass the assumption that this species of history [literary history], any more than others, is to be condemned unless it can deliver some sort of “goods” for present use.”

Sex in Literature: Lewis’ thoughts on the Lady Chatterley trial.

“Now I am not at all suggesting that literature is a realm in which anyone’s opinion is as good as any one else’s. Most undoubtedly the judgments of ripe critics should be heard with great respect. The point is that they are judgements, not statements about matters of fact. They are all reversible.

Anyone familiar with literary history knows that an almost unanimous critical opinion may prove transient…Four letter words may soon be as dated as antimacassars.”

“Adultery is an affair for law because it offends the Hobbesian principle that “men perform their covenants.”

These essays are ones to be revisited, that’s for sure. Lewis’s “Present Concerns” are still, not suprisingly, relevant.