I'm really grateful to be with you my
experience in Iceland is now about five
hours and I feel like I can't speak
authoritatively on anything because I
haven't seen anything except the
hospitality I've already received from
people here I'm grateful to be here and
I've been asked to give a presentation
right now it would introduce Lewis to you
and introduce some slight flavoring
relative to the Icelandic sagas and the
myths that were so important to Lewis
I'll talk more about these later but I
don't know how much people here know
about Lewis so I wanted to talk also
about a biography of his life so you'll
be familiar with him through the
weekend the Victorian author Anthony
Trollope once observed only the preacher
can compel people to sit still and be
tortured as a college and university
professor I know this isn't true we
professors do it far better we hold
grades over students heads and
consequently we torture them but in
Plato's Gorgias it begins with the
discussion of rhetoric and it moves to a
discussion of justice because a person
who has persuasive abilities better be a
just person less they persuade people to
do things manipulatively
how do you persuade anybody justly and I
think CS Lewis's posture is instructive
to us because as you read him he tends
to get shoulder to shoulder with his
readers and describe something so
clearly and well because the role of a
communicator is to describe and define
and if the description is good the
reader and the audience is no longer
concerned about the presenter they're
more fascinated with the thing itself
and when the presenter leaves or the author leaves they're
still focused on this digging deeper
because every truth we know we can plummet
more deeply we can ply it more widely
we can understand it in some sort of
coherent relation with other truths and
Lewis also said the rule for us is to
recognize that we want to see through
the author's eyes not focus on the
author to use the author as spectacles
not make a spectacle of the author but
let me explain a little bit about what I
mean by this i I have often had a love
affair with words I remember the first
time I ever fell in love with a word was
in my first-grade class when my teacher
was going through vocabulary cards to
help us gain a wider vocabulary the
first word I ever fell in love with was
the word swish I still love that onomatopoeic word and I'd loved it before
it was known as a clean shot in
basketball but another word I have in
mind that might help us as we begin our
study of Lewis's writings and thoughts
is a word I learned in third grade we
were poor I grew up in South Central
Los Angeles I would see children at my
school go to the cafeteria for lunch but
we could never afford it it cost 31
cents that was prohibited for us my
mother always gave us a bag lunch it had
a sandwich it had an apple and a cookie
but one morning to my surprise she
handed me 31 cents as I left for school
and I was so excited that I got to go
into the cafeteria and see what these
children were experiencing I couldn't
have described it this way then but
these were my exact sentiments being
totally unfamiliar with the sociological
protocols of elementary school cafeteria
life I was afraid I might do something
contrary to those protocols and become
the object of scorn and humor at my
expense so I watched cautiously the girl
in front of me she grabbed her fiber
glass tray I did as she did
she put her knife fork and spoon on the
tray I did as she did she took it to
that counter that went across the
cafeteria line I did as she did and the
first item on the menu were string beans
I hate string beans and I had no clue
what to do about this but cafeteria life
already didn't seem as exciting to me
but the girl apparently didn't like them
either because she said to the cafeteria
lady do you remember her she was kind of
a heavyset woman with white hair and a
hairnet and she wore a white outfit with
a white apron and had smudge marks all
over it
she was the ubiquitous cafeteria lady
who worked in every elementary school
cafeteria in the world so the girl said
to her I'll have a small portion of
those please I've never heard the word
portion before the cafeteria lady pulled
out a big spoon with holes in it so the
juices could go through she got a small
bowl she dug down into a pot put three
string beans in the bowl and handed it
to the girl so that's interesting I said
to the cafeteria lady I'll have a small
portion of those too please she did the
same thing for me I went down the line
and put the different things on my tray
and when I came to the end remember what
was at the end desserts and I saw the
most economically cut pieces of
chocolate cake I'd ever seen in my life
and I wondered if this word might have
other applications so I said to the lady
I'll have a large portion of that please
and she cut me the biggest piece of
chocolate cake I had ever seen in my
life
and I thought that's a good word
what I've discovered about C. S. Lewis is
you cannot read him long without getting
a larger portion of wisdom of insight a
larger portion of introduction to the
great ideas
he opens more than wardrobe doors as a
matter of fact there are 77 books
currently he wrote what Doug fifty-six
during his lifetime of the others he
wrote after he died no they're they're
collections of letters that he wrote
essays that have been brought together
under common cover but one book he wrote
during his lifetime took him 18 years to
do it and he was writing several other
books at the same time is the English
literature in the 16th century excluding
drama he wrote it for the Oxford history
of English literature oh hell volume is
what he called it Oxford history English
literature to write that book he read
every book written in English in the
16th century he read every book
translated into English in the original
language it was written in old Italian
Latin Old French and in translation so
his judgments about the translation
would be fair-minded it is one of the
most prodigious works of scholarship
produced in that century he opens more
than wardrobe doors you read it we were
talking earlier about it you can't help
but laugh your way through it his his
his humor and his winsomeness comes
through but I mean he would described an
author like like Michael Drayton his his
collection of poems called idea I just
from what Lewis said I said I have to go
read Drayton and I read it and it took
my breath away he's constantly giving
you vistas and you see more and your
understanding you get a larger portion
of life we also because of that larger
portion of the larger world get to find
ourselves situated more interestingly in
this world this complex world it breaks
us free of self-referentialism what do
I mean by self-referentialism some
people go through life like spiders
how the spider spins the web out from
itself
they spin out their sense of reality
from themselves with no connection with
what's real they just project
Lewis breaks us free of that he once
wrote I want God not my idea of God I
want my neighbor not my idea of my
neighbor I want myself not my idea of
myself
Lewis wanted his readers to gain a more
robust vision of the world and this was
characteristic of his own life and
development he wrote in a literary
critical work called an experiment in
criticism and coming to understand
anything we must reject the facts as
they are for us in favor of the facts as
they are they truly are in the epilogue
of that book he even said my own eyes
are not enough for me I would read what
others have written I would see what
they have seen even that's not enough
for me I would read what they've
imagined and he went on further to say
as a matter of fact I regret that the
Brutes cannot write books gladly would I
see how the world presents itself to the
eye of a mouse or a bee or how it comes
charged to the olfactory sense of a dog
he would eventually come to believe in a
world infused also by the very presence
of God who made it when he moved from
his atheism to his faith he wrote I
believe in Christianity as I believe the
Sun has risen not only because I see it
but because by it
I see everything else his one student
Harry Blamires at Oxford University he
wrote a book called the Christian mind
and he said in a secular world we tend
to think segmentally and we have
compartments this is what I think about
my family life this is what I think
about my hobbies and interests this is
what I think of my vocational life this
is what I think about economics this is
what I think about history this is what
I think about politics this is what I
think about my friends they're not
related to each other necessarily and
Blamires said he got from Lewis this
integration this faith integration of an
approach to liberal arts that sees
everything is somehow connected to
everything else this is important
so let's look at Lewis's life and
development
and where it is significant let's also
pay attention to those places where myth
generally and Nordic Icelandic myth
specifically played a part in his own
development his faith was the biggest
thing but these other things contributed
significantly and and we want to
consider that he was born in Belfast
Ireland Lewis was Irish
many people think he was English
he is from Great Britain right but he
had an Irishman in him he he once said
to somebody I am an Irishman so
naturally I am a rhetor and a talker in
one of his letters he was a storyteller
he came from wealth this was interesting I
give lectures in Belfast every other at
twice at least twice a year and one time
I was giving lectures there and the
people that knew knew him knew knew the
people that invited me to give the
lectures knew the woman that owned his
boyhood home and so I went all through
she gave me two and a half hours to
crawl around I had a copy of his
autobiography surprised by joy I could
look out the windows and see the things
that he could see he could look upon the
Belfast Loch while they were building
the Titanic he watched them from his
window his at home you see though this
house it's a it's a grand house and and
it sits on the biggest lot and what at
that time was the wealthiest suburb of
Belfast and you realise that he came
from wealth his father was a police
court solicitor his mother was a
graduate of Queen's University with a
degree in mathematics in the 1800's when
women didn't go to school very bright
people his cousins were the urates of
Glen Lochan they are still to this day
one of the wealthiest families of
Belfast his uncle was a member of the
Irish parliament and Lewis seemed to be
utterly unaffected by his status he came
from somewhat upper-class I never picked
that up from his books because he didn't
he didn't show that I had to go see
world I've seen wealthy people who
become hoardingly self-absorbed stingy
and Scrooge like and I've seen wealthy
people who become magnanimous charitable
and kind Lewis leaned towards the
kindness I've seen people who have
suffered and they become jaded and
calloused and bitter and difficult to
live with and I've seen others who
through suffering become tender
empathetic kind and understanding the
conditions do not necessarily dictate
the state of one's heart we all like
Lewis need to respond as best we might
to conditions not necessarily of our
making Lewis did well over the years he
gave charitably of his income he gave
tenderly of his heart there was a woman
who wrote to him he always answered all
of his mail just like his stepson does
his stepson stayed with me the lights
always on 'til long into the night and
it's always on before I get up in the
morning because he answers all of his
emails as well
like his stepfather I don't know how
Lewis did it and and I'm amazed but
nevertheless a woman wrote to him he
wrote her back she wrote him again he
wrote her back she wrote again and they
carried on a correspondence for thirteen
years he had expressed to people I don't
think I'm doing her a lick of good but
she mattered because she was a person
made in the image of God and Lewis felt
the responsibility to serve her there
was a Catholic priest in southern Italy
who wrote him Lewis wrote him back the
priest didn't think Lewis knew Italian
he did but the priest figured an Oxford
University fellow would know Latin so he
wrote him in Latin and Lewis wrote him back
in that and they carried on this
correspondence for sixteen years it's
amazing out of his sadnesses of his life
I think he grew empathetic and kind
towards the people he met he gave away
four-fifths of his income and 100%
the money he made from his Christian
books and speaking the story there's a
wonderful story that a panhandler came
up to him when he was in Oxford asking
for money and Lewis reached into his
pocket and gave this panhandler all the
money he had in his pocket I don't remember
was it Neville Coghill or Tolkien
Tolkien who was with him and
Tolkien said why did you give that guy
money he's just gonna go drink it and
Lewis said yeah I know but if I kept it
I would just drink it he was more
scrutinizing of his own motives rather
than somebody else's and that's always
good I've given up trying to guess
somebody else's motives my own are such a
mystery to me he lived through a time
when the political climate in North
Ireland was difficult
he had deformity of his thumbs he could
never use scissors he said and when his
friends would make castles at the beach
or something like that he had to content
himself to writing about them he was not
happy because he was made fun of at
school because he was awkward when it
came to games but little did he know
that while he was writing because his
thumbs were deformed he was creating
skills that lead us all to be here today
because we admire what he learned as a
writer his mother got cancer and she
died when he was 9 years old I read a
biography one time it said Lewis came to
adulthood and hardly knew anything about
suffering there's a bunch of balderdash
he was told by well-meaning people at
his church but misguided people if you
pray for her she'll get better you can't
tell people that sort of thing he prayed
for her diligently they said you need to
pray with more sincerity he prayed with
more sincerity and when she died it was
as if he felt he was responsible for her
death and he decided to deformity of
thumbs if God made us and this is what
I've had to suffer with and my mother
dying very early on in his life he says
if God exists he doesn't matter and he
drifted towards atheism he had a
difficult relationship with his father
and right after his mother died his
father sent Lewis and his older brother
Warren Lewis to a school
in watford outside of london on north
london and this man had a private school
his name was robert capron and lewis and
his brother would write to his father
get us out of here this guy's crazy two
years this went on they had come home
for breaks two years before finally his
father took him out of that school and
about three months later that robert
capron was declared insane and put in
a mental institution he goes from the
death of his mother for what two or
three weeks after she died something
like that into this into this into this
mad man his early atheism was a means
for coping with things he said I did not
believe in God in his autobiography and
I was angry at him for creating a world
and he didn't see the incongruity in
that kind of judgment however given time
he was able to process so much of this
for good because he stayed inclined
towards these things furthermore he
remained tender-hearted even though as
we shall see he suffered significantly
throughout his life well when he was a
boy
his older brother Warren brought into
the nursery of the house that they had
before they moved into the big
house Little Lea a toy garden on the lid
of a biscuit tin with some moss and some
leaves and so on and Lewis said what all
real gardens failed to do for me that
toy garden did it awakened in me a sense
of beauty this is remarkable it awakened
in him a sense of longing but longing
for what and desire for what and so much
of his life he spent in quest trying to
know what the longing was for him and once
he discovered then wanting to discover
more deeply about that he ends up his
father buys his builds his house on
circular Drive in Belfast the one that I
was telling you was so spectacular Lewis
wrote in his autobiography I never saw a
beautiful building and never believed a
building could be beautiful this house
was incredible I went in it and when I went
in it I immediately thought of that
passage in surprised by joy his
autobiography where he says this about
about this house the entry was huge and
in the entryway you had this dark wood
and on one side was a fireplace big
enough you could walk into it it was
made of bronze and cobalt blue his
father had had it made in Norway and
then shipped to their home in in
Belfast there was a stairway that went
up from the entry to the second floor
and the second floor the ceiling from
the entry went all the way up the second
floor it was open it was like walking
into a cathedral in Europe dark stones
stained-glass window and then all the
light and airiness and Lewis said I
never saw a beautiful building and never
knew a building could be beautiful
My first experience with beauty was
that toy garden and what you realize
all around us everywhere there's beauty
would we willingly distill it out and
pay attention but the fact that that was
the place where somehow God was reaching
out to Lewis and opening his eyes to see
this wider world getting a bigger
proport- portion of this world for
himself when he was little all of a
sudden you realize the wooing of God for
any of us is unique and particular and
while we may be surrounded with a world
that is pulsating the beauty around us
some things attract our attention
another thing that attracted his
attention was when he was a boy he
picked up a copy of longfellows
translation of Tegnér's Drapa and it
was the Nordic myths and he read the
lines Balder the beautiful is dead is
dead and he said instantly my mind was
lifted up to huge regions of northern
sky and all I can say is that it was
cold remote it was spectacular and what
happened was again the desires that he
felt that set him on a quest once he saw
this toy garden were now fed with a kind
of literature and this literature caused
him to start thinking
this is something transcendent that I'm
looking for and consequently then he
started having almost an obsession with
the Nordic myths at that particular time
he also felt an inconsolable longing to
want to attach himself to whatever it
was that was so evocative in this
literature
the identity was ambiguous but the
longing was clear in him and he was
hounded by this longing there's a poem
written by Wordsworth called my heart
leaps up and there's a line in that poem
that says this the child is the father
of the man we could also say the child
is the mother of the woman impressions
that are sometimes made in childhood for
ill or for good can define us and can
affect us if you read Lewis's book
surprised by joy joy for him is a
technical term that speaks of longing
and when he wanted to describe his life
and what it was like it was marked by
this longing and so consequently here
was this longing that was fed by the
Nordic myths so you people from Iceland
need to know that though Lewis never set
foot on your land he was moved by your
literature and by your history and so on
furthermore he had a friendship there
was a guy that lived across the street
his name was Arthur Greeves and Greeves
was a little bit ill and it was a more
formal time and Lewis's family got a
letter saying that the Greeves boy would
entertain a visit from the Lewis boy
Lewis was put out by this because he had
to put on his eatin' collar and he had
to go over and get dressed up to go see
this sick kid across the street who he
didn't really care much for but when he
walked in to meet Arthur Greeves sitting
on his bed stand was the very same book
of the Norse myths that Lewis was
reading he said in moments we had the
book open and we're flipping through
pages and he said we found out that we
not only loved the same literature we
love the same parts for the same
reason Lewis would later write
about friendship
he says
everybody has a first friend and the
first friend who is a person who reads
the same books you read and gets the
same things out of them and likes them
for the same reason that means that
friend lets you know that you're not
crazy there's other people who think
like you but then he says you have to
have second friends too and he had a
second friend named Owen Barfield and he
said about second friends they read all
the same books you read and they get all
the wrong things out of them but that
keeps the engagement going and the
discussion going he ends up going to
school and his schooling was difficult
but it still spoke to this longing
because his sense of isolation his sense
of being made fun of at school and so on
fed these longings to have things better
he ends up going to Oxford University
when he was at Oxford University he
first went to Keeble College and he went
there to participate in the officers
training school in order to go to Oxford
University you had to pass a mathematics
exam Lewis couldn't pass it he wasn't
good at math but he found out that if he
signed up to offer his life at risk of
maybe dying in the trenches of World War
one he could almost get into Oxford
University by not having to put take the
exam that's a fair trade isn't it death
or Oxford while he was there he was put
in roommate situation with a man named
Edward Francis Courtney "Paddy" Moore Moore
was Irish also as Lewis was and they
became friends and apparently there was
an arrangement by them that if either of
them died the other one would watch
after the surviving parent can you
imagine Paddy Moore taking care of Albert
Lewis I don't understand it but I
think Lewis was willing to make the
concession so that Paddy Moore would
feel secure if he were to die I've been
to the very place where he was killed in
World War one town called pargonee while
the enemy forces were coming over the
river at a bridge and they were backing
up in a churchyard you can still see the
bullet pock marks in the gravestones at
that church and he was killed and his
remains were buried there
so Lewis went to war he arrived in the
trenches November 29 1917 his 19th
birthday and he was in charge of about
30 troops as a second lieutenant he was
only in the trenches till April 15 1918
when he was wounded by friendly fire
a British round dropped short killed his
sergeant and he bore shrapnel for the
rest of his life it was interesting to
me that that short period of time
still marked him because he started
reading GK Chesterton's writing that
awakened and fed this desire this
longing inside of him and also he said
he got to know the common man and
appreciate the common man he returned to
his student life at Oxford and was
living actually with mrs. Moore and her
daughter Maureen he had three firsts at
Oxford University what does that mean
that meant he took courses in classics
that would be Greek and Latin literature
in the original language he took courses
in Greats that would be English
literature from Beowulf does he sound
familiar you people from Iceland this
Nordic great Nordic myth
he took greats from Beowulf to the 1930s
English literature and he also studied
philosophy he got three firsts a first
is to get the highest grade you can get
in your area of study and he was the
first person in the history of Oxford
University to get three firsts the
system would work like this you would go
to do tutorials your tutor would say I
want you to write a paper on this read
these two books come back next week with
the paper you'd be doing two to three
tutorials he actually did two degrees at
the same time so he's doing about four
tutorials a week reading all this
literature and then he came back and did
the philosophy one after but he does all
this work and you go for for these
tutorials every week for eight weeks
take six weeks off come back tutorials
every week for eight weeks take six
weeks off come back to tutorials every
week for eight weeks and take your long
break the summer break you do that for
three straight years and you don't take
exams all your exams you
at the end of three years and they're
all cumulative they want to know if you
really learned this stuff or not and he
got three firsts in those areas he
started teaching at Oxford University
philosophy one year he taught at Magdalen College Oxford it's kind of funny how
he got that position he was invited to a
dinner he thought that everybody was
going to be wearing white tuxes at the
dinner instead everybody was wearing
black tuxes and he was the only one with
the white tux not a good way to start
out at work he's sitting across from
the president of Magdalen college
herbert warren and warren says this him
this is the whole interview do you like
poetry mr. Lewis
he said yes mr. president and I also
like prose and that was it he got the
job so anyway he was teaching there for
29 years and then later was nine years
of professor at Cambridge University
well during that time another thing
happened that also relates to the Nordic
myths there was a student that he had
who loved reading the Icelandic sagas
and he thought I would think it would be
great if we could read these in the
originals he this student also had
another teacher at Oxford named J.R.R.
Tolkien Lewis and Tolkien had a you know
they knew who they was because they were
both on the English faculties at that
time told him was at Pembroke College
and Lewis was at Magdelan so this student
since he had done tutorials with both of
them he invited them to come to a
literary society he was going to have
with a few Oxford Dons and a few
students and they would read the
Icelandic sagas in the original as Lewis
described it he said each of us would
struggle to try and translate a line or
two and tolkien would go on for pages what
would happen was those students
eventually graduated but by this time
Tolkien and Lewis saw that they were
sort of like first and second friends
first friends because they read the same
stuff and got the same thing out of it
and like second friends they read the
same
thing and sometimes disagreed with each
other but this disagreement sharpened
them in their own writing and their own
ability to write and they started from
that a group a notorious group called
the Inklings made up of several Oxford
University Dons and professors and
consequently they would read what they
were writing to each other and critique
it and Lewis said that he and Tolkien
where their friendship began with the
Icelandic sagas they started writing the
things and the kinds of books that they
said they themselves wanted to read and
this myth and story was at the heart of
their friendship
matter of fact you could almost say had
it not been from the literature of this
country the friendship the notorious
friendship celebrated friendship between
Lewis and Tolkien might not have ever
come to be but tolkien was a Christian
and Lewis was an atheist but Lewis loved
the myths he loved this concept of
transcendence coming down to earth
making itself known to mere mortals and
so on and so Lewis struggling with these
things had a late-night discussion with
Tolkien and Lewis had struggled and
suggested this analogy I didn't think I
could know God personally any more than
Hamlet could know Shakespeare
he had this talk with Tolkien Tolkien
said you like these myths you like the
Nordic stories how come you can't accept
the one story with this reports not only
to be so much like these stories but it
also is true historically where God came
down and all of a sudden Lewis puts it
together and says I think my analogy
about Hamlet and Shakespeare is a good
one but in fact Hamlet the character of
the play could never break out of the
play to get to know the author but
Shakespeare the author could have
written himself into the play as
Shakespeare the character and made the
introduction between Hamlet and
Shakespeare possible and he says I think
that's what happened and a lot of us
came out of again the love of this kind
of literature that led to his friendship
with tolkien that led to 
those conversations and then on
September 28 1931 CS Lewis had a major
change in his life he converted to
Christianity but it grew it's related
directly to much of this lewis's own
writing was very much affected by this
as well as I said Lewis and Tolkien like
to write the kinds of books they liked
to read one of the books Lewis wrote
before he as a Christian it's called
dymer it's a narrative poem 100 pages
long I just finished a book on dymer
recently nobody reads it but they should
most of Lewis's big ideas are in germ
that book and they flourish as he grows
and develops himself to faith and he
begins to take the questions he's asking
in that book and insert the answers he's
discovering in his life after his
conversion he also wrote a book called
the pilgrims regress it was the first
book he wrote after his conversion the
full title the pilgrims regress an
allegorical apology for Christianity
reason and romanticism and there's a
young man in this book whose name is
John he has a vision of an island a lot
like Lewis's toy garden experience and
he sees that vision and he wants to
quest to find the object of this longing
that's awakened when he sees the island
as he goes on his pilgrimage he's always
bouncing from right to left north to
south in the south are swamps that get
him bogged down in the north are
mountains and this relates to truth and
reason versus issues of the heart in the
swamps Lewis wrote later in another book literary criticism of his friend
Charles Williams Arthurian Poetry
there's a scene from Wordsworth where
this Bedouin Shepherd has a rock in one
hand of stone and a shell in the other
and he's trying to fit the stone in the
shell the stone represents reason the
shell represents the issues of the heart
and Lewis says the first problem in life
is how do you fit the stone in the shell
how do you get a holistic approach to
life that can satisfy the questions of
the mind and also satisfy the longings
of the heart and when Lewis wrote
this pilgrims regress he titled the
whole thing
the pilgrims regress an allegorical
apology for Christianity reason and
romanticism he felt his faith was the
thing that finally brought these things
together and allowed him to look at an
integrated approach to life that gave
him a full portion as a matter of fact
Lewis also was a lover of an author
named George MacDonald who wrote stories
that are very myth like as a matter of
fact Lewis and Tolkien called his
stories mythopoeic play oh oh is the
Greek word for poem from which we get
the word poem it literally means in
making so these are people who make
myths with the goal of awakening our
desire to something transcendent George
MacDonald the Scottish author had once
written we do not have souls
we are Souls we have bodies you tell a
child he has a soul he thinks like
anything else he has his keys his books
his lunch his coat he could leave it
behind while he goes to the grave his
soul goes off someplace else and
MacDonald said no tell a child he is a
soul and he has a body and when he dies
he leaves his body behind like clipped hair
on a barbershop floor for those of you
that still go to barbers you can see I'm 
follicly challenged says in the Bible
God has the hairs of our head numbered
which means he knows less and less about
some of us every day but what makes up
the soul I've read a lot of books on it
I think I could set forth proofs for the
existence of the soul but traditionally
we've said it has a thinking part the
reason has a feeling part the emotion it
has a choosing part the the volition the
will and and what you get from Lewis is
that hands-down reason is the weakest
reason is the weakest we can take with
our reason we make a bad choice and our
reason doesn't wisely kick in and say
that's a stupid choice you follow down
that line you're gonna hurt yourself and
hurt the people who care for you no
reason being weak is marshaled by the
will to make all kinds of excuses for
the bad choice
in Greek Aristotle calls this excuse
making akrasia or akrasia the
justification of bad acts justification
to the point of moral blindness and
Lewis says that the reason can stand
like dragon sentries before my heart
preventing truth to get to that heart
because of the excuses I've been making
how do you get past the watchful dragons
Lewis asks and he says sometimes story
gets past the watchful dragons and Lewis
Lewis had basically seen in his own life
this is true he said continued
disobedience to conscience makes
conscience blind but it was through
story through the Nordic myths
through the classical myths Greek and
Latin myths through story generally
George MacDonald's story mythopia that
all of a sudden things started to get
through to his heart melt his heart stay
inclined towards trying to understand
these rational objections that he had
and come to a more integrated life
Douglas is gonna come up Douglas is C. S.
Lewis's stepson knew him well how many
of you saw the movie Shadowlands many of
those scenes in Shadowlands actually
happened to him we've known each other
for 39 years and he's a
brilliant guy well-read many people
don't know about him he's a rancher he's
a farmer he he is a hard-working guy he
is well-read if you disagree with them
you better be on your toes because you
may not have read as much as he's read
about the topic Douglas blessings on
you I'm glad you're here
I'm using this microphone so I can turn
it off and clear my throat I have a
problem in my throat at the moment there's
a frog living in there but I would say
that was a great address one of your
best ones I've ever heard so well done and I've known
this guy for years and he makes fun of
me very often so I'm going to fight back
a little bit Jerry has given us a
really really good lesson about who Jack
was and what he was but he's missed a
lot of the things that I know because I
grew up with him and that's obvious one
of the things that gets lost about Jack
as a teacher and as a friend as a man
was his enormous sense of humor he was
probably one of the funniest guys I have
ever lived with ever seen ever met when
I was about 7 years old my mother and
father got divorced and my mother decided
to take my brother myself across to
England she had been there before
because she had read some of Jack's
books and was very interested in them
and written to him and he'd written back
and started one of these bounce back
conversations by mail so she was
going over there ostensibly to find a
publisher for her own book which Jack
himself admired enormously called
smoke on the mountain which is a really
good analysis of the Ten Commandments and
while she was over there she wanted to
meet him because they'd had exchanged
letters for some years at that stage so
they got together and they actually
found each other to be the kind of
people they liked my mother had an
incredible IQ off the scale in fact and
she was an amazingly bright person in many
ways Jack was equally intelligent and it
was kind of
I suppose it was completely unavoidable
the two people like this absolutely
isolated on pinnacles of their own
intellectual abilities
from the rest of humanity would fall in
love with each other eventually just I
think there's no way around that
situation it took a long time and we
were living in London to start with and
it's not a place I'd recommend living in
it's cold it's dark it's dreary or it
was in those days nowadays it's getting
to be more and more violent daily which is
kind of sad now there's a lot of good in
London - of course I just don't see it
because I don't like cities I have I
almost almost hate to tell you this but
I've got a thing about Islands I keep
living on Islands you know I might show
up here one day at the moment I'm living
on the island of Malta before that I was
on the island of Ireland and before that
I was in the island of Tasmania it just
goes on and on I also have a small place
on a small island off the shore of
Queensland and we just bought a whole
they home on another Island so it's
Islands and my thing but Jack and my
mother met together and suddenly I think
over the period of time that they got together
and got to know each other they began
to realize this was a woman Jack
realized that my mother was a woman he
could really converse with I mean in
those days women were not supposed to be
intellectuals they were supposed to be very
sort of subhuman almost in some senses
by the people of the of the um
universities but Jack ran at this woman
who suddenly he realized was on the same
planes as he was I suppose it was
inevitable that eventually they would
get together and get married it took a
long time and they married when my
mother was on her deathbed this is when
she got to you again jack goes through
the same thing again his mother died
when he was a little boy of cancer his wife
well she became his wife while dying of
cancer this woman he loved was dying of
cancer
and he decided that he didn't want her
to leave this world without something of
him at least so he decided which wasn't
one of those situations where 
he asks if she'll marry him he tells her
he's going to marry her lying on her
deathbed it was a very difficult wedding
or marriage to bring about
ecclesiastically because my mother was
already divorced the Church of England
did not allow people who are divorced to
get married again in those days you may
have noticed that these things have
changed since then
however Jack decided he found an old
friend of his people of his called Peter
Byard who was an Anglican priest and
asked him if he would marry them at her
deathbed in the hospital Peter
reluctantly thought about it for a while
and then realized that God was telling
him he needed to do it so he performed
this marriage and afterwards he went to
a bishop of Oxford he was he was not in
that particular area himself but he went to
the Bishop of Oxford and told him what
he'd done and of course the bishop doing
what he had to do tore a strip off him
really told him off for doing it and at
the end of it he smiled slightly and
said but I'm very very glad you did
so Peter got away with it but at that
time I was only ten years old I'd come
home from school told that our mother
had broken a leg so we weren't going to
our house and headington in which we
were rented we would go to the kilns and
stay there with Jack and Warnie and to
me this was delightful I mean anybody
can get over a broken leg I thought but
when we got there
my brother and I Jack took us to the
hospital and did what for him must have
been horrificly difficult because he
remembered his own mother dying of
cancer and he took us into an ante room
of the ward where I'm about to visit our
mother and he told us that our mother
had broken her leg alright but she done it
because she had masses of cancer 
growing in her bones and was not expected to
live more than a few days now as you can
probably imagine to a ten-year-old child
who knew nobody else in the world except
his mother and my brother by the way was
paranoid schizophrenic from birth and a
dangerous one so he didn't really break
much in my viewpoints he was always
trying to kill me I still got the scars
from some of these days he died
incidentally locked in a secure
environment in the
psychiatric hospital in Zurich on
Christmas Day 2016 but I miss him
probably enough and I pray for him but
he disappear- he was supposed to show me the way
back to the kilns after we visited with
our mother we wanted to see our mother -and she looked so horrible I
it gives me nightmares to this day and she
was very obviously dying
well David disappeared and wouldn't
show me the way home which he was
supposed to do then I was only ten years
old so I started to make my own way back
to the kilns and I walked down a cinder
 covered paths to the churchyard of
the Church of Holy Trinity in
headington quarry in Oxford and I was
absolutely utterly alone perhaps more
alone than any of you here can even
imagine there was nobody in my life at
all and I was heartbroken of course and
I got to the gates that's still there
wrought iron gate that leads into the
churchyard I lifted the latch step
through the gate and out of this world
it's extremely difficult to describe
what happened every single blade of
grass was glowing with an inner light
that I didn't understand the trees had
come into a glorious over life kind of
situation everything was real I mean
super real I had moved out of this world
this shabby world in which we live into
something very very different and I was
suddenly made aware that there was a hugely
powerful enormously grieving and kindly
presence with me in this churchyard and
without words as much I mean it wasn't
audible but it has echoed into my
head he said to me if you really can't
make it without your mother I can fix it
all you have to do is ask that's
important fresh all you have to do is
ask all we have to do is ask
so being 10 years old and thinking there
might be something to it I went into the
church and I knelt before the altar and
I prayed with every fiber of my being my
mother be allowed to live because I
really didn't think I could make it without her
and then he said ok it's fixed get up
and go home in peace but don't tell anybody
at that time I was I was just felt I was
not supposed to tell jack or warnie which is I didn't know why but I just
felt I shouldn't so I walked down
through the church aisle in this amazing
environment lifted the latch of the far
gate to get out of the churchyard and
stepped out into this shabby world in
which we live my mother went into a
remission starting that night and she
lived for four more years Jack and my mother
had the greatest four years of their
lives the greatest times of their lives
at that time she was never going to be
completely well again in fact she was
never going to live much longer than
four years we found out in the end but
they had something that was glowing
about them the one thing that we haven't
heard about Jack was his sense of humor
he displayed it while his beloved wife
was slowly dying he made her laugh he
made us all laugh what we really wanted
to do was cry our eyes out but we
laughed Jack himself laughed my mother
also picked up on this she had a great
sense of humor too I remember one time
at the dinner table at the kilns we were
sitting there and my mother was asking
Jack if he'd done something she'd asked
him to do if he'd remembered and Jack said
of course I did what do you take me for
a fool and mother said no Jack I took
you for better or worse like and that
kind of humor was bouncing around our
house all the time in this four years we
actually went on a holiday to greece my
jack of course always longed to see greece
my mother always longed to see there
where all the legends came from the myths
and so they went to roger lancelyn green
a pupil of jack's who had became a very
good friend and he's a very was a very
nice man he's dead now he and his wife
organized this trip to Greece and they
made very sure that they had a
wheelchair handy at every particular
place they had to stop for my mother
because she was getting very very sick
at that stage and they made sure that
she was taken care of mostly with ouzo
though I think do you know what ouzo is
it's a very very powerful Greek spirit
alcoholic spirit on me not the kind
that comes and visits you in the night
and frightens you so she was well looked after
on the trip but they went to go up a
mountain to see some particular temple
or something at the top and my mother
finally just felt she just couldn't go
any long any further so she told Jack
Jack I just can't go anymore and
he's like well let's sit down there was a
fallen pillar or something they sat down
and Jack of course was terrified about
what was happening to my mother
always trying to be cheerful as much as
he could anyhow a rather overdressed over
made up typical American lady came
up the path a member of the group as well
and she sort of sniffed at my mother and said huh you didn't get
very far did you and Jack's eye on self
control snapped for a split second and he
said oh go and have a heart attack and she
tottled off very snooty with her nose in
the air up to the top of hill and had a
coronary and collapsed with a heart
attack and my mother told me this story
when they came back from Greece with some
glee I have to admit and Jack was
horrified that she should tell anyone
and he told her never to repeat that
story again and the funny part was that
this woman actually was taken off the
off the mountain on a stretcher down to
an ambulance and taken away but he told
Jack told my mother never to never to
mention it again but he didn't tell me
so I think I can get away with it but
that was that was something that bit
into his sense of humor he couldn't he
couldn't really take my mother found it
quite amusing that this woman had gone
up there and actually had a heart attack
and gone way in the ambulance I don't
know whether she died or stayed alive
and I actually don't really much care
to be honest but they came back and we
all knew at that stage the condition my
mother was in that she wasn't going
to last very long and she didn't I was 14
years old it was four years after my
ten-year-old time and again I was sent
home from school because my mother was
thought to be dying any moment and I
went again
walking back from the hospital into the
same churchyard and without even
expecting it or remembering or thinking
about it
lifted the latch and again stepped out
of this world and he was there again
very obviously and very powerfully and
he said you know if you if you really
can't make it still I can do that again
but by this time I had warnie who was
a really great uncle and I had Jack who
loved me and I loved and Warnie too and
I had Fred paxford I haven't mentioned
him but Fred paxford was our gardener in
the in the kilns and he was the man who
is the basis for puddleglum
puddleglum was always expecting the worst to
happen outwardly but inwardly expecting
the best to happen and Fred Paxton was
that to the hilt if you got up in the
morning you found him in the kitchen say
good morning Fred sir it might be good now
but it'll be hailing or raining or snowing later on
just you wait and see
you know he was like that he was he would he did
a lot of our shopping he'd go down to
the villages and he'd take upon his
bicycle and he'd come back with quarter
of a pound of sugar if they needed sugar
and one day Warnie who was exasperated
by this mean sort of look of things said
Paxton why do you always come back with
just so little sugar you know we're
gonna need more and Fred said ahh well if I
bought a lot more and er the world come
to an end what will we do with two pounds of
sugar on our hands haha
he really was puddleglum there's no way of
getting away from it what they didn't
understand  i think is he just enjoyed shopping
he just liked to but when my mother died
a short while later after I came out at
that particular time in that churchyard
I realized that I could get by with
these wonderful people looking after me
and so I just simply said sounds a bit
corny but it's all I could think of Thy
will be done then I walked through the
garden out the churchyard back into this
world and she died four days later
it was a tough time but I could make it
I had Fred and Warnie actually when I
went after the funeral I came back when you're a
one of the things British school boys
are not allowed to do is cry
particularly in public so I came back
and I wanted to go and hide myself and there
was a pathway that led from the back
door of the kilns under a deep weeping
willow and over toward the old tennis
court and there was a fence that I could
lean on there and I was there leaning
leaning on the fence and just crying
gently to myself suddenly this huge arm
descended across my shoulders and
his Fred Paxton and he said don't cry
son it'll be all right and I looked up to
him and he was weeping his eyes out
he was a lovely man
and a very very fine friend and I
regret his passing ever since but
anyhow that was the sort of story of how
things happened at the kilns it was a
wonderful place to be but one of the
things we haven't even touched on and
Jerry this is the mission of yours I
hate to tell you is what was Jack
looking for what was Tolkien looking
for what were the people who wrote the
great myths of Greece and ancient Rome
and indeed the sagas of Iceland and the
north what were they looking for there
are two answers to this question in my
view first of all they were looking for
the truth because you don't find it in
the people around you very often you
don't find it in the people trying to
persuade you of things you don't find it
in people trying to persuade you to go
to war you have to search for truth and
when you find it you have to learn to
recognize it jack was doing that I think
from the very earliest time of his
childhood he sort of reveled in
reading books about all sorts of
things he was looking for truth he had
great deal of problems with his father
because his father didn't necessarily tell the
truth warnie was the only person he
relied on for truth at all times that
deteriorated later when Warner became
an alcoholic warnie had been a soldier
in the First World War
he'd made his way through that and came
out with the rank of Major and when the
second world war broke out he was still
a member of the Army Service Corps and
he was I think he was he was sent off to
France for quite a long while I
believe he was one of the last troops
taken off the beaches at Dunkirk and
what he found and saw they had horrified
him right through the wall I think he
didn't last long when they came back
from Dunkirk he was included as the
force but he had turned to alcoholism
to help himself even when before the war
and it just got on top of him then but
he was a lovely guy and Warnie was one
of these people again who was searching
for truth he wasn't as determined about
it as Jack was Tolkien was searching for
truth in his searching through all of
the mythologies if we look carefully
enough I believe in all of these sagas
that's what they were looking for they
wrote these stories to try to present
their view of truth when the Greeks
wrote about their myriad of gods and and
the Norse Furcal so they were searching
to find out why there is food for us to
eat why it keeps coming back why can we
have need to drink what where does this
all come from and of course the Greeks
came up with his great pantheism of gods
who make all this stuff for us they were
searching for the truth as were the
great writers of the sagas and those of
us who read these things are still
searching for the truth when Jesus came
to this land this world he presented us
with the truth himself and it takes us a
long time sometimes it took me till I
was 45 years old to figure it all out
and to realize that the world is not
something that we can play with it's a
vital place for us to live in and seek
for truth just because we know Jesus
doesn't mean we've got it all we still a
whole lot of things we don't understand
yet anyhow getting back to what I was
talking about which was Jack and my
mother and all that kind of thing it was a
great time in my life despite the horror
and the despair and the sorrow I learnt
more from Jack than I have ever learned
from anyone else in my life and it
happened at the dinner table and it
happened in one time I was reading a
book up in my room I used to read and
Jack would come out and tell me to turn
the light so turn the light off because
the light would be on and I would wait until he went away and I'd turn it back on again
and eventually
he would really bellow at me I turn it
off but this particular occasion it
wasn't wasn't bedtime yet but I was
reading a book and I came across the use
of the word sacrilege
in a sense that had absolutely nothing
to do with religion or Christ or God
or anything I couldn't understand what
it meant in that context so I thought
the obvious thing to do is go and ask
Warnie and Jack where their bow stance
after Matt was dead so they were in his
study in warnie's study down at the bottom
of the kilns and they would always sit
down there at night and read and talk so
I tolled down there and knocked the door
and they said come in Doug and I walked
in Jack said what can we do for you I
said well I've kinda explained that I
come across this word sacrilege being
used in a strange way to me and I had no
idea what it's supposed to mean Warnie
looked up at me and said Doug young
fellow my lad I can tell you exactly
what sacrilege is and I said well what is it
he said tinned beer and I've never forgotten it  I understood what he
meant well it can mean
something that should never be done but
has been done anyway that is sacrilege
that's how it was being used his idea of tinned beer being sacrilege really has stuck
Warnie was a wonderful man and he had
this problem with alcohol but he was one
of the great English gentlemen you don't
meet any of these days one of the last
Warnie he died of course seven years
exactly 10 years after Jack died I went
to his funeral actually I remember
but with him went one of the great
English gentlemen last few remaining and
I worked with another one who was some
Lord Attenborough as he became Richard
Attenborough when we made Shadowlands the
movie I was a consultant to him on that
he was a fine English gentleman there
don't seem to be any any more that
particular idea has died why why simple
people stopped looking for the truth
it is so important that we search for
truth in our lives and it's hidden in
many ways because the devil doesn't want
us to recognize it and he's a force to
contend with anyhow I think that's about
all I can tell you tonight because my
voice is beginning to disappear but I
hope you will go out and and learn from
what Jerry told us particularly he's the
scholar I by the way am a farmer who
became a Christian who became a writer
who became a journalist who became a
radio and television broadcaster what
else have I done Jerry you know more about
me then I do oh yeah I appeared I appeared
in the three Narnia films we made it as
a cameo role in each of them so he calls me a
movie star which isn't far from truth of
course but and I'm a movie producer and
there's so many things I have found
interesting to do in fact in your search
for truth one of the things you'll soon
discover is that there are huge numbers
of fascinatingly interesting things
that you can do in the world while
you're searching for truth and the more
of these things you do the more truth
you discover
so what else can we talk about we're going to ask questions of you
oh that's that yes right if that's okay
yeah of course it's okay one one quick reflection
Pascal the French physicist and
philosopher said
he said what must the
nature of truth be like that the
smallest deviation from it you have
falsehood he also said there are only
two kinds of people reasonable people in
the world those who seek hard to find
truth because they don't know it and
those who seek to understand it better
because they do
I think he's slightly wrong yeah
Because there is one other type of person that's the person
who avoids the truth at all cost
uh-huh because it's dangerous to them in
some cases they're right because they're
going to hell yeah yes questions anyone have
have an intelligent or even an
unintelligent question I love those that
they would like to ask please feel free
to stick a hand up and we'll go selecting you
Jerry you can help me with that
 
he says he noticed you use the name
Jack yes very simply when Jack was about
four years old or five years old he
lived in the village and there was a
little dog in the village that everybody
knew and everybody was fond of including
Jack himself and the dog's name was Jacksie and somehow that dog was accidentally
killed and when Jack found out about it
he was up the village he came home very
upset pointed at himself and said he is
Jacksie and he would not answer to
anything else from there on at the age
of four or five years old so as time
went by they had to give in and call him
Jacks started with Jacks came turned
into Jacks eventually became Jack and
it lasted through his entire life till
he died
it was his nickname there is something
about this though you'll you'll go in
circles you'll go in circles reacting to
something you'll go in circles and
you'll find people calling CS Lewis Jack
I have difficulty with that not for
somebody who knew him intimately calling
him that or for his friends calling him
that but I think that there's sometimes
an attempt by people to make it seem
like they had a familiarity with him
that they didn't have I think it's
sometimes pretentious but it also might
say to the fact that his his books his
letters these kinds of things
he he's vulnerable he's transparent and
I think people feel like they have that
relationship with him from his books and
so on so I understand why people do it
but he'll call him jack I call him CS
Lewis and I've often wondered who if
there isn't a little of his moving to
Jack himself in the voyage of the Dawn
Treader that begins there once was a boy
named Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he
almost deserved it and Lewis didn't think I
think he maybe felt like maybe I'm
hitting something well maybe its me maybe he
didn't like being called Clive Staples
Lewis which is what his real name
oh Warnie you're talking about Warnie
I have to I think my microphones died so I'll
tell you anyway
Warnie was Jack's brother and grew up
with him and he was someone Jack
admired and loved dearly and he lived
with us in the house when all the time I
lived there and he became a terrific
very beneficial uncle to me
that's who Warnie was I'm sorry I
should have made that clear earlier
Lewis and Warren Lewis had lived
together before Lewis met Joy Douglas's
mother incidentally Warnie loved my
mother just as much as Jack did but in
a very different way she was the sister
he had always longed to have and never
found it til until my mother showed up and
when she died he grieved as heavily
as Jack did and and when Joy came to live
at the kilns Warren Lewis said that he
would move out for their convenience and
it was your mother who she said no way I
think my mother knew that she was going
to die and well actually I know she knew she was
going to die I also think that she felt
that Warn- that Jack was going to need
Warnie to lean on when she did die in
fact he wound up only with me because
Warnie immediately hit the bottle and
got drunk as a skunk
but and I wasn't much support to him but
I did my best and and he did his best to
support me so he told us a little bit
about CS Lewis's humor but he didn't say
a whole lot about his mother's humor a
little bit except for that one comment
on that I married you for better for
worse yeah well there were some boys
that lived in the neighborhood who'd do
nasty things at the kilns and well yes I
had to forgotten to tell you that one my
mother really didn't like the way the
loc- the local lads as they called
themselves would come into the kilns
woods and the lake around behind
the house and they would tear the place
apart
destroy throw rubbish all over the place
throw rubbish into the lake even
including each other on occasions and so
the place was getting to look terrible
so when my mother was in remission and
when she'd recovered a bit she said Jack
we're going to have to do something
about this we can't have these people
destroying our property like this we
should build a barbed wire fence along
the edge of it Jack said it's no good
mother if we build the barbed wire fence
they'll only cut the wire and steal it so
my mother said well remember my mother
was born in the Bronx and brought up
there in New York she said well if we
build a fence and they cut the wire and
steal it I'll buy a shotgun so we built
the fence and they cut the wire and
stole it and she bought a shotgun and
build it was only a nine millimeter
shotgun and I have one exactly replica
of it in my in my own gun cabinets at
home and you really would be very very
difficult to kill anybody with it you'd
have to be right next to them but but it
did make an odd bang and it and
scattered pellets among the leaves of
the trees and the smoke came out at the
end after firing this thing sort of at
random all over the woods soon we didn't
have any more trespassers I mean I don't
mean she shot them all but they just
decided decided that she might you know
so they just didn't come in anymore was
too scary for them then one day after
this had been had begun the place had
started to become beautiful again and
all the trespassers we thought had
disappeared my mother and Jack and I
were walking up the hill into the into
the woods and they went on ahead of me I
was looking at something below at the
bottom of the hill and they went up it was
just a bit about from here to the top of
the room high a bit higher perhaps and
they stopped under a large oak tree
there and suddenly from the bushes
a young man appeared obviously fancying
himself as a latter-day Robin Hood or
something because he was carrying a long
bow and a quiver of arrows and Jack
immediately said look this is this is
private property you really shouldn't be
here would you mind leaving the guys
response to that was to knock an arrow
to the string draw it back to his ear
and pointed at them immediately
Jack stepped in front of my mother to
shield her from the arrow and she stood
there for a few he stood there for a few
seconds until he heard my mother from
behind him in tones of chilled steel said
got damn it Jack get out of my line
of fire so Jack steps quickly stepped
sideways and this guy found himself
staring down the muzzle of what to him
must have looked like some enormous
cannon in the hands of a mad woman who
was about to kill him and he just
evaporated he just vanished incredibly
quickly even lept over the barbed wire
fence which was pretty good going and
disappeared in actual fact he was in no
real danger at all but it worked I
learned something from that that I
hadn't known before I knew my mother was
hugely brave in facing her disease I
knew Jack had been brave in war but
didn't know is they had this kind of
heroic looking after each other
braveness at the same time they each
would have died to save the other at
that point and they both showed it at
that point
unless they were playing Scrabble oh
that's definitely awe do you know
the game Scrabble you know what is okay
well my mo- my mother and Jack loved it they
loved playing it but they had their own
way their own rules they would take the
board from one Scrabble set and the
letter tiles from two Scrabble sets and
they would play Scrabble allowing all
known languages factual or fictional
we have to remember these people had
read just about everything ever written
in every language in the world when
they'd just have some Japanese cropped
up occasionally and I was watching them
one particular night when they were
playing this game and well the only rule
about it was you had to be able to prove
that the word you'd put down did
actually exist in some book somewhere in
the house whether it was fictional or
factual so Jack put something down
and my mother called him out and said
that's a cheat there's no such word so
Jack argued that the toss on that and
start to argue that there was really
a word like it and my mother's well what
book and just went off for a few minutes
they both started giggling and laughing
and finally they turned to me so what do
you think Dagon I said don't ask me ask
Warnie so it was agreed that I would
go down to Warnie's study and bring him
up so he could adjudicate this this war
that was going on
so Warnie came up and he looked very
carefully at the word and he thought for a
few seconds and then he penalized Jack
for cheating of so many points and
penalized my mother the same number of
points for crowing after for crowing over
the fact that she'd called him out so
it's kinda like you know the wisdom of
Solomon that was the kind of people they
were when we had a wonderful wonderful
household and a wonderful few years
between the original onset of the
disease and eventual death of my mother
Jack when when my mother died Roger
Lancelyn Green who's another well-known
writer who had been Jack's pupil at
university was staying with us for a
while because he came down because he
was worried about how Jack was doing
after my mother died he came down to
make sure Jack was alright he was that
kind of man and his wife was a lovely
person too - she died recently
age of 99 I think but anyway he came down
and then he said well Jack you know we
were all sitting around the dinner table
eating how are you coping
you've got Douglas here who's
heartbroken obviously and so are you so
how are you getting through it
Jack said well I'm doing what I always do
running in this kind of predicament I
analyze what's happening within me
within my mind within my heart within my soul
and I write it all down in a journal and
study it and so Roger who was a very
close friend of my stepfather said well
could I possibly read that and Jack said
yes of course and sent me up to get it I
knew where it was kept it was
actually in a child's school notebook or
exercise book that he'd written in his
handwriting and I'm one of the few
people in the world by the way who can
still understand how to read Jack's hand
writing
it's almost illegible to everybody else
but I brought it down and Roger took it
away with him that night went to bed and
he read it overnight the next day he
said at breakfast that Jack Jack you
absolutely must publish this work it
will help hundreds of thousands of
people all over the world to get through
what you've just gone through so Jack decided that was ok so he would do that
eventually so he sent it off to his
literary agent a chap called Spencer
Curtis Brown in London and said that we
must publish this if we do publish if we
can find anyone who wants to publish it
with the publisher we've never ever used
before and I've written it as the under
the pen name of Demidius which in
Greek means cut in half which was
referring of course to his lost of my
mother so it went off from Spencer to a
publish called Favor and TS Eliot was on
the board of Favor at the time TS Eliot
and my stepfather had become friends
when Eliot and he had been asked to
assist in the revision of the Psalms for
the Anglican Church in England which
they both did despite the fact they were
good friends despite the fact that Jack
couldn't stand Eliot's poetry but they
still became friends anyway Eliot wrote
back to Spencer and said Spencer look we
absolutely must publish this book it'll
help millions of people well I think you
should get I'm pretty sure I figured out
who wrote it I think you should get him
to change the pen name to something a
little less distinct because I think
everybody in Oxford who did it under a
pen name so his friends in Oxford wouldn't
be embarrassed by his naked grief I
think I think you should tell him to
change it because I think everybody in Oxford
who knows him will know he wrote this
book as soon as they see it so he
changed it to N.W. Clark which is
anglo-saxon for no one knows the writer
Nat Will Clark so that went off and the
book was published under that heading
and it was stayed like that until many
years later when Jack and Warnie both
died and I was asked by HarperCollins
who would take it over I think if they
if they could publish it under his own
name I think it was a good idea that they did
it's about time people knew who wrote it
but the odd thing about it was there are
great famous bookstores in England one in
called Foils in London for example
another one called black whales in in in
Oxford and what was happening was
friends of Jack's going to the bookstore
they see this new book they picked up
here oh this would help jack
so they'd buy copies and send it to him
we had about two dozen copies all over the-
every bookshelf had a grief
observed in it because Jack would never give
away a gift or throw a gift so it's kind
of ironic that that book was one of the
things that in a sense helped him
because he could see the funny side of
what was happening I didn't have I have
two questions for you they're related one
what is your favorite CS Lewis book and second
who's an author you got to reading Lewis
because he pointed in that direction the
my favorite book of Jack's is the one
I'm reading at the time you asked more
than anything else I think a grief
observed is fabulous but in fiction
I mean I cry when I read a grief
observed to this day it's your story it
is true but I think his best work of
fiction ever was till we have faces
until we have faces is a Greek myth
invented more or less by Jack and what
most people don't know it was written in
a collaboration between Jack and my
mother the feminine side of it it's all
about a woman but the feminine side of
it is perfected by my mother's presence
in that book and he always wanted to
publish it under both their names but
she wouldn't allow him to because she
said that having her name on it would
detract from the from the people to
buying it and it's it never really sold
very well but starting to now which is
kind of interesting it's starting to
take off after all these years I really
do believe it to be the best work of
fiction that he wrote and certainly the
best work of fiction my mother ever
wrote
as a team they wrote it together so
that's the first one he felt that too
absolutely yeah absolutely convinced it
was the best thing he'd ever written with
my mother's help but as I said earlier it's when
I'm reading something of Jack's that's my
favorite book of his at the time and then
I bounce on to something else later
I've got a lot of stuff to reread
because I haven't read quite a lot for a
time but I'm going to have to read till
we have faces again this will be the
16th or 17th time I read it and I still
find new bits of meaning that I missed
in previous readings even after having
read it so often and do you find
sometimes to some insight into your
mother as you read them of course of course and the
one then that you had gotten to because
you read Lewis something that maybe
oh it's very difficult to answer that
because everything I read by Jack points
me to something else that's how he wrote
as you know as well as I do so it's
difficult and I think probably the best
thing he taught me in that sense by
reading his works and so on was to read
George MacDonald and I've read
everything George MacDonald ever wrote
an actual fact there was a guy a very young
man and his name is David Jack Jack being
his surname he's Scottish and he has taken
the books from George MacDonald which
are written half in the Scotch Doric are many familiar with Scotch Scotch
Doric language it's a it's a very how
can you describe the Scotch Doric it's a
certain thing you may hear somebody say
it a bit like that if you heard it it's a very
difficult language and it's written as
it's as it's pronounced in the books so
this guy David is taking the books and he
analyzes the pages one by one and he's
divided into two columns one on the
right has the Doric in it so if you are
a Scottie than you understand it you can
read that on the left you have it all in
English translation and I'm actually
going through reading Jack's- David's
work I'm pretty sure purgatory would
be full of them spending time with a
drunk Scotsman
*gibberish
then there was another question I was
gonna ask you oh yeah no I was gonna
make an observation if you read CS
Lewis you will never get stuck in a CS
Lewis rut because he's always taking you
other places and I think that's one of
the most valuable things about his work
 it leads you to read so many other
authors so much other material if he
recommends it you can bet it's going to
be good and if you get recommendations
not so much by a you should read this
it's the present it leads you through as
you said he's a liberal arts education
you can't read him without wanting to
read the Greek poets and playwrights you
can't read him without wanting to read
Plato and Aristotle George MacDonald you've
you've got Augustine Anselm he wrote
the introduction to Anselm
I mean Athanasius incarnation and the
Word of God you want to read Chaucer you
want to read Milton you want to read
Shakespeare Shakespeare all the whole
bunch he just keeps taking you to more and
more places you want to read the
Icelandic sagas and if Tolkien's with
you maybe get through them in the
original indeed anybody else got a
question
it it seems to be growing daily and I
think part of that a small part of that
is the movies we've made and on the
Narnian chronicles are now in I think 50
languages and I loved I was just telling
someone earlier this evening I was in a
university somewhere in America and
remarked that we I think that at that stage
we were up to about 48 languages we had
just been very proudly said we've just
been translated into Faroese and the
girl standing next to me said Oh Egyptian
this is a university student but we were sweet
 to her we didn't mock her too badly oh the
one the best one ever all of that sort of
thing again at a university in America
couldn't happen anywhere else I don't think one of
the one of the young ladies asked me
after I'd done my talk or whatever are those
centaurs real and I just couldn't resist
I said well we were there in this great
big open place in in New Zealand that
nobody ever has been to before and we
decided it was gonna be like a
battlefield so we're discussing how to
make the battle scene for the lion the witch
and the wardrobe it happened in this place
and as we were doing that these very
strange people start to come out from
the trees and her eyes got bigger and
bigger and bigger and I thought she was
gonna pass out and everybody started to
laugh and she figured out she'd just
been had right whirling but I apologized
of course and we had a question here
his friends were convinced the
only thing holding the roof up in that
house was the bookshelves
the house was every single room in the
house full of books
I've actually been guilty of much
the same sort of thing I've got I have a
home cinema in my home and on the
monitor and this is the one on the isle of white no not the isle of white 
the malta one all the shelves are
stacked with books some are good and
some are lousy some I inherited some I
bought and I have this bit about
airplanes I'd buy a book to get on the
airplane doesn't really matter what it is
if it's a good book it goes home to my
library if it's a bad book it stays on
the plane you know when I get off most come
home I pick my books carefully but I have huge numbers
of books all over the place at home but
nowhere near as many as there were at
the kilns and that wasn't all you go his
Ox- his Oxford rooms in Oxford there
were ceiling to floor books everywhere
and stacked up in heaps sometimes it was
they all vanished
when warnie died I don't know where they
went but they keep popping up at
universities in America so and a large
quantity of them actually were my property
and I kept them there when I went
overseas meaning to go and get them
later but they vanished
yeah books held the house together
without a doubt there were there was a
college wrote in college I think was the
name of it that ended up with a lot of
his library and then Wheaton College
bought that that's right part of the library so 
got it honestly at least yeah they did
they paid for it but you if you come
over to Wheaton College where I teach we
have the largest collection of C. S. Lewis
material in the world and we have the
largest of Dorothy Sayers GK Chesterton
Charles Williams Owen Barfield
and then second largest of Tolkien because Tolkien
when the Lord the Rings came out he got
a massive royalty check so he told his
wife you don't like this house you can
buy a new house matter of fact don't
move your furniture buy new furniture
matter of fact buy this buy that and so on by the time
they had spent all the royalty money the
tax bill came and he as an academic
hadn't considered the fact that he might
have to pay taxes on his royalty check and
so Jack was just the same with that by
the way he needed to get money quick so
he sold all of his papers that he had at
that time to Marquette University of
Wisconsin America for five thousand
dollars these things are worth should've been five
hundred thousand minimum it's incredible so
anyway Marquette has the biggest Tolkien collection in the world
I don't know it's a weird world we live
how much longer do you want to go
James were you gonna say more one or two
more questions we go way back there on
the back of the top speak loudly please
uh-oh he never said that in
his life
no
it's one of the many it's one of the many
quotes of CS Lewis which aren't really
quotes from CS Lewis I don't think it's
real
I know Jack very well knew Jack very
well he wouldn't have said anything as
silly as that
there is a book of what
was it called
do you remember the title the misquotable C. S.
Lewis and this guy tabulates all the
different current excuse me
current quotes that people have invented
and attributed to CS Lewis there are
lots and lots and lots of them somebody
seems to be make some people seem to
think it's a hobby invent a new C. S. Lewis
quote and it's garbage
that's one of them I think but I think that one
goes back a lot further it's an early
one but if it's a really good quote and
you know that CS Lewis didn't say then
you say it and take credit for it
yourself
yeah why not absolutely anyone else sir
if Jack was here today he would be
pretty convinced he was dead and living
in Hell seriously we have people all
over the world
slaughtering babies in utero or even
slaughtering at partial birth that is
the work of the sa- of Satan there are
many ways and many reasons why Jack
would think he was dead and living in
Hell at the moment if he came back now
hell I'm alive and I think I'm living in
hell sometimes the things that are being
done so let's pop over to you please
most of these books were translated long
after his death but we usually do have
people who look very carefully at them
the publishers who do these works are
held pretty pretty tightly to get them
accurate and I have not had an Italian
person complaining to me that they
doesn't gel with the English version
friends who speak English see I live
quite close to Italy and I actually have
apartments in Florence
my daughter lived in Florence for
seven years learning to be a gem setter
a jeweler and goldsmith actually made
this Aslan on the cross of Christ for
me as a present one day it's some black
diamonds and silver I think so I have
ties with Italy Lewis was a very good
friend of another member of 
the Inklings Charles Williams and
Charles Williams was a friend also of
Dorothy Sayers as was Lewis and Williams
was talking to Sayers about Dante your
Italian and Sayers had school
knowledge of Dante and so many people in
education students think if they've read
a book that inoculates them against ever
having to read the book again and Lewis said that he
thought the mark of a literary person was if they read a book more than once some books of
course aren't worth reading even once
and if you come to weep they stay on the
plane yeah they stay on the plane you come to
Wheaton College I'll show you his copy
of Don Juan by Lord Byron and on the
last cover he wrote never again well even he thought
some of them weren't worth reading more than once but Williams
talked to Dorothy Sayers about Dante and
rekindled in her an interest and she
went and reread Dante she was so taken by it
then she learned Italian so she could
read it the original and then she did
the first English translation that
maintained the tertiary rhyme scheme
from the original and she died before
she finished with her friend Barbara
Reynolds an Italian scholar at Cambridge
University
I knew Barbara Reynolds very well she
was the editor of seven the German for a
long time and there's a essay in
studies in medieval on Renaissance
literature by CS Lewis called the
similes of Dante and it was a paper he
gave for the Dante society at Cambridge
University led by Barbara Reynolds who
taught Italian at Cambridge
and she was there when he did that paper
it's interesting so Lewis had deep
connections with the Italian literature
and he loved also the Italian romances
and he writes about them in his book the
allegory of love his appreciation of the italian romances
sir
my first first coming together with
Narnia was when I was about six years old
I think in upstate New York
my mother had bought bought this book
and read it to us at that stage and I
started to read for myself from that
point on I think that's what really
inoculated me with books and I get told
often I'm reading too much in fact when I
was at school and in place in Surrey in
England it was a very boring school and
I didn't like it very much but I spent
most of my time in the library it had a
reasonable library and I read everything
of any worth in that library the first
year I was there and noticed they had a
shelf which was just the Encyclopedia
Britannica so I read that all of it
twice a lot of it's just stuck up there
you know the weird stuff comes to
bubbling out sometime you'd have been
great to play Scrabble with yeah well I
wouldn't play with Jack and mother I
tell you right now or Warnie for that matter
yeah yeah I mean we talked about
Narnia a lot actually Jack and I when we
used to go into the woods and I would I
would say do you think we'll see any
fawns today Jack we would just you know
yeah Narnia was always in our minds were
in my mind particularly and I would ask
questions if I didn't understand
something little did you know that one
of the books would be dedicated to you
well that's true yeah that's true little did I know that I'd end up making movies at the time
there are a couple but only a couple I
think left during the Second World War
he was asked to deliver speeches to
mostly at the beginning it was mostly
the RAF to try to encourage these lads
who were going out facing imminent death
every time they got in their aeroplanes and
so Jack started to do that and then the BBC
got hold of what he was doing and asked
him to come and broadcast to the whole
population of England on on the BBC
radio to sort of encourage them and so
he did that as well he was actually
offered a knighthood by Churchill at the
end of the war but he denied it saying
that he didn't see why he should be
lionized for simply doing what he
thought was his duty to his country
there are about two left I think of
different things abilities there's one
there's one recording there's the four loves
there's the four loves there's one
recording of one of his broadcast talks
that became Mere Christianity there's a
recording he has of an introduction to
appreciation of Charles Williams
another one on an introduction to the
Great Divorce and then interestingly
enough a few years back there was a
record found here in Iceland a 78 rpm
record of Lewis delivering a lecture to
the people of Iceland that was broadcast
on the radio here because the Brits were
concerned that they needed a base to
patrol the North Atlantic from the
German submarines during the war and
they asked him if he would do this
recording in the hopes that he could
show that Icelandic myths and the
English mythologies of the earlier days
and Beowulf and all that stuff were more
connected than Icelandic sagas were to
the German that's even though vogner had
been of course a great opera he was
a thief yeah
so so the thing is there's actually a
recording I have not heard it but I know
a man who have owns a copy and it was
made for Iceland there's probably some
floating around in this country I actually know a
man who was here during the second world
war in charge of an anti-aircraft
platoon or whatever they had in those
days and he was he still has a framed
swatstika of an aircraft he shot down wow
he's dead but his sons got it yeah so so
those are the recordings that are out
there there's a if you google it you can
go to the Episcopal radio & Television
foundation and they're the ones that
have or produce or make available all
these recordings I mean they don't make
them available without his permission
but the thing is I think they're the
ones aren't they I think so I haven't
been involved with that for so many
years now I've more or less forgotten what
we did but that that was if you want to get
copies of his reading them interestingly
enough there's there's actual film
footage of tolkien talking and reading and
you can you can tolkien was a terrible
reader yeah
that's why his son Christopher used to
read most of the things at the England
he was he mumbled but you can actually
get film footage of very nice man
Tolkien and I wouldn't be surprised if
one day something like this came up with
Lewis because he did some stuff for BBC
television it's gonna be somewhere yeah
a lot of that stuff was bombed off
during the war archives were destroyed
so we don't know
oh yeah we're trying to get everything
translated to do everything it takes a
while
well it depends do when you say
participation in the war do you mean his
actual fighting in the first world war
or that what he did in the second one
he was 19 years old when he went to
battle and he felt that he had to do
what for the country that had done so
much for him he had to return that favor
as best he could he was not someone who
believed in what's the term for not fighting at all
yeah he was not a pacifist he wrote even
an essay called why I'm not a pacifist
and he also said this if if if war is
ever just then sometimes peace must be
sinful that because you if war if war
is ever just ever then sometimes peace
must be sinful that we would tolerate
things we shouldn't tolerate basically
and that's what's happening around the
world at the moment
I didn't hear that well he thought he
was uh he thought most people would
agree that if someone is doing what Nazi
Germany was doing somebody had to stop
it and it might as well be me as anybody
else I mean that was his attitude and he
felt as a duty to England and a duty to
the people of Europe to try to do the
best he could even in the First World
War he didn't last he didn't last very long
he got blown up fairly quickly but and
was very badly wounded but he
incidentally when he was in the clearing
station for wounded soldiers all he
could take keep down when they went to feed him
 he couldn't eat anything was
champagne and they fed him on champagne
and he hated it for the rest of his life
side line there please
I think that the correlation there is
not between the two books is that both
of them are about Jesus in different
ways but both of them are about that and
how you get to Him so I think that's
that's why they seem to be similar
well I think it's just simply these two
men came up with the same kind of
solutions the same kind of answers to
the questions we all ask but there was
no actual direct correlation between
them like when was Bunyan writing
anyway 17th century and Jack would've Jack
would have certainly read his works well
I don't think he- he wrote an essay even on Bunyan but
I don't think he used it in Narnia
the Narnian Adventures came to him he
didn't go to them another clarification
too Bunyan's writing allegory Lewis only
wrote one allegory pilgrims regress he
never wrote the Narnian books are not
allegories and he was very clear to make
that point he called them supposals
suppose there was a world like Narnia
and God were to come to that world what
would that be like and so he developed
this a metaphor is a
comparison where the comparison is
implicit that car just flew by cars
don't fly birds fly but they don't fly
speak for yourself my cars fly I get the comparison
but the allegory is like an extended
metaphor every point is supposed to
represent something else and Lewis isn't
writing that way there are some things
we could say oh that's an awful lot like
say Jesus's encounter with the woman at
the well or that's an awful lot like
this yes like but not allegorical if
that makes sense
thank you
