and C. S. Lewis

[David Wilson-Okamura]

This is trivial, and doesn't rise to the level of our recent and more
serious threads.

Collected Letters 3:39 (ed. Walter Hooper)
To George Sayer (former student), 21 June 1950

"...We shall have all our days to ourselves except for my calling at
the Nursing Home each afternoon [to visit his adoptive mother]; and we
can cut that one or two days for our all day walks. We cd. read the
whole Aeneid together...."

What got my attention here was the editor's note: "Lewis probably read
the Aeneid more often than he did any other book."

I didn't know this, but I'm not surprised. There's much in Virgil to
feed the yearning type of Romanticism that Lewis analyzed in Pilgrim's
Regress and Surprised by Joy. The note of resignation is also a
recurring one in both men's writings.

[David Wilson-Okamura]

More from Lewis's letters:

To Ruth Pitter, 30 Dec. 1950

"...What helps you in Theocritus hinders me, and in the Georgics too:
i.e. when I've looked up the vegetables in the Lexicon, I don't know
the English any better than the Greek. The equation 'glox, the lesser
mud-wort, fangoleum paludis,' is to me a = b where both are unknown.
Not that I don't enjoy the vegetables when I meet them in the cool,
green flesh: but each individual is new to me each time" (Collected
Letters, 3:79).