C. S. Lewis on reading
“he was sitting reading something, you know the way he does, with his fingers under some of the pages and a pencil in his hand – not the way you or I’d read”
Ivy Maggs speaking about Dr Dimble in That Hideous Strength
Over at Into the Wardrobe and Beyond, I wrote an article about why we should re-read the Chronicles of Narnia, drawing on a wonderful letter from C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves in February 1932. However, I only quoted a short section from that letter, so in this post I want to look at what Lewis had to say about reading itself, beginning with an intriguing passage from early in the letter:
To enjoy a book like [Froissart’s Chronicles] thoroughly I find I have to treat it as a sort of hobby and set about it seriously. I begin by making a map on one of the end leafs: then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page: finally I index at the end all the passages I have for any reason underlined. I often wonder – considering how people enjoy themselves developing photos or making scrap-books – why so few people make a hobby of their reading in this way. Many an otherwise dull book which I had to read have I enjoyed in this way, with a fine-nibbed pen in my hand: one is making something all the time and a book so read acquires the charm of a toy without losing that of a book.
I find that really fascinating. For Lewis, reading was an active experience. Like Dr Dimble in That Hideous Strength, he read with a pen or pencil in hand, treating reading as a creative experience. I am still very hesitant about writing in my own books, but I think I need to learn from Lewis for all the reasons I outlined in my previous post on re-reading.
Part of the problem, of course, is time. Who has time nowadays to read in that way?
Of course, Lewis has an answer to that problem too. Later in the same letter, he explained that he was worried about his brother, Warnie, who was in Shanghai:
When there is something like this [he’s probably referring to Japanese attacks on the city] wh. forces one to read the papers, how one loathes their flippancy and their sensational exploitation of things that mean life and death.
If Lewis usually avoided reading the newspapers, I don’t think he would have been a great fan of TV or the internet, not least because they can draw us away from the reading of books which really matter, books which are neither flippant nor sensational.
So, cutting back our daily intake of the rolling news cycle might be one answer to the lack of time we so often experience, but I can hear another objection: Lewis was a bachelor and not only a bachelor but an academic whose job it was to read old books. Of course, he had time to read!
Maybe, but a look at his daily schedule in term time is instructive. There was much less time in his day for reading than you might imagine.
7.15 am – wake to a morning cup of tea
8 am – chapel
8.15 am – breakfast with Dean of Chapel and others
9 am – 1 pm – tutorials
1 – 4.45 pm – home to work in the garden, walk the dog, and spend time with Mrs Moore and the rest of his de facto family
5 – 7 pm – tutorials
7.15 – dinner
As Alister McGrath points out in his biography, Lewis followed essentially the same schedule all his working life: “The morning was set aside for working, the early afternoon was set aside for solitary walking, the late afternoon for more work, and the evening for talking.”
I imagine he followed the DEAR principle that friends of mine have adopted. Every now again, the whole family simply Drops Everything And Reads. If reading is important then sometimes we need to prioritise it over other activities.
But what do we read?
Lewis’s advice in his introduction to a translation of St Athanasius’ On the Incarnation is well known. This is how it begins:
There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said.
Lewis then gives two pieces of advice, the first of which is sometimes skated over:
Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or the old, I would advise him to read the old. … A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light.
His second piece of advice, which is something of a concession, is this:
It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.
So what does all this mean for families today? I’ll start with a personal example and then set out some suggestions for consideration.
I am currently teaching an American AP in Comparative Government and Politics, which means that I need to be across the news and current affairs. To that end, I took advantage of some subscription offers for a range of current affairs magazines. Interesting as many of the articles were, I found that they were distracting me from the more challenging (but ultimately more satisfying) work of reading good books. So I’m going to extend Lewis’s advice: read one old book to every three new books, and read one magazine to every four books (not the other way round).
And what about those old books? How old is old? One of the joys of being a dad is that I’ve discovered all sorts of children’s classics that passed me by as a child: The Wind in the Willows; Winnie-the-Pooh; The Little House on the Prairie series; the Anne of Green Gables series; the books of E Nesbit, of George MacDonald, of Hilda Van Stockum. There is a world of wonderful children’s books out there which can transform us as adults and children and, best of all, as families. If our children read these books - or have them read to them - they will begin to escape the chronological snobbery about which Lewis so often warned us. (This is an issue I also address in the introduction to 50 Books for Life.)
And finally, what about writing in books? What about maps and genealogical trees? There is room for these too and not just for scholars reading Froissart’s Chroniques, but I’m aware that this post is becoming rather long so I’m going to save my practical suggestions to my next post, when I’ll be writing about the community of artists and writers who transformed the village of Ditchling during the 20th century. In the meantime, please do let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions of your own!