All My Road Before Me

by C. S. Lewis

  Home shortly after twelve and read the papers. Then flurry and scurry in the kitchen and lunch and more washing up for D despite all that I could say or do, while Mrs P. read and Pasley tried hard not to sleep over the drawing room fire. After tea D came and sat in the drawing room for the only time during their visit—except a little in the evening. They showed us several photos taken on a delightful trip they had this summer in some birdless country of lakes and sand dunes near Bordeaux and Arcachon . . .

  They also showed us others taken at Valentia last Easter and told us about their visit to a bull fight, which they enjoyed. I denounced the immorality of this cruel and cowardly business. Pasley trotted out the usual irrelevant answer that some English sports were quite as bad, and then they both actually pleaded as a justification the fact that they had enjoyed it. I said ‘What a debauch!’ and pointed out that that made no difference.

  Pasley denounced me as an a priori philosopher who made human institutions subservient to my internal notions of right and wrong: but of course it took only a familiar bit of argument to show him that he did the same. I was forced to admit that the pleasure we took in action was a justification in the sense that, other things being equal, the less the temptation the greater the crime. It is fortunate that I didn’t overhear (what I was told later) Mrs P. telling D about the Spaniards sticking their darts into the bull to rouse him—‘but it doesn’t hurt him’. If I had I might have said regrettable things. It was all disgusting.

  After supper I begged D to let me wash up, but she asked rather savagely, ‘Do you want me to die?’ and explained that she had been frozen in the drawing room as Mrs P. blocked up the whole fire. So I returned to the drawing room . . .

  Pasley . . . complained of living in a state of tension: he always feels he must be ‘getting on’. If he sits down to read he must hurry on to get to something else: if he walks out he must hurry back. Mrs P. said to him ‘You are not so bad as you were a year ago,’ and he agreed. He knows himself that this is one of the roads to a nervous breakdown. I hardly knew what to say to him. It is hard to see where salvation can lie for a man who never loved nature and no longer loves art and for whom religion is out of the question . . .

  Monday 25 February: . . . D was more affected by this week end than I had ever seen her by all Mary’s tiresomeness, and said she was getting too old to bustle about slaving for two young slips who thought such a lot of themselves . . . Pasley explained to me at great length that when he came up again to dine at All Souls he would not be able to stay with us, as he would have little enough time for dressing and going in and out. The Pasleys left me at the Plain to bus home and I walked . . .

  A little wet snow was falling. Then came the cream of the day: to sit by our own fire, to chat and read, to have our own easily prepared and quickly despatched supper—all peaceful and delightful after the effort of these two days . . .

  Tuesday 26 February: A bright morning that soon darkened and settled into a heavy fall of snow. I worked all morning on More, finishing his ‘Appendix to the Defence of the Philosophic Cabbala’ (a tedious work) and beginning the Defence of the Moral Cabbala. We had lunch in the kitchen. Afterwards I wrote a short letter to Aunt Lily and walked in to the Schools where I visited the English Library and found Ward’s Life of Henry More. I read it there for some time and then, taking it out, went to Robson-Scott in St John’s St.

  I found him alone. We talked of W. de la Mare, the only great Georgian. He agreed with me that the common view of de la Mare as the poet of faery and fantasy leaves out all one side and that the most important one. I was sorry to find that Robson had invited Bateson (whom I used to meet at the Discussion Class) and Ziman, both of whom soon joined us. A poor conversation. Bateson told us that Gadney the bookseller had gone mad—a fact which he and Ziman seemed to regard purely as a joke. We also condemned Saintsbury. I discovered that More—the lout whom I saw yawning in candidates’ faces at my English viva—is a friend of Wyld’s: so that the latter’s ‘saeva rusticitas’ is apparently the badge of a school. Robson has two pupils whom he got through Carlyle.

  I came away early and walked home. After supper I began trying to pick out a chronological framework from Ward, but it is nearly impossible. Last of all D and I fell into a talk about the bad year that is gone and all the bad years before it: but consoled outselves somehow and ended up fairly cheerfully . . .

  Wednesday 27 February: A letter from my father this morning, answering my last, in which I had pointed out that my scholarship had now ceased and that I should need a little supplement to carry on. This question had been raised before. He replied with a long and pleasant letter with a sting in its tail: offering what was necessary, but saying that I had £30 extra expenses last year (which I cannot account for at all) and remarking that I can always put money in my pocket by spending more time at home. There comes the rub—this cannot be answered: yet to follow his suggestion would be nerves, loneliness and mental stagnation.9

  I finished More’s Philosophical Works this morning and made out a table of chronology from Ward’s Life and my old table done for the English school. After lunch I went first to the Union where I extracted several facts from the Dictionary of National Biography subvoce More and then went to Wilson to borrow his Theological Works . . . In the evening I began The Mythology of Godliness10 . . .

  Thursday 28 February: Worked all morning. As it was blowing with ‘sharp scimitar’ and getting ready to snow, I decided to skip my provisional arrangement with Aunt Lily: I went out with Pat and walked through Barton End and down the lane: then over fields to Elsfield paths and up the edge of the big field and past the copse where the stream comes out of it. The sky was very dark ahead of me but I had some sunlight at my back which made a strange cold brassy light on the bare fields. The thick mass of bullrushes etc. on the edge of this copse made a great crackling. As I rounded it the snow came, very light and slow but gliding almost horizontally. When I turned round I saw Oxford in the sunlight. Came home past Mrs Seymour’s and through Old Headington. Worked for the rest of the day on the Mystery of Godliness.

  Friday 29 February: Worked on the Mystery of Godliness in the morning. Did all that D would let me (which is to polish the stove and sweep the kitchen and scullery) after lunch and then went to Napier House to fetch Helen Rowell who is to spend her half term week end with us. She is a nice child and very little trouble, but for D’s sake I wish it had not come so soon after the Pasleys.

  Shortly after tea, which was very late, I went up to dress, preparatory to dining with Carritt . . . Those at dinner were Farquharson, Carritt, an American Dr Blake, the junior fellow (Bowen I think) and an old member whose name I didn’t catch. Before we went in Farquharson approached me with some solemnity and asked if I would enter my name in a list of people who would serve in the next war. I replied at once ‘That depends Sir on who it is against and what it is about.’

  At dinner Carritt put into my hand the notice of the vacancy at Trinity—an official fellowship in Philosophy, worth £500 a year. After dinner in the Common Room Farquharson became very amusing indeed, telling us anecdotes of his boyhood.

  As Carritt said when he and I were walking to Allen’s digs in Holywell for the Philosophical Society, ‘F’s talk has a peculiar flavour about it. It is very good—often better than it was tonight—and yet is always within an inch of being mere silliness.’ I suggested that the face had a lot to do with it. So it has: the great bird-like nose and forehead and the eyebrows and wrinkles arched up ‘quasi enitentis’ like Vespasian.11 At Allen’s we found Ewing, Rink, Curtis, Ziman, Fasnacht, King and others.

  Ziman read a poor paper on ‘Some Heresies’. The discussion however was very good. Ziman had said that pleasure was always adjectival to the satisfaction of desire—desire being the instinct reflected upon. We challenged him on Plato’s flower smells from the Philebus. He fell back upon unconscious or potential desire. This led to my usual move re potentiality. Then Carritt wanted to know what instinct
really was. This led to Rink telling us about the wasp in Bergson, and Fasnacht caused great amusement by waiting till the whole story was over and then saying, ‘I’m very sorry but all those facts have been contradicted.’ Carritt said this was hardly fair in a philosophical society. We kept it up till about 11.15. I walked back to College with a nice man whose name I do not know.

  Having got back my shoes from College I walked home, looking at the details of the Trinity fellowship as I passed the lamps. For some reason the possibility of getting it and all that would follow if I did came before my mind with unusual vividness. I saw it would involve living in and what a break up of our present life that would mean, and also how the extra money would lift terrible loads off us all. I saw that it would mean pretty full work and that I might become submerged and poetry crushed out.

  With deep conviction I suddenly had an image of myself, God knows when or where, in the future looking back on these years since the war as the happiest or the only really valuable part of my life, in spite of all their disappointments and fears. Yet the longing for an income that wd. free us from anxiety was stronger than all these feelings. I was in a strange state of excitement—and all on the mere hundredth chance of getting it.

  A dark night with a few stars, freezing, with a wind that would skin the bones. Before going to bed D and I had some talk about the Trinity job. She again urged me to try for an All Souls’ Fellowship and thought that the D.Phil. was a mere waste of time. If only I could get an All Souls’ Fellowship it certainly would save a great deal.12

  Saturday 1 March: I spent most of the morning in the kitchen cutting turnips and peeling onions for D, and then went for an hour’s walk in the fields. After lunch and jobs I took Euripides from his shelf for the first time this many a day, with some idea of reading a Greek play every week end (when I am not writing) so as to keep up my Greek. I began the Heracleidae. Coming back to Greek tragedy after so long an absence I was greatly impressed with its stiffness and rumness and also thought the choruses strangely prosaic. The effort to represent a scuffle between Iolaus and the Herald is intolerably languid. After the first shock, however, I enjoyed it.

  Its noble matter of factness is really the great thing. Macaria, unless I read more into her than the poet meant, is a really well conceived character. She sees at once the real position which everyone else has hushed up, and even that her party will be ridiculous if no one steps into the lead: she knows that someone has got to make the offer and does it with very little fuss. There is no attempt to sentimentalise her: there is a sort of cold impatience in most of her speeches—as there probably is about martyrs in real life. But I wonder if Euripides meant it so, or is he merely trying to find motives for an altruism wh. he has seen in life but has no theory to account for . . . ?

  Tuesday 4 March: After breakfast I walked into town. I went to the library in College and looked up in Paley three passages in the Heracleidae that had baffled me. Paley emended one of them and ‘supplied’ words and sentences to the other two. How easy it is to translate anything on these terms!

  I then walked to New Inn Hall Street. Raymond alias Herr Steinshen (whom may the prophets utterly reject) has coolly sent us there to see about some rates which have been sent in to him for the second time. Loose, the tax gatherer, said it was simply a mistake and promised to write to Raymond . . .

  By great ill chance, I met Aunt Lily. I followed her into Buols where she was lunching and talked to her till her food came. She has just (for the seventh or eighth time) discovered the secret of creation. It has something to do with wave lengths. She has also discovered that there is no such thing as matter but only energy: and since mind and matter are both unknown energies therefore they must be the same thing. In about ten minutes she poured forth as many misleading metaphors, paralogisms, and downright contradictions as would have made Socrates happy for a twelvemonth. Is she mad—or is this only what every active mind must come to if left without dialectical discipline? . . .

  After lunch I went for a walk with Pat. It was a bright day with a blue sky full of large slow moving clouds . . . I walked along to the Horsepath lane and met Ewing with Price, who got the Fellowship I tried for at Magdalen. I had always thought that Price was the little beetle faced Jew whom I constantly see about and was glad to find my mistake, for the real Price seems a pleasant fellow . . .

  Afterwards I went on with the Hippolytus—splendid stuff. I wish I knew how Euripides meant the Nurse to be taken. Some of the things she says are sublime: others appear comic to us—I fancy only because we are not simple and matter of fact enough . . .

  Wednesday 5 March: I returned to Henry More this morning with considerable reluctance and went on for a little with the Mystery of Godliness. It had no flavour about it.

  Ever since my conversation with D about the wisdom of a D.Phil. I have been in an unsettled state. I reflected that the degree itself would be no passport to a living and that while I worked at my old mooncalf [the thesis on Henry More], tho’ I might learn a great deal about the 17th century, I should be letting my Greek and my philosophy slip, and be losing, in part, my qualifications for any work that might come along. On the other hand if I read hard in history, philosophy, English and Greek, I should be keeping myself in readiness for anything and increasing my chance of an All Souls fellowship. However small that chance might be, non temptasse nocet.13 So at last I made my decision and shut up my wormy folio of mooncalf. For the rest of the morning I read through again my ‘Promethean Fallacy’. It is more intelligible and, on the whole, more cogent than I thought: but not so well written (in the literary sense) as I had hoped.

  After lunch I walked into town and to the English library to return Ward’s Life of More. Simpson, with another man, was sitting at the desk and told me I would have a notice fining me half a crown for the book. I said ‘And if the notice does not arrive Sir, I presume the half crown—.’ SIMPS: ‘The half crown remains.’ He very nearly gave me 10/-short in my change, but I watched him carefully for he is a great scholar.

  Hence to the Union where I studied the Ordnance Survey map of the Bookham district—having been lately haunted (as I am every now and then) by an acute memory of my excellent walks ‘in that delightful land’. I would give a good deal for a fortnight’s stay there . . .

  I also looked into the Girdle of Aphrodite—a new book of translations from the Anthology, very good: and then into G. K. Chesterton’s Life of St Francis—the chapter about naturalism and what it led to among the pagans, wh. I thought pretty true: tho’ whether Christianity made any immediate difference on the masses is not so clear . . .

  Thursday 6 March: I spent the whole morning composing a long and difficult letter to my father.14 . . .

  I walked into town and went to the library in College. I looked into G. K. Chesterton’s Browning—a thoroughly bad book, full of silly generalisations. There is nothing in his chapter on The Ring and the Book to show that he has read it. I then looked into Noyes’ William Morris—the chapter on Jason. I should not have thought it possible that in half an hour I could have read so much new truth about a poet I know so well. It gave me the very feel of Morris—more than Morris himself.

  When I came out of the dark library (at about 4) the air was wonderfully bright and soft in colour. It was like a summer evening at six o’clock. The stone seemed softer everywhere, the birds were singing, the air was deliciously cold and rare. I got a sort of eerie unrest and dropped into the real joy. Never have I seen Oxford look better. It looked as it used to when I saw it in my cadet days and used to long for it to be a University town again. I took two or three turns up and down the Broad. Although it is only a few hours old I see that this is already becoming transfigured by memory into something that never was anywhere and never could have been.

  I then went to Manchester (after going into Mansfield by mistake) and with some difficulty found my way to the room where the Postgraduates’ Philosophical Group were meeting. There were only three there when I arrived
: a nonentity, a chinless parson who talked in a kind of gobble and a very beefy man with a face black from shaving and very moist lips who crooned in his voice and was inclined to shut his eyes when he talked. They talked about Troeltsch.15

  Presently Price came in and then a man in gold rimmed spectacles who had negroid hair and skin but the features of a sheep. His trousers were very well creased and he was called ‘Mr Jones’. He never spoke but to say ‘Good afternoon’. Then Stout came in—a funny looking little man with a whimsical way of talking that was very attractive.16 Tea and bread and butter were brought: and Stout produced some cakes unexpectedly from a paper bag. He told us a good story of a female solipsist who had written to Bertrand Russell—‘Dear Mr Russell, I am so glad you have become a solipsist. I have always wondered that there were not more of us.’ Ross of Oriel came in and I was introduced to him.17 As there had been some hitch about tea we were very late in starting.

  I read my ‘Hegemony [of Moral Values]’ paper. At one point Stout, not having heard, interrupted me to ask ‘What was the subject of that sentence?’ I imagined for a wild moment that he was going to ask what was the subject of this paper.

  During the adjournment the beefy man came and crooned Browning at me. Then Stout said ‘Order, Order’ and we all sat down. Ross opened the discussion. He was very complimentary about my paper. Part of what he said may be discounted as the usual courtesy bow, but what really pleased me was that he said ‘Mr Lewis explains the precedence of moral good in a very ingenious way which I really think is quite new—and, at first sight at any way [rate?], I find it attractive.’

  What was even better, when we were breaking up I overheard him saying to someone else ‘That was new.’ We had not much time for discussion and what there was was poor. The Beefy Man shut his eyes more tightly than ever and talked absolutely off the point. Stout made some good remarks. As we left, Ross asked me if I was going to publish it. I said that I certainly would if I had any chance. He advised me to send it to Mind or The Hibbert: The Hibbert would pay more, but Mind was the better thing . . .