The Kilns,
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
20/3/56
Dear Mary
I don’t know what “high-hatting” means, but it is in this country a safe bet that 999 out of a 1000 people have no use for Scott; and the more high-brow they are, the safer. He is despised by everyone (except a few old fogies like myself) in England. I didn’t say “great plays”, I said GREEK plays (this is the trouble about my handwriting). It is not offensive to assume that a lady doesn’t read Greek—not even in a University town! And I have no “cultural activities”. I like the Bacchae because it’s exciting, not because it is—loathsome word!—“cultured”. In fact, you misunderstood my letter.
All the best.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
15/4/56
Dear Mary
Thank you for your letter of the 31st and for the enclosed poem, which I enjoyed. I think it brings all the threads together well. The complexity—the close texture—of all the great events in the Christian year impresses me more and more. Each is a window opening on the total mystery.
I sympathise with you for the unnamed shock you speak of, without the least inquisitiveness as to its nature; being sure your own decision (not to tell it) was right. Except when speaking to one’s Confessor, Doctor, or Lawyer (where the opposite holds) I suppose the rule is “When in doubt, don’t tell”. At least I have nearly always regretted doing the opposite and never once regretted holding my tongue. (Talking too much is one of my vices, by the way).
About prayer (for others) and suffering for others there’s a lot scattered through 2d Corinthians which is well worth meditation.
The reviews of S. by J. (Don’t bother sending them—I get them) are funny. The sheer errors of fact—not to go into misunderstandings—would ruin a candidate in the most elementary exam I know!
The spring looks lovely thru’ windows here but remains bitterly cold. I go back to Cambridge the day after tomorrow.
All blessings.
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
26/4/56
Dear Mary
I am most sorry to hear about your recent experiences. Though I am not doctor enough nor psychologist enough to understand them, I can see that they must have been very unpleasant indeed. You may be very sure of my continued, and increased, prayers. One of the many reasons for wishing to be a better Christian is that, if one were, one’s prayers for others might be more effectual. Things do come all together and so quickly in life, don’t they? Of course we have all been taught what to do with suffering—offer it in Christ to God as our little, little share of Christ’s sufferings—but it is so hard to do. I am afraid I can better imagine, than really enter into, this. I suppose that if one loves a person enough one would actually wish to share every part of his life; and I suppose the great saints thus really want to share the divine sufferings and that is how they can actually desire pain. But this is far beyond me. To grin and bear it and (in some feeble, desperate way) to trust is the utmost most of us can manage. One tries to take a lesson not only from the saints but from the beasts: how well a sick dog trusts one if one has to do things that hurt it! And this, I know, in some measure you will be able to do.
Well, I hope your next news will be better. Meanwhile, may Our Lord support you as only He can.
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
21/5/56
Dear Mary
What a horrid adventure. To meet unrestrained anger in any human being is in itself always very shocking. I think the effect may be partly physical. Have you noticed how one angry man bursts out (say, in a crowded ’bus) and a tension comes over everyone? Indeed one nearly becomes equally angry oneself. When one gets this shock along with injustice of course there is a compound reaction. It is at first sight so easy to forgive (especially when one knows that the anger was pathological) but then one sort of wakes up five minutes later and finds one hasn’t really forgiven at all—the resentment is still tingling thro’ one’s veins. And how one has to watch that “feeling hurt”—so seldom (as one would like to believe) mere sorrow, so nearly always mixed with wounded pride, self-justification, fright, even (hiding in the corners) desire for retaliation. But obviously you know all this and have fought your best. But there remains the quite separate trouble of having lost your job. Oh dear. I am sorry. Surely all these Church people will find some way to provide for you. I will indeed pray—oh, what a business life is. Well, both you and I have most of it behind, not ahead. There will come a moment that will change all this. Nightmares don’t last.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
14/6/56
Dear Mary
I have your letter of the 11th—along with a letter from another lady in almost exactly the same position. Oh dear, what a hard, frightening world it is! And yet not wholly; I am rejoiced to hear that you have some true friends who will not let you sink. And why should there be any (let alone “too much”) “cringing inside”? We are all members of one another and must all learn to receive as well as to give. I am only sorry that the laws prevent me from giving you any lessons in the art. Isn’t the spiritual value of having to accept money just this, that it makes palpable the total dependence in which we always live anyway? For if you were what is called “independent” (i.e. living on inherited wealth) every bit you put into your mouth and every stitch on your back would still be coming from the sweat and skill of others while you (as a person) would not really be doing anything in return. It took me a long time to see this—tho’, heaven knows, with the Cross before our eyes we have little excuse to forget our insolvency.
The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.
I shall pray for you whenever I wake in the night, and hope for better news.
Yours
Jack Lewis
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
5/7/56
Dear Mary
Thank you for your letter of June 30th. Yes, what your Franciscan author says is very true. As some one says “The Devil used to try to prevent people from doing good works, but he has now learned a trick worth two of that: he organises ’em instead”.
I am very, very glad that God has sent you good friends who won’t let you sink, and that you have turned the corner about that bad feeling that one must not take help even when one needs it. If it were really true that to receive money or money’s worth degraded the recipient, then every act of alms we have done in our lives would be wicked! Dives was quite right to leave Lazarus lying at his gate! Or else (which might be even worse) we should have to hold that to receive was good enough for those we call “the poor” but not for our precious selves however poor we become! How difficult it is to avoid having a special standard for oneself! DeQuincey says somewhere that probably no murderer mentally describes his own act by the word murder; and how many people in the whole world believe themselves to be snobs, prigs, bores, bullies or tale-bearers? Talking of murder, do you see we’re abolishing capital punishment in this country? Do you think we’re wise or foolish? . . .
I’m very busy with preparing lectures. This is the most sunless summer I ever remember.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
3/8/56
Dear Mary
I have your letter of July 30th and am very sorry to hear that you are still in difficulties. Your “pleasures” (i.e. social engagements) seem to be almost as much of an affliction as anything else!—but I can understand that. . . . I think what one has to remember when people “hurt” one is that in 99 cases out of a 100 they intended to hurt very much less, or not at all, and are often quite unconscious of the whole thing. I’ve learned this from the cases in which I was the “hurter”. When I have been really wicked and angry and meant to be nasty the other party never cared or even didn’t notice. On the other hand, when I have found out afterwards that I had deeply hurt someone, it had nearly always been quite unconscious on my part. (I loathe “sensitive” people who are “easily hurt” by the way, don’t you? They are a social pest. Vanity is usually the real trouble).
I read Don Camillo some years ago, but can’t imagine how it could be made into a film. I suppose they drag some love story into it? (But then I’m, as you know, rather allergic to the films).
I have known nice (and nasty) Hindoos. I should have thought the nice ones were precisely “Pagans”, if one uses Pagan not in the popular modern sense—which means pretty nearly “irreligious”,—but strictly. I.e., I think all that extreme refinement and that spirituality which takes the form of despising matter, is very like Pythagoras and Plato and Marcus Aurelius. Poor dears: they don’t know about the Sacraments nor the resurrection of the body.
Yes, I know how terrible that doubt is “Perhaps He will not”. But it is so seldom the present and the actual that is intolerable. Remember one is given strength to bear what happens to one, but not the 100 and 1 different things that might happen. And don’t say God has proved that He can make you fear poverty, illness, etc. I am sure God never teaches us the fear of anything but Himself. As the only two good lines in one of our bad hymns says “Fear Him ye saints and you will then have nothing else to fear”. (Racine, no doubt independently has the same thing in Athalie—je crains Dieu et n’ai pas d’autre crainte). Not all the things you fear can happen to you; the one (if any) that does will perhaps turn out very different from what you think. Of course I know this is easier to say to another than to realise oneself. And always remember that poverty and every other ill, lovingly accepted, has all the spiritual value of voluntary poverty or penance. God bless you; you are always in my prayers.
Yours
Jack
Somewhere in Eire
18/8/56
Dear Mary
It’s no good giving you an address for I am moving about. Your letter of Aug. 12th reached me today. I am delighted to hear about the job. It sounds exactly the thing, sent by God, at your most need. I will never laugh at anyone for grieving over a loved beast. I think God wants us to love Him more, not to love creatures (even animals) less. We love everything in one way too much (i.e. at the expense of our love for Him) but in another way we love everything too little.
No person, animal, flower, or even pebble, has ever been loved too much—i.e. more than every one of God’s works deserves. But you need not feel “like a murderer”. Rather rejoice that God’s law allows you to extend to Fanda that last mercy which (no doubt, quite rightly) we are forbidden to extend to suffering humans. You’ll get over this. . . .
I’m writing on a dressing table in a small, dark hotel bed-room, very sleepy, so I’ll close. God bless you—and Fanda!
Yours
Jack Lewis
Drumbeg Hotel,
Inver,
Co. Donegal
Sept. 8/56
Dear Mary
I can’t quite understand all the affair about the Bank, being intensely stupid about everything that might be called business—but perhaps for that very reason all the more able to enter into your dismay. All that side of life is to me simply a terrifying mystery. But I hope I am right in thinking that it all turned out well in the end. It certainly looks as if God were looking after you financially. I expect that the instruments He uses are kind human beings: and all the better if so, for then it is good for them as well as for you.
How charming about your young friend and her present!
I used to meet Fr. D’Arcy pretty often when he was Master of Campion Hall, for we were both members of the Dante Society. Remember me to him if you happen to meet him.
I think what I must have said about Hindus (but can I write it any more legibly this time?) was that, if you use Pagan in the proper sense, i.e. to mean Polytheist, then they are Pagans, but not of course if you use that word in the journalists’ sense, to mean “irreligious” or even “debauched” (that journalists can be saved is a doctrine, if not contrary to, yet certainly above, reason!).
I am glad you like my stories. They are the part of my work I like best.
It continues cold (you would think it Arctic) here and wet, but with lovely gleams at times in which far-off mountains show three times their real height and with a radiance that suggests Bunyan’s “delectable mountains”.
I hope your health will soon improve.
Yours
Jack Lewis
P.S.—I doubt if you’ll find any Leprechauns in Eire now. The Radio has driven them away.
Royal Port Hotel,
Rathmullen
Co. Donegal,
EIRE
Sept. 14 [1956]
Thanks for cutting containing yourself and Sister Mary Frances and Mr. Birch and me; both interesting. Problem: why are nuns nicer than monks and schoolgirls nicer than schoolboys, when women are not in general nicer than men? But perhaps you deny all three statements!
All blessings.
J
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford, England
20 Oct/56
Dear Mary
I can’t answer yours of the 14th as it deserves for it comes to me on a day when I am all embroiled with affairs arising out of a friend’s sudden illness, and very much distressed. Alas, troubles everywhere. . . . I am very very sorry to hear about your health. “Hives on the eyes” must be horrid and go all through one’s head. And the anxiety too. May God comfort you. I’m thankful He has at any rate given you some good friends.
In great haste.
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
Nov 16/56
Dear Mary
Very sorry to hear all your bad news. . . .
You may as well know (but don’t talk of it, for all is still uncertain) that I may soon be, in rapid succession, a bridegroom and a widower. There may, in fact, be a deathbed marriage. I can hardly describe to you the state of mind I live in at present—except that all emotion, with me, is periodically drowned in sheer tiredness, deep lakes of stupour. Perhaps a very heavy cold in the head helps this. So you won’t expect me to write long or many letters. Let us always pray for one another.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford, England
Dec. 12th 1956
Dear Mary
I am sorry to hear that your news is still no better; but I don’t somehow think that all your friends will leave you in the lurch if things come to the worst.
Why should I make a mystery of my own affairs? (but don’t mention it till it becomes public). I am likely to be, in the near future, both a husband and a widower. That is, I am marrying a very sick, and perhaps a dying, woman. That’s all.
We will keep one another in our prayers.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford, England
4/1/57
Dear Mary
Thank you for your letter of the 28th with enclosures. I must try not to let my own present unhappiness harden my heart against the woes of others! You too are going through a dreadful time. Ah well, it will not last forever. There will come a day for all of us when “it is finished”. God help us all.
Yours sincerely
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
17/1/57
Dear Mary
I’ve got such an attack of rheumatism in my right arm I can hardly write. I have married a lady suffering from cancer. I think she will weather it this time: after that, life under the sword of Damocles. Very little chance (not exactly none) of a permanent escape. I acquire two schoolboy stepsons. My brother and I have been coping with them for their Christmas holidays. Nice boys, but gruelling work for 2 old bachelors! I’m dead tired now.
Yours very sincerely
Jack Lewis
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford, England
17/2/57
Dear Mary
There is no great mystery about my marriage. I have known the lady a long time: no one can mark the exact moment at which friendship becomes love. You can well understand how illness—the fact that she was facing pain and death and anxiety about the future of her children—would be an extra reason for marrying her or a reason for marrying her sooner. If I write very shortly it is not because I am reticent but because I am tired and busy. My brother is also ill and causes a good deal of anxiety, and of course I lose his secretarial help; so that I have not only much to bear but much to do. I can’t type; you could hardly conceive what hundreds of hours a year I spend coaxing a rheumatic wrist to drive this pen across paper.
What a divine mercy about the last moment money for the rent! Clearly He who feeds the sparrows has you in His care. Never suppose that the amount “on my own plate” shuts up my sympathy for the great troubles you are undergoing. I pray for you every day. Ah well, we shall all be out of it in a comparatively few years. With blessings.
Yours
Jack Lewis
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
14/3/57
Dear Mary
I can’t really write to-day but just send a line to thank you for your kind letter of March 8th. I am very glad to hear about the job or jobs. All much the same at this end.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
13th April 1957.
Dear Mary
My wife is now home, bed-ridden, and dying. We have two nurses. You really must not expect more than notes from me. I lead the life of a hospital orderly, and have hardly time to say my prayers or eat my meals.
Thanks for the Easter poem, and congratulations on the job.
Yours,
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
June 18th, 1957
Dear Mary
We go on. Joy is to all appearance (blessedly or heart-breakingly) well and anyone but a doctor would feel sure she was recovering. My brother is well and very helpful. I have had and have some trouble in my back (perhaps I told you this before?) which produced a few muscle spasms and screams from me but is now only a wearisome ache. We have a heat wave. I heard from some one who knows you the other day—all about a rumour of my own death! I trust all goes well with you.
Yours
Jack Lewis
The Kilns etc.
July 3/57
Dear Mary
Thanks for letter. I fear I must be very brief. I am sorry to hear of your renewed trouble. Yes, my wife was Joy Davidman: I hope you’ve read her Smoke on the Mountains. What on earth is the trouble about there being a rumour of my death? There’s nothing discreditable in dying: I’ve known the most respectable people do it! Joy is in no pain and in wonderful (apparent) health and spirits.
All good wishes.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Aug 12th 1957
Dear Mary
Thanks for your kind letter of Aug. 8th. Of course I showed it to Joy who got great pleasure from it and sends you her love. I enclose both our autographs.
She continues (apparently) to mend—in fact (o irony!) her face now is that of a woman in better health than in the photo you have seen: much less drawn and intense and far livelier. (But of course no man ever approves the photos of the woman he loves!)
My osteoporosis doesn’t seem to get much better, but at least it has never been so bad again as it was when it began. I’m wearing a Surgical Belt—very like one’s grandmother’s corsets. It gives me a wonderfully youthful figure. Both my stepsons are now home from school for the summer holidays. They are well and seem happy enough.
Even our heat wave was trying: yours must have been ghastly. I sympathise with you for that and all your other afflictions.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Oct 20th 1957
Dear Mary
We are shocked and distressed at the news in your letter of the 15th. I think I see from what you say that God is already giving you new spiritual strength with which to meet this terrible affliction—just as He did to us in Joy’s worst times. But pain is pain. I wish I could relieve any of it for you—one is so ineffective. The great thing, as you have obviously seen, (both as regards pain and financial worries) is to live from day to day and hour to hour not adding the past or future to the present. As one lived in the Front Line “They’re not shelling us at the moment, and it’s not raining, and the rations have come up, so let’s enjoy ourselves”. In fact, as Our Lord said, “Sufficient unto the day”. You may be sure you will be very much in our prayers. All my news is good, very good up-to-date, tho’ of course we live always under the sword of Damocles. God bless and keep you, dear friend. It’ll be nice when we all wake up from this life which has indeed something like nightmare about it.
Yours
Jack
As from Magdalene College,
Cambridge
Nov 3d 1957
Dear Mary
Oh what bad luck! Tooth troubles on top of all the rest. The financial side of it is probably really the least formidable. As our ancestors used to say, you have “lived at God’s charges” so far, and no doubt He will continue to foot the bill. Nor do I think you are in the least danger of getting “queer”—except that we’re all queer. We’ve been having influenza and the few days in bed seem (so odd is my complaint) to have done my bones harm—i.e. they’re not so good as they were three weeks ago, but they’re not so bad as they were 6 weeks ago. Joy continues to make progress. All blessings and sympathy.
Yours
Jack
As from Magdalene College,
Cambridge
Nov. 30th 1957
Dear Mary
Thanks for your letter of Nov. 22d. Yes: moves are desolating things. The wind of Time blows cold at these corners, doesn’t it?—and one’s belongings have a sort of squalid pathos about them once they are packed. But one often feels better afterwards and I hope you will find this. Of course the new home is a tiring nuisance until the new ways which it demands have become habits. After that, it may begin to have a certain rejuvenating quality. You don’t mention the heart-trouble: I hope that means you are feeling a great deal better.
All goes wonderfully well with Joy; we are very blessed at present. My own bone disease (osteoporosis) will, I gather, be always with me, but I am not in a painful condition now. I’ll never be able to take real walks again—field-paths and little woods and wonderful inns in remote villages, farewell!—but it’s wonderful how mercifully the desire goes when the power goes.
With all good wishes.
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
14/1/58
Dear Mary
Your letter reached me before I left home this morning on my way back to college, this being the first day of term. I came by car (hired) and Joy came with me for the drive and went home after lunch. It sounds a small thing, but it would have been incredible even a month ago.
I am sorry you have been having trouble with your cat. We (have) had a rather “animallic” time for our old bitch (we thought she knew better) made us an unexpected Christmas present of 10 puppies! We are tired of hearing neighbours say “Oh, thank you—we’d love a puppy, but—”
The worst of all economies is on necessary medicines, tho’ I quite understand how you are tempted to it. What a pity you haven’t got our National Health system in America. I wish I could help. I can only continue my prayers. My bones, by the way, are quite quiescent, so I don’t need to be pitied. God has been wonderfully good to us in every way.
Forgive my awful hand and short letters—both have the same cause. This is the 8th letter (all by hand) and the end is not yet! God bless you, and guard you from all danger.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
As from Magdalene College
Cambridge
22/2/58
Dear Mary
Joy (who thanks you for your most kind message) tells me I am writing to you on George Washington’s birthday, so “there’s glory for you” as Humpty Dumpty would say. God is very good to us and we go on happily at present. We kept one of the puppies, and call him Guppy (out of Bleak House) and he is a lively youngster. I notice, as I have done before in similar circumstances, the common age is a bond stronger than common species; i.e. Guppy is friends with the kitten and Guppy’s mother is friends with the old cat—a huge Tom called Ginger. I’m glad my angels should be thought more correct than those of the “Repository Artists”, but what the dickens are Repository Artists? I never heard of them.
I am sorry you had such a bad time at the dentist’s but hope that the total result is an improvement. Your mention of “Valentines” carried me back many years: I have not seen one since I was a small boy, as they have almost died out in this country.
Yes, we must not fret about not doing God those supposed services which He in fact does not allow us to do. Very often I expect, the service He really demands is that of not being (apparently) used, or not in the way we expected, or not in a way we can perceive.
I’ve written an article for an American magazine called The Christian Herald.
With all good wishes and love from us both.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
31/3/58
Dear Mary
Thank you for your letter of the 26th. I am very sorry to hear about the earache. It is a horrid thing, much worse than toothache. We all go through periods of dryness in our prayers, don’t we? I doubt (but ask your directeur) whether they are necessarily a bad symptom. I sometimes suspect that what we feel to be our best prayers are really our worst; that what we are enjoying is the satisfaction of apparent success, as in executing a dance or reciting a poem. Do our prayers sometimes go wrong because we insist on trying to talk to God when He wants to talk to us. Joy tells me that once, years ago, she was haunted one morning by a feeling that God wanted something of her, a persistent pressure like the nag of a neglected duty. And till mid-morning she kept on wondering what it was. But the moment she stopped worrying, the answer came through as plain as a spoken voice. It was “I don’t want you to do anything. I want to give you something”; and immediately her heart was full of peace and delight. St. Augustine says “God gives where He finds empty hands”. A man whose hands are full of parcels can’t receive a gift. Perhaps these parcels are not always sins or earthly cares, but sometimes our own fussy attempts to worship Him in our way. Incidentally, what most often interrupts my own prayers is not great distractions but tiny ones—things one will have to do or avoid in the course of the next hour.
We are all well, but tired of the refusal of spring to arrive. I’ve never known a colder, wetter, darker March. This is pretty early in the morning and Joy is still asleep: otherwise she would join me in our love to you.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
15/4/58
Dear Mary
What lovely news you have to tell. I do thank God on your behalf most heartily. What strange tricks our minds play!—that we should think it presumption to believe what we [are] forbidden not to believe. About past, long past, sins: I had been a Christian for many years before I really believed in the forgiveness of sins, or more strictly, before my theoretical belief became a reality to me. I fancy this may not be so uncommon.
Joy sends her love. We were away at a very nice country hotel last week having at last, what we never had before, a honeymoon! Here’s another absurdity of the mind: I’m such a confirmed old bachelor that I couldn’t help feeling I was being rather naughty (“Staying with a woman at a hotel!” Just like people in the newspapers!) I can’t write more, for I’m travelling back to Cambridge to-day and the Vicar is coming in a few minutes to give Joy her Easter Communion (she still can’t manage church).
God bless you more and more.
Yours
Jack
P.S.—By the way, you are one of the minority of my numerous female correspondents who didn’t gradually fade away as soon as they heard I was married!
June 6th [1958]
Dear Mary
Perhaps you won’t mind a letter from me this time, instead of Jack? He is having his first go at examining for the Cambridge tripos, and is fairly drowning in examination papers—apparently very silly ones! He comes up for air now and then, blows a few pathetic bubbles, then submerges again. He can’t even get home for the next fortnight; our longest separation since our marriage, and we’re both feeling it badly!
I am sorry you’ve been having that nasty time in the hospital. I know only too well what even the nicest hospital is like; how the nurses all vanish at the one moment of the day when you really need them, how the televisions and wirelesses all around make night hideous, how the night nurse wakes you from the first really refreshing sleep you’ve had in a month, at midnight, to give you your sleeping pill. . . . And you, I suppose, have been the subject of demonstrations to medical students as well! In Oxford they give students their examinations at some poor patient’s bedside; examiners and student alike all done up in their mortarboards and gowns, and scaring the patient half to death. But I’m told that experienced patients have been known to whisper the correct diagnosis to the student if he gets stuck. . . .
Well, I hope you’re home again now, and that it wasn’t too bad and they found the right answers. I can share too in your thwarted desire to be useful. We women feel that more than men, I think. There are a million things that need doing around this house. Once I would have pitched in and helped my housekeeper—but now, because I have to walk with a stick and have only one hand free, I’m more nuisance than help and can only sit on the sidelines and give advice and be a pest. It is difficult having to accept all the time! But unless we did, how could the others have the pleasure, and the spiritual growth, of giving? And—I don’t know about you, but I was very proud; I liked the superior feeling of helping others, and for me it is much harder to receive than to give but, I think, much more blessed.
Then, too, it’s only since I’ve been ill and helpless that I’ve realised just how good people in general are, when they have a chance. So many people have taken trouble over me, and gone out of their way to give me pleasure or help! It’s very heartwarming—and humbling, for I remember how cynical I used to be about humanity and feel a salutary shame.
Is your pet a cat or dog? I’ve found that cats stand these changes and separations pretty well—one of mine, when I was ill, took possession of a new home and mistress and had them completely under his thumb in a week. (If one can speak of a cat’s thumb?)
Can you do any sort of work? I’ve found that making crocheted rugs and tablecloths, or knitting socks, was an amazing help with my spiritual difficulties when I was feeling low. One can work off so many frustrations by stabbing away with a knitting needle! It’s better to make pretty things, I find, than just useful ones.
Of course we’re both praying for you—and don’t be too afraid, even if you turn out to need an operation. I’ve had three, and they were nothing like so bad as my fears.
Blessings,
Yours,
Joy Lewis