The Kilns,
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
July 21st 1958
Dear Mary
(1.) Remember what St. John says “If our heart condemn us, God is stronger than our heart”. The feeling of being, or not being, forgiven and loved, is not what matters. One must come down to brass tacks. If there is a particular sin on your conscience, repent and confess it. If there isn’t, tell the despondent devil not to be silly. You can’t help hearing his voice (the odious inner radio) but you must treat it merely like a buzzing in your ears or any other irrational nuisance. (2.) Remember the story in the Imitation, how the Christ on the crucifix suddenly spoke to the monk who was so anxious about his salvation and said “If you knew that all was well, what would you, to-day, do, or stop doing?” When you have found the answer, do it or stop doing it. You see, one must always get back to the practical and definite. What the devil loves is that vague cloud of unspecified guilt feeling or unspecified virtue by which he lures us into despair or presumption. “Details, please?” is the answer. (3.) The sense of dereliction cannot be a bad symptom for Our Lord Himself experienced it in its depth—“Why hast thou forsaken me?”
Of course we will continue to pray for you.
A tripos at Cambridge is an examination: so called for the tripos (compare tripod) or 3-legged stool on which the candidate used to sit when the exam. was still, not written work, but a disputation.
Joy and I have just been for a lovely fortnight in Ireland. She, and my brother, are both well. We send our loves and blessings.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Sept. 30 1958
Dear Mary
Thanks for your letter of 26th. The Time review was ill-timed, for the American edition of the book will not be published until November. I have told Harcourt Brace to send you a copy when it appears. I also have been in the hands of the dentist but much less unpleasantly than you; I know a “dry socket” after an extraction can be the very devil and all. We must both, I’m afraid, recognise that, as we grow older, we become like old cars—more and more repairs and replacements are necessary. We must just look forward to the fine new machines (latest Resurrection model) which are waiting for us, we hope, in the Divine garage! Thank you for the enclosure; I don’t think it contradicts anything I’ve said. Joy continues well, thank God, and would send her love if she were awake, which at the moment she’s not, for I’m a barbarously early riser and have usually got my breakfast and dealt with my letters before the rest of the house is astir. One result is that I often enjoy the only fine hours of the day—at this time of the year lovely, still, cool sunshine from 7 till 10, followed by rain from then on, is common. I love the empty, silent, dewy, cobwebby hours. I hope your mouth is now comfortable again.
Yours
Jack
There is an old Scots version of Psalm 136 (137) 8ff which goes:
O blessed may that trooper be
Who, riding on his naggie,
Wull tak thy wee bairns by the taes
And ding them on the craggie
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Oct. 30, 1958
Dear Mary
That is very good news about your daughter and family. Also these last minute mercies which keep on turning up in your financial crises. I suppose living from day to day (“take no thought for the morrow”) is precisely what we have to learn—though the Old Adam in me sometimes murmurs that if God wanted me to live like the lilies of the field, I wonder He didn’t give me the same lack of nerves and imagination as they enjoy! Or is that just the point, the precise purpose of this Divine paradox and audacity called Man—to do with a mind what other organisms do without it? As for wrinkles—pshaw! Why shouldn’t we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare. All well with us, in haste, with love.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Dec 25th 1958
Dear Mary
I have let our correspondence get rather disgracefully behind on my side, not from ceasing to think of you, but from being very busy finishing a book (a dull, academic, technical one, tho’ exciting to me) and from the usual daily post—drat it! Thanks for your nice review. And I am glad our law now allows me to send you a little (I gather you and Barfield have it all in train). We are all well—Joy wonderful—but live in perpetual sunlessness. Never knew so long a spell of fogs. One pines for lights and, scarcely less, shadows, which make up so much of the beauty of the world. Accept the warmest love and Christmas greetings from us both.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Dec 29/58
Dear Mary
Just a very hurried line—(1). To condole with you on the loss of Fr.—. (2.) To tell a story which puts the contrast between our feast of the Nativity and, all this ghastly “Xmas” racket at its lowest. My brother heard a woman on a ’bus say, as the ’bus passed a church with a Crib outside it, “Oh Lor’! They bring religion into everything. Look—they’re dragging it even into Christmas now!”
Love and sympathy from us both.
Yours
Jack
As from Magdalene
Jan 26th 59
Dear Mary
Thanks for letter of the 26th. Your Grant Ulysses Smith sounds delightful. Did you know that when your army was here in the last war your coloured troops were more popular than the white ones? A letter from Cuba with no mention of the revolution is rather surprising at first sight. But it might not even be due to caution. I am often struck in reading the records of the past (e.g. letters written during our Civil War in the 17th Century) how unimportant the things the historians make so much of seem to have been to ordinary people who were alive at the time. Does not what we call “history” in fact leave out nearly the whole of real life? Of course the cure mentioned in my article on prayer was Joy: the “good man” an old pupil of mine—one of the completest and most beautiful conversions I have witnessed. By the way, I mentioned to a distinguished theologian that I had been attacked by “a man called N.”, and he replied “Oh! old P.N.! What does he believe this week?”—so apparently he changes his views pretty often. Perhaps one day he may give Christianity a trial. I have put him in my prayers. I am sorry to hear about the teeth: always a horrid business. We are having beautiful winter weather at present: bright, pale sunshine (paler than you ever see—Joy calls it the “arctic light”), still air, and just that sprinkling of hoar-frost which makes everything sparkle like sugar. All well. Good wishes.
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
6/5/59
Dear Mary
I am sorry you have been worried. Actually I was quite unaware that we owed you a letter. But never assume that anything is wrong if I should make the same mistake again. Remember, I don’t type. Also, manlike, I am not naturally a correspondent at all. The daily letter-writing I have to do is very laborious to me.
We are all well. Indeed Joy and I both dig—a thing neither of us expected ever to do again.
We also have a Siamese cat. In my heart of hearts I really prefer the great, grey bullet-headed native cat, but the Siamese are delicate and fascinating creatures. Ours adores me because I lift her up by her tail—an operation which I can’t imagine I should like if I were a cat, but she comes back for more and more, purring all the time.
The young priest after whose laying-on-of hands Joy began so miraculously to mend now writes to tell me that his own wife is suffering from cancer. His name is Peter. Will you, of your charity, have him in your prayers?
Joy, if she were here, would join me in all greetings and good wishes.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
May 19th 1959
Dear Mary
I am sorry to hear you have lost an old friend. Curiously enough the same thing has just happened to my brother and me—old lady (at least I suppose she must have been old, tho’ she was always a girl to us) whom we have known since before we can remember. And, just like you, we keep on hearing jokes for which she would have been exactly the right recipient. There is no way out of it: either one must die fairly young or else outlive many friends. We are now told by the learned that Siamese are not royal cats at all, but the common jungle cat of those parts and quite “without honour” in their own country! Another disillusion!
In haste—all blessings.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
June 7th 1959
Dear Mary
I am sorry to hear that so many troubles crowd upon you but glad to hear that, by God’s grace, you are so untroubled. So often, whether for good or ill, one’s inner state seems to have so little connection with the circumstances. I can now hardly bear to look back on the summer before last when Joy was apparently dying and I was often screaming with the pain of osteoporosis; yet at the time we were in reality far from unhappy. May the peace of God continue to infold you. Your elderly neighbour would be comic if the matters at issue were not so serious. She has an odd idea of how to cheer people up! Like having a visit from a ghoul. People in real life are often so preposterous that one would not dare to put them in a novel. I gather you are having a heat-wave in America, and I hope this won’t make things harder for you. We have had a lot of (for us) hot weather; now, though the heat has gone, the drought continues and the soil in our garden is like dust.
What a state we have got into when we can’t say “I’ll be happy when God calls me” without being afraid one will be thought “morbid”. After all, St. Paul said just the same. If we really believe what we say we believe—if we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a “wandering to find home”, why should we not look forward to the arrival. There are, aren’t there, only three things we can do about death: to desire it, to fear it, or to ignore it. The third alternative, which is the one the modern world calls “healthy” is surely the most uneasy and precarious of all. We are well here. God bless you.
Yours
Jack
The Old Inn
Crawfordsburn
Co. Down,
Northern Ireland
July 7th 1959
Dear Mary
Your letter of the 20th has followed us here. You seem to have had a very nasty experience. I can see why you describe it as “looking into the face of death”; but who knows whether that face, when we really look at it, will be at all like that? Let us hope better things. I had a tooth out the other day, and came away wondering whether we dare hope that the moment of death may be very like that delicious moment when one realises that the tooth is really out and a voice says “Rinse your mouth out with this”. “This” of course will be Purgatory.
What you have gone through begins to reconcile me to our Welfare State of which I have said so many hard things. “National Health Service” with free treatment for all has its drawbacks—one being that Doctors are incessantly pestered by people who have nothing wrong with them. But it is better than leaving people to sink or swim on their own resources.
You surely don’t mean “feeling that we are not worthy to be forgiven”? For of course we aren’t. Forgiveness by its nature is for the unworthy. You mean “Feeling that we are not forgiven.” I have known that. I “believed” theoretically in the divine forgiveness for years before it really came home to me. It is a wonderful moment when it does.
I am sorry this is so illegible but we are away on holiday and I have only Joy’s biro to write with. Odious thing! We have been having a nice time, tho’ not very good weather. Love and sympathy from both.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
11 July 1959
Dear Mary
We got back from Ireland last night, when I found an infinite pile of letters awaiting me, so this can be only a hurried scrawl. Your doctor sounds delightful and I am glad you have that comfort. Not that I know what a pediatrician is any more than a boojum! All our good wishes go with you.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns etc
Aug 3/59
Dear Mary
I have your letter of 30 July. It has puzzled me. I understood that you were going to the doctors for heart trouble. How and why do the psychiatrists come into the picture? But since they have come, I am glad to hear they are nice. I sympathise most deeply with you on the loss of your friend. But for good as well as for ill one never knows what is coming next. You remember the Imitation says “Bear your cross, for if you try to get rid of it you will probably find another and worse one”. But there is a brighter side to the same principle. When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place. We are all well here though I am frantically busy; and though I get no more tired now than I did when I was younger, I take much longer to get un-tired afterwards. All blessings and sympathy.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
21 Aug 59
Dear Mary
Yes, six snacks instead of three meals must be a frightful nuisance. One must be always washing up! And I know how, when one is on one’s own, even a nice meal and a good appetite can hardly make the whole time-wasting business getting it and clearing it away seem worth the few minutes of actual eating. You will be surprised to hear that our temperatures are, for once, not very much lower than yours. Yesterday at 11.30 a.m. on our lawn the thermometer read 94 degrees. A big tree and a still bigger branch off another came crashing down in the wood yesterday, in windless calm—purely for lack of internal moisture. The early mornings and late evenings are lovely, but not the blistering hours in between.
A “move” is a beastly thing at the best of times. One’s things have a sort of whining pathos (do you know what I mean) about them once they are winkled out of their old native haunts.
I wish you had better news to send me and I more comfort to send you. Of course you are always in my prayers.
The house is still asleep—I get up early and try to dispose of my mail in the day’s cool and silent hours, so I can send you only my love and sympathy. Joy would add hers if she were awake!
Yours
Jack
The Kilns etc
21 Sept [1959]
Dear Mary
In great haste—indeed no more than a scrape of the pen to express my sympathy. House-hunting is gruelling and heart-breaking work at the best of times. I’m sorry I missed Fr. L. How pleased you must be about selling that article! Ah well here. If I got a crocodile skin I’d sell it! Blessings.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
18 Oct 59
Dear Mary
Well, thank goodness your move is now over. A “bed-sitter”, as we call them over here, has certainly its drawbacks. In England, where most houses have no central heating, it has one compensation—that of going to bed and getting up in a warm room. But that, I suppose, would be so anyway in America. . . .
Will you redouble your prayers for us? Apparently the wonderful recovery Joy made in 1957 was only a reprieve, not a pardon. The last x-ray check reveals cancerous spots returning in many of her bones. There seems to be some hope of a few years life still and there are still things the doctors can do. But they are all in the nature of “rearguard actions”. We are in retreat. The tide has turned. Of course God can do again what He did before. The sky is not now so dark as it was when I married her in hospital. Her courage is wonderful and she gives me more support than I can give her.
The dreadful thing, as you know, is the waking each morning—the moment at which it all flows back on one.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
22 Dec 1959
Dear Mary
I have got your note. It finds me with as clear a conscience about correspondence as a not very methodical, nor leisured, man ever has. I am pretty sure I have written to you since I last heard from you. Let us, however, make a compact that, if we are both alive next year, whenever we write to one another it shall not be at Christmas time. That period is becoming a sort of nightmare to me—it means endless quill-driving!
Despite the terrible news of which I told you, we hobble along wonderfully well. I am ashamed (yet in a way pleased) to tell you that it is Joy who supports me rather than I her. I do not forget your prayers and am most grateful for them.
I hope you are now fully settled into your new quarters and find them tolerable! Also that “Brother Ass” is behaving better.
Christmas will be over by the time you get this, but you know you will have been (as always) in my thoughts and prayers. Let us hope that both of us will have been given Grace, amidst all this ghastly commercial racket of “Xmas”, to enter into the feast of the Nativity: the racket has nearly smothered it!
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
13 Feb. 1960
Dear Mary
I am sorry to hear from your letter of 8 Feb. about the “Asian flu”. Either we haven’t yet got it here or our doctors call it by some other name. I very much hope that by the time this reaches you, you will be really on the mend. Many thanks for the pretty card and poem you sent Joy—it was a kind thought. She remains so far amazingly well and strong to all appearances, thank God. It looks as if we shall after all be able to manage a lightning air-trip to Greece which was arranged in happier times. It would mean a great deal to both of us to have stood even once on the Acropolis. I am suffering from a strange condition which makes it impossible ever to stay asleep (I can go to sleep easily enough) for more than about 70 min. continuously at night, or to stay awake in the day time if I relax at all! Premature senility perhaps.
God keep us all,
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
26 March 1960
Dear Mary
Do you know, I should have more hope for the young cad described in Fr. L’s letter than for many people in a quiet, cultured state of unbelief who would always speak of Christianity with reverence? His very rudeness shows that he is not quite free from the fear that there “might be something in it after all”. I bet that if he were talking to Hindoos or Buddhists he would speak more politely of their religion. You must be having the same flu’ bug that has visited us. His visits are not always very severe, but it is a wonderful stayer.
Things are not, or not much, worse with us, but life is very terrible. I sometimes feel I am mad to be taking Joy to Greece in her present condition, but her heart is set upon it. They give the condemned man what he likes for his last breakfast, I am told.
I hope your news will soon be better,
Yours
Jack
As from Magdalene,
Cambridge
19/4/60
Dear Mary
We did get to Greece, and it was a wonderful success. Joy performed prodigies, climbing to the top of the Acropolis and getting as far as the Lion gate of Mycenae. She has (no wonder) come back very exhausted and full of aches. But I would not have had her denied it. The condemned man is allowed his favourite breakfast even if it is indigestible. She was absolutely enraptured by what she saw. But pray for us: the sky grows very dark.
I can’t begin to describe Greece. Attica is hauntingly beautiful and Rhodes is an earthly paradise—all orange and lemon orchards and wild flowers and vines and olives, and the mountains of Asia on the horizon. And lovely, cheap wines. I’ve eaten squid and octopus!
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
15 July 1960
Dear Mary
I’ve just got your letter of the 12th. Joy died on the 13th. I can’t describe the apparent unreality of my life since then. She received absolution and died at peace with God. I will try to write again when I have more command of myself. I’m like a sleep-walker at the moment. God bless.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
24 Sept. 1960
Dear Mary
Thanks for your letter of the 21st. I hope from what you say that the end of this bad patch is now in sight. Meantime, you seem in fine spiritual health.
As to how I take sorrow, the answer is “In nearly all the possible ways”. Because, as you probably know, it isn’t a state but a process. It keeps on changing—like a winding road with quite a new landscape at each bend. Two curious discoveries I have made. The moments at which you call most desperately and clamorously to God for help are precisely those when you seem to get none. And the moments at which I feel nearest to Joy are precisely those when I mourn her least. Very queer. In both cases a clamorous need seems to shut one off from the thing needed. No one ever told me this. It is almost like “Don’t knock and it shall be opened to you”. I must think it over.
My younger stepson is the greatest comfort to me. My brother is still away in Ireland.
God bless us all.
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
28 Oct. 1960
Dear Mary
Dear, dear, this is very distressing news. How many things have come upon you at once! As Coleridge says
—to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.
It’s the mixture, or alternation, of resentment and affection that is so very uneasy, isn’t it? For the indulgence of either immediately comes slap up against the other, which then, a few seconds later comes slap up against it, so that the mind does a diabolical “shuttle-service” to and fro between them. We’ve all at some time in our lives, I expect, had this experience. Except possibly anxiety nothing is more hostile to sleep. One must try, I suppose, to keep on remembering that the love part of the suffering is good and purgatorial while the anger part is bad and infernal. Yet how madly one cherishes that base part as if it were one’s dearest possession—dwells on everything that can aggravate the offence—and keep on thinking of things one would like to say to the other party! I suppose all one can do is to keep on meditating on the petition “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us”. I find Fear a great help—the fear that my own unforgivingness will exclude me from all the promises. Fear tames wrath. And this fear (we have Our Lord’s word for it) is wholly well-grounded. The human heart (mine anyway) is “desperately wicked”. Joy often quoted this in connection with the great difficulty she found in forgiving a very near and very nasty relative of her own. One has to keep on doing it over again, doesn’t one?
God send you help of every sort.
Yours
Jack
P.S.—It’s also useful to think “Either X is not so bad as, in my present anger, I think. If not, how unjust I must be. If so, how terribly X needs my prayers”.
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
24 Nov 1960
Dear Mary
Thanks for your letter of the 20th. About forgetting things. Dr. Johnson said “If, on leaving the company, a young man cannot remember where he has left his hat, it is nothing. But when an old man forgets, everyone says, Ah, his memory is going”. So with ourselves. We have always been forgetting things: but now, when we do so, we attribute it to our age. Why, it was years ago that, on finishing my work before lunch, I stopped myself only just in time from putting my cigarette-end into my spectacle case and throwing my spectacles into the fire!
What I was writing about last time was the pain and resentment you were feeling about some things——had said or done. I wasn’t trying to lecture. Rather, to compare notes about temptation we all have to contend with.
There, by the way, is a sentence ending with a preposition. The silly “rule” against it was invented by Dryden. I think he disliked it only because you can’t do it in either French or Latin which he thought more “polite” languages than English.
As for the bug-bear of Old Peoples’ Homes, remember that our ignorance works both ways. Just as some of the things we have longed and hoped for turn out to be dust and ashes when we get them, so the things we have most dreaded sometimes turn out to be quite nice. If you ever do have to go to a Home, Christ will be there just as much as in any other place.
The bit of conversation with——which you quoted sounds as if there were nothing much wrong on either side but nerves. But I admit I don’t know the cure. Slowing down the speed of the conversation (so far as this depends on oneself) is sometimes helpful. Also sitting down. I think we all talk more excitedly when standing (Notice how often the actors in a comedy sit whereas those in a tragedy usually stand).
All blessings,
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
9 Jan ’61
Dear Mary
I don’t feel at all “wise” and the only bit of advice I can give you with perfect confidence is—don’t sit up writing long letters either to me or to anyone else when you are tired! It is very bad for you. Now as to the main issue.
Whatever you decide to do, get your own attitude right. . . .
Their penitence may no doubt be very imperfect and their motives very mixed. But so are all our repentances and all our motives. Accept theirs as you hope God will accept yours. Remember that He has promised to forgive you as, and only as, you forgive them.
The decision, however, remains, I agree, a terrible one to make, and only someone who really knew you . . . is really qualified to give you advice. . . . Of course this would involve giving up a great deal. . . . But I’m afraid as we grow older life consists more and more in either giving up things or waiting for them to be taken from us. . . .
The only certain thing is that your acceptance (if you accept) or your refusal (if you refuse) must be made with perfect charity and courtesy. May God’s grace give you the necessary humility. Try not to think—much less, speak—of their sins. One’s own are a much more profitable theme! And if, on consideration, one can find no faults on one’s own side, then cry for mercy: for this must be a most dangerous delusion. . . .
Well, I’m afraid all this comes to precious little. But I don’t, and can’t know enough. I can only pray that you may be guided to the right choice. It is (no disguising it) only a choice between Crosses. The more one can accept that fact, the less one can think about happiness on earth, the less, I believe, one suffers. Or at any rate the suffering becomes more purgatorial and less infernal.
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
24 Feb. 1961
Dear Mary
I am very glad you have made the decision and I believe it is the right one. . . . There will be every opportunity and necessity of mortifying the “highly developed pride” diagnosed by the grapho-analyst! There will have to be plenty of “turning back” and “change of purpose”—except, to be sure, the constant and prayerful purpose of continual sacrifice. The great thing is that you realise all that, and as the comic beatitude says “Blessed are they that expect little for they shall not be disappointed”. . . . Probably the safe rule will be “When in doubt what to do or say, do or say nothing”. I feel this very much with my stepsons. I so easily meddle and gas: when all the time what will really influence them, for good or ill, is not anything I do or say but what I am. And this unfortunately one can’t know and can’t much alter, though God can. Two rules from Wm. Law must be always before our minds.
1. “There can be no surer proof of a confirmed pride than a belief that one is sufficiently humble”.
2. “I earnestly beseech all who conceive they have suffered an affront to believe that it is very much less than they suppose”.
I hope your vet is not a charlatan? Psychological diagnoses even about human patients seem to me pretty phoney. They must be even phonier when applied to animals. You can’t put a cat on a couch and make it tell you its dreams or produce words by “free association”. Also—I have a great respect for cats—they are very shrewd people and would probably see through the analyst a good deal better than he’d see through them.
Remember me kindly to Fr. D’Arcy.
Jobs bunch oddly in my profession and for the last fortnight I have been so busy as hardly to know whether I’m on my head or my heels and am very tired. Otherwise well enough. We keep on having spring and winter alternately, and however few or many blankets one starts the night with one will wake up either sweating or shivering before morning. . . . You will all be much in my prayers.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
28 March 1961
Dear Mary
Humans are very seldom either totally sincere or totally hypocritical. Their moods change, their motives are mixed, and they are often themselves quite mistaken as to what their motives are. . . .
I know it’s easy for me to give good advice to others in situations which I probably could not face myself. But that can’t be helped; I must say what I think true. Surely the main purpose of our life is to reach the point at which “one’s own life as a person” is at an end. One must in this sense “die”, become “naught”, relinquish one’s freedom and independence. “Not I, but Christ that dwelleth in me”—“He must grow greater and I must grow less”—“He that loseth his life shall find it”. But you know all this quite as well as I do. It may well involve eating white bread instead of brown! How many millions at this moment have no bread at all. All blessings.
Yours
Jack
P.S.—Of course this little addition to your income can continue.
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
21 April 1961
Dear Mary
I have your letter of the 16th. . . . Thanks for the poem. I’ve got some sort of virus into me which has kept me from being quite well all this spring, never quite awake by day and never quite asleep by night (and never without unpleasant dreams), so don’t expect much from me. Blessings on you all.
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
5 June 1961
Dear Mary
. . I have nothing to say but things you know already quite as well as I do. We must beware of the Past, mustn’t we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past! Not so the saved. This is one of the dangers of being, like you and me, old. There’s so much past, now, isn’t there? And so little else. But we must try very hard not to keep on endlessly chewing the cud. We must look forward more eagerly to sloughing that old skin off forever—metaphors getting a bit mixed here, but you know what I mean.
I almost dare to believe my digestion is coming right again, but I am so tired out with it and with marking exam papers that there isn’t much left of me at the moment! God bless us all.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
12th July 1961.
Dear Mrs. __________
I’ve opened your letter of 6th addressed to my brother, who is, I’m sorry to say at present in hospital and unable to deal with his own mail. I saw him yesterday and mentioned that a letter had arrived from you, and he asked me to explain why there will be no answer to it for quite a time.
With kind regards.
Yours sincerely,
W. H. Lewis