Читать онлайн «Christian Reflections»
Автор C. Vonzale Lewis
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollins
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London SE1 9GF
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Copyright © 1967 by C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd.
Copyright renewed 1973 C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd
This ebook first published by William Collins in 2017
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN 9780008203856
Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780008228552
Version: 2016-12-15
CONTENTS
We were talking one day in 1963, C. S. Lewis and I, about the ‘resurrection’ of literary works.
He mentioned Sir Walter Scott as one of his favourite authors whose books had gone out of fashion, but which appeared to be undergoing just such a resurrection. When I predicted that his own books would suffer no decline, he cautioned me against putting too high a value on them. Indeed, he tried to modulate my enthusiasm by pointing out that after an author’s death the general ‘rule’ is that the sales of his books fall drastically and eventually dry up altogether. ‘But sometimes – not by any means always –’, he said, ‘an author’s works undergo a kind of “resurrection”. But that is something no author, alive or dead, can count on. ’A literary historian, Lewis was naturally familiar with this phenomenon. He cherished no undue optimism as to what would happen to his books, and thus his frequent but gentle admonitions when I praised them more than he felt they deserved, and certainly more than made him comfortable. The truth is that Lewis was almost without opinions regarding the value of his writings. In so far as he was ‘worried’ about their future, it was simply that if the sales of his books stopped, and he died first, his elder brother Warren might find it difficult to survive.
