Tonight I'm enjoying what is perhaps the best biography of the great Lewis ever written.
Many things strike me. After his retirement from teaching,
Jack now spent his days rereading some of his favorite books: the Odyssey and Iliad and a little Plato in Greek; the Aeneid in Latin; Dante's Divine Comedy; Wordsworth's The Prelude; and works by George Herbert, Patmore, Scott, Austen, and Fielding, Dickens, and Trollope (pp. 407-408).
We need this attitude toward reading so badly right now. Lewis was so right about turning to books and stories from the past. After reading them you start to notice patterns, common archetypes, and values that are intrinsic to one another. It's so weird. I've never met Lewis, and yet I connect with him at the deepest level of imagination. As Jordan Peterson says, "People don't have ideas. Ideas have people." He also said that if people were to live for over 150 years, then it might not be a waste of time to read Harry Potter. But since we're only here for a few decades, we should devote our time to reading the best there is. Nothing beats reading intellectual people who talk about anything that's of importance or anything that really matters. It makes me want to strive to be more than I am, especially in a world full of tweets and just pure stupidity at times.
Thank God that Lewis is still with us (through his writings) to shed the light.