Sunday, September 13, 2015
To Enjoy Our Full Humanity
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 64:
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To enjoy our full humanity, we ought, as far as is possible, to contain within us potentially at all times and, on occasion, to actualize, all the modes of feeling and thinking through which man has passed. You must, so far as in you lies, become an Achaean chief while reading Homer, a medieval knight while reading Malory, and an eighteenth-century Londoner while reading Johnson. Only thus will you be able to judge the work 'in the same spirit that its author writ' and to avoid chimerical criticism.
