Laudator Temporis Acti

C.S. Lewis, letter to his brother Warren (Jan. 28, 1940):

This week I have been reading an Elizabethan, Hall's Satires (as dull as ditchwater) and Cicero's De Legibus. The latter you might suppose to be rather a bromide, but it is perfectly delightful. It's in dialogue form, held out of doors. Isn't this nice?—'Now we have reached the island. I don't know a more charming spot. Look how the stream divides as if round the bow of a ship.' And again 'But I've another reason for liking this place which can't affect you in the same way. My brother and I are "on our native heath" here. We come of an old family hereabouts: all round here you find our sacred places, our own people, and all the relics of our forebears. You see the house as it now is, rebuilt by the care of my father, who was an invalid and spent pretty well all his life here among his books. But in this very spot, in my grandfather's time, there was a little house in the old style—like the one Curius has down in the Sabine country—and in it I was born.'

All very ordinary and obvious, of course, but, like Boswell, so full of sense and leisure and happiness. Does it occur to you that people have written of that sort of thing in almost all ages but our own? I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it may seem, really don't.

Related post: Cicero's Birthplace.