BE ALWAYS READING AND BE CIVILIZED!

Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015) ("To generations of students, astonished by his prodigious literary memory, he [that is, C. S. Lewis] would give this simple counsel: 'The great thing is to be always reading but never to get bored--treat it not like work, more as vice!'" Id. at 41. "'Wars are always lost, and The War always goes on,' wrote Tolkien to Christopher near the end of the war. The worldwide carnage embittered him, as did the jingoistic jubilation of British citizens as Allied troops pressed forward to victory: 'There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour. By which I do not mean that it may not all, in the present situation, mainly (not solely) created by Germany, be necessary and inevitable. But why gloat! We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or to hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted.'" Id. at 343-344.).