When C. S. Lewis first published The Abolition of Man in 1944, there was not a public sense that education was losing its value. For the most part, citizens on both sides of the pond were pleased with the state of affairs, and if the experts thought that things could be improved, then they were given the benefit of the doubt. Lewis, of course, took issue with this, and used Abolition to show how even the most elementary school textbook could corrupt the hearts and minds of students.1 Lewis described how the problem was the opposite of what many teachers and parents believed:
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity . . . The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.2
The issue runs deeper than merely starving the imagination. Lewis describes this problem as resulting in “men without chests,” hollow where it matters most.3 Such heartless individuals treat nature as something to be conquered, and lose their humanity in the process4. Lewis’s prescription is to return to the older things which gave meaning to culture and life for the last 2,000 years. Often, this advice is thought of in terms of reading old books, not modern ones. But what of authors who seek to embed in the modern sensibility a love of the natural world, and to do so through “just sentiments”?
Richard Wilbur offers a balm to the weary soul, much in the vein that Lewis prescribes in Abolition. His collected poems showcase not only an appreciation for what it means to be human, as in the humorous “A Finished Man,”5 but he also reveres nature in a way that rightly orients an individual back towards their Creator, like in his “March.”6 But perhaps nothing better encapsulates the solution to restoring just sentiments as Wilbur’s dueling poems, “The Reader” and “The Writer.”7 Separated by 28 years, these poems seem to go in a reverse order; one first learns to read, and then one learns to write. But the inculcation of right feelings cannot be accomplished by merely going in order.
Writing is a difficult thing, giving life to images through words, and Wilbur notes this difficulty as he muses on his daughter’s efforts. “Young as she is, the stuff / Of her life is heavy cargo, and some of it heavy: / I wish her a lucky passage.”8 Like a bird struggling to survive, frail and fragile and easily destroyed, the imagination is quashed by the harsh reality of life. But there is hope. If a writer can survive, and become a reader once again, not just putting words on the page, but allowing the words to be put on them, a kind of restoration happens. “But the true wonder of it is that she, / For all that she may know of consequences, / still turns enchanted to the next bright page . . . the blind delight of being, ready still / To enter life on life and see them through.”9 Wilbur crafts, between these two poems, an image of understanding that sees an attempt to create filtered through an appreciation for the created. And all of this is accomplished through the written word; reading paves the way for a restoration of the imagination.
Lewis was aware of this progression. Long before Wilbur penned his verse, Lewis suggested that the ability to see lay at the heart of true understanding. “The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque . . . a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”10 The young girl sitting in her room, trying to plot the course of her first character, is able to do so for she draws from the deep well of the page-turners which have preceded this moment. But more than that, as time goes on she will return to those wells, revisit those pages, and find that the brilliance of the moment is not dimmed by the passage of years. In order to restore the chests of men, they must be taught to put pen to paper, and then to go back to the words which gave them a vision in the first place. Lewis’s Tao and Wilbur’s words beckon the reader to write, and then to return.
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York, HarperOne, 2001), 16.
Lewis, 28.
Lewis, 41.
Lewis, 84.
Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems: 1934-2004 (New York: Harvest Books, 2004), 114.
Wilbur, 137.
Wilbur, 5, 128-129.
Wilbur, 128.
Wilbur, 5.
Lewis, 96.