Читать книгу Compelling Reason - Клайв Льюис, Клайв Стейплз Льюис, C. S. Lewis - Страница 5

This book is not a collection of hitherto unpublished work, it is a collection of essays which are not presently in print but which Murray White of HarperCollins and myself thought should remain available to the reading public. One of the legacies which one inherits from a great writer is the responsibility to try to ensure that his minor works do not vanish from publication, or at the very least that they do not vanish until people no longer want to read them.

In this volume, we have tried to select those essays of Jack’s (C. S. Lewis) which are applicable to today’s world and still very much in demand. Jack said that a writer should not try to be ‘modern’ or ‘up to date’ because the more that he achieves it, the more he ensures that in a very short time he will be ‘out of date’. And it is this ability to achieve timelessness which so characterizes the best of Jack’s essays and articles. It is inevitable that some of what Jack wrote is coloured and affected by his upbringing and the environment in which he lived, but the crystal clarity of his thinking frequently enabled him to cut through the shrouds of his era and reach to the very heart of matters which will concern men and women of thought for all time. We hope that you will find this phenomenon exemplified in this book.

Douglas Gresham

Ireland 1996