My Secret History Part II

I think I’m ready to jump back in to blogging on a regular basis. I sort of drew back from it as a response to an attack on my personal privacy through the internet with which I’ve been dealing for a while, and which has thankfully come to a resolution. (Thank you God!) Even so, the memory of it will stay with me as a caution to the dangers of this online society in which we live.

I love the fact that virtually anything I want to know about is at the tip of my fingertips on the internet. What a few short years ago would have taken many trips to libraries around the world, is there for the Googling. And yet, I have learned a hard lesson, that an unintended consequence of this wealth of information is a grave lack of privacy, which can be exploited by the unprincipled, and used against me in ways I never dreamed possible. I am sadly the wiser and more cautious for the experience. As I recently asked a lawyer,“Don’t I have a right to privacy in this country?” (You know, the much touted defense for the legality of killing of innocent babies in the womb.) His answer, “That went out with the internet.” Well, okay, I’m better now.'

So, enough about that. I’ve been searching for a C.S. Lewis quote that I wanted to use to go with the quote from the Secret History on Greek Prose Composition in my previous post. If memory serves me (which it often doesn’t), the quote is something about him being so at home in Greek and Latin that he had basically a native speaker’s fluency in them; that he was a product of a bygone system of education, a dying breed of classically educated scholars. Anyway, I couldn’t lay my hands on it, but I did find a quote where he said losing his Greek and Latin would be like losing a limb.


Eureka! I have found it!: It’s from C.S. Lewis’ inaugural address at Cambridge in 1954, De Descriptione Temporum. See for yourself if my memory of the quote matches up at all with what he said:

One thing I know: I would give a great deal to hear any ancient Athenian, even a stupid one, talking about Greek tragedy. He would know in his bones so much that we seek in vain. At any moment some chance phrase might, unknown to him, show us where modem scholarship had been on the wrong track for years. Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you some what as that Athenian might stand. I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners. You see why I said that the claim was not really arrogant; who can be proud of speaking fluently his mother tongue or knowing his way about his father's house? It is my settled conviction that in order to read Old Western literature aright you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modem literature. And because this is the judgement of a native, I claim that, even if the defence of my conviction is weak, the fact of my conviction is a historical datum to which you should give full weight. That way, where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.