On Reading Old Books

There are two ways of enjoying the past, as there are two ways of enjoying a foreign country. One man carries his Englishry abroad with him and brings it home unchanged. Wherever he goes he consorts with the other English tourists. By a good hotel he means one that is like an English hotel. He complains of the bad tea where he might have had excellent coffee...

But there is another sort of travelling and another sort of reading. You can eat the local food and drink the local wines, you can share the foreign life, you can begin to see the foreign country as it looks, not to the tourist, but to its inhabitants. You can come home modified, thinking and feeling as you did not think and feel before. So with the old literature. You can go beyond the first impression that a poem makes on your modern sensibility. By study of things outside the poem, by comparing it with other poems, by steeping yourself in the vanished period, you can then re-enter the poem with eyes more like those of the natives; now perhaps seeing that the associations you gave to the old words were false, that the real implications were different than you supposed.

...I am writing to help the second sort of reading. Partly, of course, because I have a historical motive. I am a man as well as a lover of poetry: being human, I am inquisitive, I want to know as well as to enjoy. But even if enjoyment alone were my aim I should still choose this way, for I should hope to be led by it to newer and fresher enjoyments, things I could never have met in my own period, modes of feeling, flavours, atmospheres, nowhere accessible but by a mental journey into the real past. I have lived nearly sixty years with myself and my own century and am not so enamoured of either as to desire no glimpse of a world beyond them.
~C.S. Lewis, "De Audiendis Poetis", Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (written late 1950s?; 1st published 1966)

Dear Readers,

Please take note! I will be leaving tomorrow morning for Chicago to attend The Lord of the Rings Symphony, and immerse myself in the native Chicago"culture" (local brewpubs to feature prominently in my plans...) I promise to be back next week with more daily C.S. Lewis. Until then, feel free to look at the archives, add comments to old posts, and visit the other blogs I have linked on the right side of the page. All new comments come to my email inbox, so I'll be sure to see them! And--please be nice to each other on the tagboard! =)
Cheers!
~Arevanye