Influences

Since finishing the first volume of Spenser I have been reading again 'The Well at the World's End', and it has completely ravished me. There is something awfully nice about reading a book again, with all the half-unconscious memories it brings back. 'The Well' always brings to mind our lovely hill-walk in the frost and fog - you remember - because I was reading it then. The very names of chapters and places make me happy: 'Another adventure in the Wood Perilous', 'Ralph rides the Downs to Higham-on-the-Way', 'The Dry Tree', 'Ralph reads in a book concerning the Well at the World's End'. Why is it that one can never think of the past without wanting to go back?
~C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume I, Letter to Arthur Greeves (16 November, 1915)

I spent the afternoon and evening between spells of working on "Sigrid" (which I did with incredible difficulty, but finally pleased myself) and beginning to re-read The Well at the World's End. I was anxious to see whether the old spell still worked. It does - rather too well. This going back to books read at that age is humiliating: one keeps on tracing what are now quite big things in one's mental outfit to curiously small sources. I wondered how much even of my feeling for external nature comes out of the brief, convincing little descriptions of mountains and woods in this book.
~C. S. Lewis, All My Road Before Me (entry of July 4, 1926)
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