An excerpt from a letter written by C.S. Lewis in 1930, found on page 912 of his Collected Letters:
As to the business about being ‘rooted’ or ‘at home everywhere,’ I wonder are they really the opposite, or are they the same thing? I mean, don’t you enjoy the Alps more precisely because you began by first learning to love in an intimate and homely way our own hills and woods [in Ireland]? While the mere globe-trotter, starting not from a home feeling but from guide books, feels equally at home everywhere only in the sense that he is really at home nowhere? It is just like the difference between vague general philanthropy (which is all balls) and learning first to love your own friends and neighbors which makes you more, not less, able to love the next stranger who comes along. If a man loveth not his brother whom he hath seen–etc. In other words doesn’t one get to the universal (either in people or in inanimate nature) through the individual–not by going off into a mere generalised mash.
Particularism, localism, and kinism: without these things we are but generalized, atomized individuals stripped of our humanity.
| Tweet |
|
|
|
