Envy

Matthew Lee Anderson is enjoying an experience I would love to have. He is living in The Kilns. Some friends and I once were given a tour of the house, but he is living there:

Sometimes when young folks read a lot of old books, they wake up one day and think that C.S. Lewis wasn’t really all that insightful. ”It’s all in Plato,” the Professor in the Chronicles says. And there’s a temptation for us to think that all of Lewis is there, or in Augustine or Dante. But try writing at his level and with his clarity and the awe returns, with a vengeance, and makes a mockery of the hubris that ever dared doubt Lewis’ ultimately unquestionable brilliance. To synthesize several strands of Western Christian thought and then package the whole into a children’s book series? Unless your name is Tolkien, you ought to be astonished.

Which is why I feel like you need to know that I am living in C.S. Lewis’s house. Like, The Kilns. The place where he did the bulk of his writing. The place where he spent time walking and thinking and smoking his pipe. For the next nine months, at least, we’ll be here. And maybe, if they’ll have us, for longer. ....

Day One from Oxford: A View from The Kilns - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture, C. S. Lewis Foundation - Living the Legacy of C.S. Lewis