I am reading a fairly obscure book, All My Road Before Me, 1922-27: The Diary of C S Lewis. It is surprisingly dull ( albeit getting better toward the end) given that Lewis was such an interesting character. What is fascinating though is this: I always found Lewis a very likable soul…..great guy to have a beer with , the Inklings, the whole Chestertonian deal. And I still think that to be true …..at a later , after his conversion , period of his life . The surprise however is that ….by his own words …..he seems to have been, in his early years, a very unpleasant sort of guy….arrogant , priggish, given to petty lies and so on and so forth. I do not ….surprisingly…..take all this to be negative but rather ….in an odd sort of way, positive. Many people ( most of us) after finding God still have tempers , vanities , complexes….any number and all manner of unpleasantries. This highly black and white pre and post conversion Lewis is a surprise to me …..but not one which lessens my affection for him. And a postscript: the relationship with Mrs. Moore was very odd but…..strange and eccentric things……are by no means necessarily evil things, I believe.

image: Albert Bridge / Wikimedia Commons