C.S. Lewis On COVID-19

Jul 23, 2020

Here is what CS Lewis had to say in 1948 when everyone was focused on the threat of the atomic bomb (emphasis added):

“In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of AIDS, an age of motor accidents.’

In other words, let us not begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. We were already all sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented, and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, then, when it comes, let that bomb find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.” Paraphrased From Present Concerns , C. S. Lewis

This is as relevant today as it was in 1948. Go forth.

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