February 7, 2006

Dear Colleague,

     A great blessing of life is to know someone truly good, for such an encounter, even more than a vision of the Morning Star or the intoxication of sublime music, is the closest we are ever likely to get to the proof of God's existence and of immortality. I envy C. S. Lewis for his extraordinary talent, his well-earned success as scholar, and his happy marriage late in life, but, above all, for knowing--though only briefly--someone called Charles Williams.

    Who was Charles Williams? Here I ask your indulgence, for I will be quoting at length from an essay by Lewis, written shortly after learning of his friend's wholly unexpected death. Williams was employed as an editor of Oxford University Press, and during World War II, as a lecturer in English at Oxford, even though he was not a "professional scholar." Not a professional, no, nevertheless, Williams more than held his own among learned dons.

    I am not doing this right. It's hard for a post-modernist fellow like me to talk of goodness and the good person without cheap, lip-smacking irony. The words "Williams more than held his own" are certainly the wrong words. Conversation was fun and high seriousness to Williams; so the idea of sounding smart among smart people couldn't be further from his mind. What was he like in a conversational coven of Oxford dons? "He seemed to have no 'pet subject.' Though he talked copiously one never felt that he had dominated the evening. Nor did one easily remember particular 'good things' that he said: the importance of his presence was, indeed, chiefly made clear by the gap which was left on the occasions when he did not turn up."

    Williams had many friends. The Oxford dons he knew had no idea that he was deeply loved by people in walks of life far from their "dreaming spires." To every circle, Williams offered the whole man: "all his attention, knowledge, courtesy, charity were placed at your disposal. It was a natural result of this that you did not find out much about him--certainly not about those parts of him which your own needs or interests did not call into play. A selfless character, perhaps, always has this mysteriousness: and much more so when it is that of a man of genius."

    Williams was a Christian, but he clearly came to Christianity for reasons other than consolation. "He vehemently denied that he had any natural desire for life after death. In one of his earlier poems the man who is made ruler of three cities says:

    I bore the labour, Lord,
    But cannot stomach the reward."

    This element of realism--his keen awareness of the vanities and horrors of life--made him a most sympathetic adviser to students who brought their personal problems to him. "So you are unhappy. But of course...."     In Williams's presence, one not only recognized an extraordinary intelligence, but one felt oneself more intelligent than one thought possible. And in the presence of death? Lewis's last words about his friend were: "When the idea of death and the idea of Williams... met in my mind, it was the idea of death that was changed" (C. S. Lewis, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 1947).

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu