Bullet now or cancer later
May 3, 2008
I commend to you a little book I am reading now: The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis, a series of essays based on talks given by Lewis during the 1940s. One of the essays is “Learning in Wartime,” a talk to Oxford students who were uncomfortable because they were in school while their contemporaries were risking death in the early days of World War II. Lewis talks about several ‘enemies’ that may keep the students from doing their best at their studies.
The third enemy is fear. War threatens us with death and pain. No man — and specially no Christian who remembers Gethsemane — need try to attain a stoic indifference about these things, but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination. We think of the streets of Warsaw and contrast the deaths there suffered with an abstraction called Life. But there is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or that — machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. It puts several deaths earlier, but I hardly suppose that that is what we fear. Certainly when the moment comes, it will make little difference how many years we have behind us. Does it increase our chances of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering, and a battlefield is one of the very few places where one has a reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all.
In 1952 I was a college student with a draft deferment, and I was quite aware of my contemporaries serving in Korea while I was drilling with the ROTC. I can’t say that it caused me much, if any, mental anguish. I wonder what I would have thought if I had read these words. In those days I assumed I was immortal and didn’t think much about death, like most 21-year-olds.
It’s now 55 years later, and I know I am not immortal in the temporal sense, and I’ve long since lost my reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all. But I am moved by C.S. Lewis’s words and his way of thinking.
Dave, not fearful at all, at all.
Comments
Got something to say?
