Save Opinion For What Matters Most
A lesson from Marcus Aurelius and the life of C.S. Lewis
“You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Early in his life, the people around Clive Staples Lewis, you may know him as C.S. Lewis, thought the child from Northern Ireland to be a bit unpleasant. Lewis was 15 when he attended the boarding school known as Malvern College in the English countryside, a rather stereotypical turn-of-the-century all-boys school if there ever was one. Following the death of his mother, Flora Lewis, a stinging loss brought on by abdominal cancer, Lewis’ father didn’t know what to do. Boarding school for Clive and his brother, Warnie, was the best answer he could come up with.
Lewis didn’t want to be there, and he carried himself as someone who wanted everyone to know it. You see, the young C.S. Lewis was always a bit enveloped in his inner life. He grew up in a house full of books in Strandtown outside of Belfast, and if you’ve never learned this about Ireland, it’s a soggy country. Most days in the lush countryside of the “Emerald Isle” were rainy or dressed in a thick layer of mist, leaving Lewis to look out the window into the hills and dream of what secrets they held. A deep longing for those hills would follow C.S. Lewis for the rest of his life. C.S. the bookworm, daydreamer, and thinker, was formed in those pivotal years in his childhood home.
You can imagine his horror then, at the gruff athletic culture of competition that greeted Lewis at Malvern College. Games and sport seemed to Lewis to be Malvern’s true pride, rather than its academic program. Boys were here to be instilled with “manliness” and a kind of toughness that Lewis scorned.
Maybe it was his unusual single-jointed thumbs, making for rather clumsy hands, that turned Lewis off to sports, or perhaps it was the boy's attitude that made the situation so tumultuous.
The fact of the matter is, C.S. Lewis thought highly of himself at a young age. You can almost imagine Lewis as a Hermione-like character from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, a whiz-kid who throws side-eye at anyone itching to play Quidditch or socialize rather than study. Hermoine lightens up in short order, but it takes Lewis far longer.
Lewis wrote in a letter to his father, “If I had never seen the horrible spectacle which these coarse, brainless English schoolboys present, there might be a danger of becoming like one myself.”
He must have been very popular with the other boys in the lunch hall.
But let’s give Lewis his due. We’ve all seen this movie. You can picture the withdrawn and studious child in the boy's prep school, trying to survive a culture driven by entitled kids who use hazing and violence to intimidate and punish individuality. The bookworm gets bullied and harassed and the school administrators barely take an interest in it. “Boys will be boys.”
If you favor the underdog, you don’t want them to be hateful, judgemental, or paranoid in return. That doesn’t make for a great protagonist. But this was Lewis’ problem. Tucked away in the library at Malvern, Lewis has recounted his feeling of being a “misfit, a heretic, an object of suspicion within the collective-minded and standardizing Public School system.”
To almost anyone else, this part of England would be seen as beautiful, and Malvern an idyllic, castle-like place to receive an education. To C.S. Lewis, who had been molded in the almost mythic “mysterious woods” of Ireland, he derided the “hot, ugly country of England” and the “flat, plain and ugly hills of Malvern” any chance he got.
People like this are exhausting.
Lewis’s brother, Warnie, remarked for many years that Lewis was more to blame for the nastiness than was Malvern College. Lewis was a “square peg in a round hole”, and instead of attempting to soften his edges, he took a little too much pride in sharpening them. It made his experience one of misery that C.S. Lewis would recount and write about in his literary career for decades to come.
Warnie even suggested that his brother go off and “amuse himself by detonating his cheap little stock of intellectual fireworks” with a private tutor instead of Malvern.
That tutor soon came into view, when William Thompson Kirkpatrick, a friend of the Lewis family, agreed to personally tutor the flailing young C.S. Lewis. The prickly teenager who would go on to pen some of the most iconic literary works of the 20th century had found his first mentor in Kirkpatrick.
Lewis arrived in Great Bookham, part of Surrey County south of London, and joined Kirkpatrick for a walk from the train station to his new tutor’s home.
Uncomfortable and grasping for a way to make conversation, Lewis led with the sharpest tool in his toolkit, passive-aggressive observation of his surroundings. He remarked to Kirkpatrick that Surrey was “wilder” than he expected upon arriving. Kirkpatrick, who had most certainly been briefed on Lewis’ hallmark attitude, began his work on Lewis. He stopped C.S. Lewis in his tracks and demanded an explanation for this remark.
What did Lewis mean by “wildness”, Kirkpatrick asked sharply. He pushed Lewis to explain why he expected any kind of environment at all. What books or photographs of Surrey had he studied? Did he consult a map on the train ride from London?
Why would anyone have an expectation set about a place they knew nothing about? Kirkpatrick wanted to know what informed Lewis’s thinking.
Lewis, of course, had nothing. The truth was revealed. Lewis simply hated England and held the whole country in contempt for the crime of it not being his home, Northern Ireland.
This made a deep impression on the future scholar and author, who recounted the experience in his partial autobiography, Surprised By Joy (1955). Kirkpatrick had run Lewis through the gambit of what’s known as the Socratic method, or discovery by way of asking questions.
What does “wild” mean to you?
Where have you traveled besides your homeland?
Can you define “ugly”?
In a way, toddlers and their love of the word “why” are the most natural Socratic teachers. You can tell them the sky is blue, and when they ask why, most of us aren’t armed with the knowledge to explain the mechanics of the color spectrum or how wavelengths of color in the atmosphere work. Some of us will do quick online research as an aid in explaining why the sky is blue, others will wave their hands and blurt out “because it is!”
It seems this approach by Kirkpatrick had the intended effect on Lewis, who began trying to distance himself when possible from having strong, useless opinions. Lewis didn’t take offense to his mentor's suggestion that he had no right to an opinion on life in Surrey County. Years later, Lewis would recall the exchange as “red beef and strong beer” for his spirit, a colorful way of saying he found it edifying to be challenged intellectually on his claims.
Could you take this kind of sudden scrutiny in stride and share your thought process with grace? It’s a tall order. Our world today is driven by opinion and encourages sounding off to friends, family and strangers alike.
We’ve never experienced in all of human history something like what social media is doing in our minds. We feel as though we’re seeing the way other people live and think through these apps, but it’s an illusion no more real than the shadows being cast on the wall in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. We see only what we’re meant to see, and our opinions become a reflection of that limited experience.
C.S. Lewis was brought to a kind of realization that you might call a “touch grass” moment. This little online colloquialism is used to shade someone who has an out of touch opinion about the world which reveals they don’t spend enough time in the physical world with real people.
Lewis’ love of myth and reading would end up gracing the whole world with the Chronicles of Narnia and a dozen other classic books, but to get there he had to learn to think and not rush to judgment on people, places or ideas. Maybe we should try that ourselves.
Once again.
Well said.
Vacuous opinions are anastomosing the culture, sending smaller and smaller groups of us down dark tributaries into dead marshes.
Well done.