Back to school: Lewis recommends three exercises to defend against the enemies of learning (Exercise 3)

The follow excerpt is from a sermon C.S. Lewis preached in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Oxford University in Autumn 1939, thus the title, “Learning in War-Time.” Even though we are not on the brink of WWII, we do live on the edge of precipice, making Lewis’ perspective on higher education just as relevant now as it was then.
Perhaps it may be useful to mention the three mental exercises which may serve as defences against the three enemies which war raises up against the scholar….
    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 0f 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 of that—of a 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% 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. Does it decrease our chances of dying at peace with God? I cannot believe it. If active service does not persuade a man to prepare for death, what conceivable concatenation of circumstances would? Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them. War makes death real to us: and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.
C.S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time,” The Essential C.S. Lewis (New York: Touchstone, 1986) 375-376.

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