"Das Schwert soll entscheiden!"

C. S. Lewis hat heute Geburtstag, den einhundertelften.

Garrison Keillor berichtet in seinem Writer's Almanac von heute zwei Anekdoten, die ich jedenfalls noch nicht kannte:

"While friendly with his professorial peers, Lewis worked to ensure that he was an imposing, unapproachable figure to his students at Oxford. Once, a student had come to office hours to discuss the poet John Keats, and was later witnessed running down the stairs as Professor C.S. Lewis yelled after him: "If you think that way about Keats, you needn't come here again!" Another time, he recited one hundred lines of a narrative poem by Matthew Arnold to a student who was not convinced of the poem's merit. When the student still refused to acknowledge that the poem was any good, Professor Lewis proclaimed, "The sword must settle it!" Lewis handed him a rapier and drew the stunned student into a fencing match. The pupil was nicked by his professor's sword and bled a few drops."