Weekly Reading Practice 03

P.c.: Miller Elementary

#Time: 08 minutes

#Note down the unknown words

#Try to make summery of one and half line

#Give your feedback

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C. S. Lewis was many things: scholar, poet, novelist, apologist, friend to J.R.R. Tolkien, and husband to Joy. But in a 1957 essay, he stepped into another role: that of, as one blogger puts it, a “get-off-my-lawn, wide-jawed, beslippered, well aged, first class curmudgeon.”

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I’m almost tempted to say “Ok boomer,” even though Lewis was a member of the Lost Generation. (Also such a statement is a clear case of “chronological snobbery,” which Lewis defined as a term and denounced as a mindset.)

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That essay, “Delinquents in the Snow” from the collection God in the Dock, begins with Lewis griping about neighborhood kids who constantly bother him by singing terrible renditions of Christmas carols at his door and expecting money in return. Then, with increasing crankiness, he tells the reader that these are probably the same kids who broke into his shed and stole some stuff recently. Other than Lewis’s intuition, there’s no connection between the carolers and the discourse on criminal justice that follows. Like I said, it’s a weird essay.

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Basically, Lewis is angry that the kids who robbed his shed were let off easy by the court and will therefore likely grow up to commit “burglary, arson, rape, and murder.” Without any additional evidence, he extrapolates this single event into a nationwide trend and predicts that unless something is done about it, the result will be either an outbreak of vigilante violence or a full-scale revolution.

Acknowledgment: The American Conservative