What Ayn Rand really thought of C.S.Lewis

[GrayMouser]

Originally Posted by Eärniel

There is a reason why I keep those things under lock and key.


One of the reasons I wondered whether she intended to publish this. It sounds a lot like the stuff a teenager would write when they disagreed with something in their text books. But personally I'd write it in my notes, writing commentary on a textbook always felt like vandalising (and we usually had to sell them on).

Coleridge sounds like he could be pretty savage himself:

Of course, the marginalia that corrected, quarrelled, and attacked—“hostile marginalia,” as they’re called—were the most fun. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s copy of “Joan of Arc,” by Robert Southey,* Coleridge came up with so many objections that he had to abbreviate them, as in “L.M.,” for “ludicrous metaphor,” and “N.,” for “nonsense.” Like a censorious teacher, Coleridge wrote his comments in red ink, filling the margins and causing him to remark, “Mercy on us, if I go on thus I shall make the book what I suppose it never was before, red all thro’.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/0...#ixzz2P7JwlDBJ

And this:

A few of the marginalia in the books were wordless—for example, in Jack Kerouac’s copy of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” by Henry David Thoreau. Kerouac possessed this book but did not own it, having borrowed it from a local library in 1949 and never brought it back. On page 227, this sentence—“The traveller must be born again on the road”—was underlined in pencil, with a small, neat check mark beside it.