Walking With C.S. Lewis

 

Joseph Pearce has surfaced again! The indefatigable promoter of literature, Chesterton, Lewis, and their friends has turned up in The Imaginative Conservative with an article titled "Walking With C.S. Lewis".

The article - which is actually a reprint of an 2015 one - begins...

I have always been a keen walker, or “hiker” in the American idiom. I have ambled, rambled, scrambled or otherwise perambulated across large swathes of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland; I have roamed around Europe; and I have even ventured, since my arrival on this side of the Pond fourteen years ago, to traipse through parts of the New World. I am happy to walk alone or with friends, and I am always happy to walk with ghosts. ...

Belloc puts in an appearance. But then we get to Lewis ... 

One of my favourite walks of this sort is to follow C.S. Lewis in The Pilgrim’s Regress, in which the pseudo-autobiographical protagonist traverses the Mappa Mundi of Lewis’s philosophical imagination, arguing with heretics and battling with dragons. I was, therefore, delighted to learn that a new annotated edition of this under-read and underrated classic has just been published (The Pilgrim’s Regress: Wade Annotated Edition, 2014), edited and introduced by David C. Downing, a Lewis scholar of deservedly solid repute, whose work I have known for years. Few works of Lewis are in more need of annotation than this allegorical journey through intellectual error and I was excited to see how Downing’s notes would illustrate Lewis’s path to conversion. ...

You can read the rest of the article here.