The headmaster of this school had already been prosecuted for cruelty to his students when Lewis arrived in 1908, and a few years later he would be certified insane. Both boys wrote again and again to their father, begging to come home, and Lewis prayed for relief from the constant savage beatings. But he did not escape “Belsen” until it was closed in 1910. As a result, he not only became estranged from God, but turned against his father, a pious, unpredictable lawyer of whom Lewis later wrote, “His emotions had always been uncontrolled. Under the pressure of anxiety his temper became incalculable; he spoke wildly and acted unjustly.” Lewis’s next English school was only es, and was constantly bullied and teased. “Holidays are Heaven, school is, well, death,” he wrote.
According to his most recent biographer, Alan Jacobs, Lewis was rescued from adolescent depression and despair by the discovery of myth, romance, and fairy tale, and by intense Wordsworthian experience of the natural world, which he called “Joy.” At fifteen he read Frazer’s The Golden Bough and began to see Christianity as only another Near Eastern myth of a dying and reviving god. Continuer la lecture de « Lewis always refused to discuss the relationship with his friends, and concealed it as much as possible from everyone else »