Megan’s Reviews > The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945 > Status Update

Both Jack and Tollers regularly wrote in their correspondence about personal experience of cowardice. I have felt...well, encouraged!--by their vulnerable longings for courage as they felt great fear of loss.

Yet the moral blindness of the twentieth century represented something entirely novel: ideologies that threatened to destroy the foundations of civilized life. Tolkien and Lewis believed that only an outlook rooted in the ancient truths could resist it. "The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds," Lewis wrote, "and this can be done only by reading old books." p.115