Now, whatever he was, and as you know, he was a great many things.

CS Lewis was, for me, first and foremost, the absolutely unforgettable friend,

the friend with whom I was in close touch for over 40 years,

the friend you might come to regard hardly as another human being,

but almost as a part of the furniture of my existence.

That is a very lovely little tribute to CS Lewis from his dear friend, Owen Barfield,

a name that probably rings many fewer bells than Lewis's own.

He was much less famous than Lewis, but he was profoundly important in Lewis's life

and in the movement that we now call the Inklings, who's also close with JRR Tolkien.

I've been waiting on this show to talk about him for a while because he's one of those guys

that there's a little bit of anxiety for me, even approaching it since he changed my life.

So profoundly, his first book, which is not what I'm going to talk about today, poetic diction.

His first book was one that I found in a library in Oxford, because Lewis himself kind of

mentions it obliquely in the footnote of book called Miracles that he wrote.

And I found the thing that the footnote was about really interesting.

And so I went and chased down this book, poetic diction, which is about the nature of language,

and the nature of poetry. And I just remember kind of pouring over it with this incredible excitement,

you know, like how is somebody else is sort of thinking about these things,

which is sort of a lot of my own thoughts kind of weirdly reflected back at me.

And in some ways, that's what I want to start with today is talking about the nature of the

relationships in the Inklings and what it must have been like to be discovering some of the things

together that Barfield and Lewis and Tolkien were discovering together.

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