This is C.S. Lewis’s answer to the question: What use is there for academic studies in a time of war?
That “permanent human situation” here, I think, being pain, suffering, and death.
How should we act differently in the face of these realities?!
Uh – yeah – these are always our realities…
As Lewis has said before, it is not evident that (in fear) you should alter your life in any major way.
His answer, in brief, is that such studies have the same use, and the same uselessness, in time of war as in time of peace, because “the war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.”
-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)