Book #41: The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis

I remember the first time I read The Screwtape Letters, maybe seven years ago, I was absolutely blown away by the premise and by how straightforward it was. It was totally different than what I'd imagined it would be (for some reason I read it without having heard what it was about) and I could not believe how seemingly . . . accurate Screwtape was (although "accurate" feels like the wrong word). If I were to really imagine individual devils watching over us and trying to think of ways to get us to "choose the wrong" and pull us towards Hell, I think they would think exactly like Screwtape and Wormwood do. That's the unsettling thing about this book--it kind of uncovers the underlying mentalities that we all have that are bad for us and bring us further from heaven.

This time around, there were a few sections that hit me as especially appropriate (probably because they are things I have been struggling with lately), and I thought I'd write them down so that I could remember them later. These are long, but really struck me as true. This first one is about how we can waste our time doing nothing egregious but how that's almost as bad as actually sinning because it makes us worse off in the end:

"As uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and out-going activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, sot hat at least he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, 'I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.' The Christians describe the Enemy as one 'without whom Nothing is strong'. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickeness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you are able to separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts" (59-61).

This was the other one that I really took to heart, about how we feel like we own our time and dislike having "our time" interrupted by having to do things we don't want to do:

"You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption 'My time is my own'. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.
You have here a delicate tax. The assumption which you want him to go on making is so absurd, that, if once it is questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defence. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels. He is also, in theory, committed to a total service of the Enemy; and if the Enemy appeard to him in bodily form and demanded that total service for even one day, he would not refuse. He would be greatly relieved if that one day involved nothing harder than listening to the conversation of a foolish woman; and he would be relieved almost to the pitch of disappointment if for one half-hour in that day the Enemy said 'Now you may go an amuse yourself'" (112-113).

I really am amused by a lot of the things Screwtape says in this book, and I feel like it was a good exercise in self-reflection as I read it. It's good to realize that there are a lot of thoughts and thought processes you want to avoid, and to have those pointed out by a "devil" makes it a lot more clear how you want to be thinking. So I'm glad to have re-read this book, and I'm sure I'll revisit it again sometime in the future.