Book #50: The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

Well, I am cruising to a new low of books read this year with only 50 when hitting November. Oh well! This was another book club read--one that I've already read, but I was looking forward to re-reading. This book is one of the best at pointing out the flaws held by general humanity. Its format is so startling and different from our normal viewpoint (from the perspective of a devil trying to tempt a man) that it makes you think more and become more aware of how you have been tempted and worked on.

I was in charge of the discussion at book club last night and basically I just wanted to read half of the chapters out loud. But these quotes were my favorite parts.

This part was my absolute favorite. It is absolutely terrifying to read, because of how applicable it is to us today--particularly with social media. How many people spend the majority of their time doing exactly what Screwtape is talking about here--scrolling aimlessly looking for nothing to entertain them? And it's so important to remember what he is saying about how this habit isn't just neutral--it is actively bringing us away from God and closer to Satan:
"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 also 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 outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last 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 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 reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a 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 wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters in the extent to which you 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 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." (pages 59-61)

This following part also stuck out to me because of how much it applies to me (yikes!):

“Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury…. Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. Now he is not yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy are in themselves too much for it. They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. 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... The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift… He is also, in theory, committed to a total service of the Enemy; and if the Enemy appeared to him in bodily form and demanded that total service for even one day he would not refuse." (page 110-111)

“The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship… Just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty" (page 135).

“But, if only he can be kept alive, you have time itself for your ally. The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather. You see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere” (page 155).

Lewis had just such a sense of human nature. It's amazing to me how much of his work strikes a chord--and particularly how much of it seems to relate to LDS doctrine. That must be because it is filled with truth.