23 AUGUST
23 AUGUST
Profile of a Glutton: “All I Want. . .”
Screwtape continues his profile of gluttony in action:
The real value of the quiet, unobtrusive work which Glubose has been doing for years on this old woman can be gauged by the way in which her belly now dominates her whole life. The woman is in what may be called the ‘All-I-want’ state of mind. All she wants is a cup of tea properly made, or an egg properly boiled, or a slice of bread properly toasted. But she never finds any servant or any friend who can do these simple things ‘properly’—because her ‘properly’ conceals an insatiable demand for the exact, and almost impossible, palatal pleasures which she imagines she remembers from the past; a past described by her as ‘the days when you could get good servants’ but known to us as the days when her senses were more easily pleased and she had pleasures of other kinds which made her less dependent on those of the table. Meanwhile, the daily disappointment produces daily ill temper: cooks give notice and friendships are cooled. If ever the Enemy introduces into her mind a faint suspicion that she is too interested in food, Glubose counters it by suggesting to her that she doesn’t mind what she eats herself but ‘does like to have things nice for her boy’. In fact, of course, her greed has been one of the chief sources of his domestic discomfort for many years.
—from The Screwtape Letters
1863 Albert James Lewis, father of C. S. Lewis, is born in Cork, County Cork, Ireland.
1908 Flora Hamilton Lewis (age forty-six) dies of cancer on her husband Albert’s forty-fifth birthday, leaving two young sons, Warren, thirteen, and Jack, nine. During this year Albert Lewis’s father and brother also die.