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Y DEAR: WORMWOOD, M When I told you not to fill your letters with rubbish about the war, I meant; of course, that I did not want to have your rather infantile rhapsodies about the death of men and the destruction of cities. In so far as the war really concerns the spiritual state of the patient, I naturally want full reports. And on this aspect you seem singularly obtuse.
Thus you tell me with glee that there is reason to expect heavy air raids on the town where the creature lives_ This is a crying example of something I have complained about already — your readiness to forget the main point in your immediate enjoy- ment of human suffering: Do you not know that bombs kill men? Or do you not ` realise that the patient s death, at this moment; is precisely what we want to avoid? He ha8 escaped' the worldly friends with_ whom you tried to entangle him; he has 'fallen in love with a very Christian woman and is temporarily immune from your attacks on his chastity: and the various methods of corrupting his spiritual life which we have been trying are SO far unsuccessful.
At.the present moment, as the I4I full impact of the war draws nearer and his worldly hopes take 2 proportionately lower place in" his mind, full of his defencc work, full of the girl, forced to attend to his neigh- bours more than he has ever done before and liking it more than he expected; " taken out of himself" as the humans say, and daily increas- ing in conscious dependence on the Enemy, he will almost certainly be lost to us if he is killed tonight: This is $ obvious that I am ashamed to write it. I sometimes wonder if you young fiends are not kept out on temptation-duty too long at a time — if you are not in some danger of becoming infected by the sentiments and values of the humans among whom you work_ They,_ of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good: But that is because we have taught them to do 80_ Do not let uS be infected by our own propaganda.
I know it seems strange that your chief aim at the moment should be the very same thing for which the patient's lover and his mother are praying namely _ his bodily safety But S0 it is; you should be guarding him like the apple of your eye. If he dies now you lose him If he survives the war, there is always hope: The Enemy has guarded him from you through the first great wave of temptations. But, if only he can be kept alive, you have time itself for your ally:
The long; dull monotonous years of middle-aged prOS- perity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather. You see, it is SO hard: for these creatures to persevere_ The" routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resent- ment with which we teach them to respond to it— all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition. If, 0n the other hand, the middle years prove prosperous, our position is even stronger_ Prosperity knits a man to the World_ He feels that he is afinding his place in it" while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance;, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him & sense of being really at home in earth which is just what we want.
You will notice that the young are generally less uwilling to die than the middle-aged and the old. The truth is that the Enemy, having oddly destined these mere animals to life in His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effect- 143 ively from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else. That is why we must often wish long life to our patients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unravelling their souls from Heaven ad build- ing up a firm attachment to the earth: While they are young we find them always shooting off at a tangent:
Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incal- culable winds of fantasy and music and poetry the mere face of a girl, the song of bird, or the sight of a horizon are always blowing our whole structure away. They will not apply themselves steadily to worldly advancement, prudent connections, and the policy of safety first_ So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or science or psychology, or what not_ Real worldliness is a work of time assisted, of course, by pride, for we teach them to describe the creeping death as good sense or Maturity or Experience Experience, in the peculiar sense we teach them to give it, iS, by the bye, a most useful word_ A great human philosopher nearly let our secret out when he said that where Virtue is concerned 'Experience is the mother of illusion 9) _ but thanks'to a change in Fashion, and also, of course, to the Historical Point of View, we have largely rendered his book innocuous. How valuable time is to uS may be gauged by the fact that the Eneny allows us so little of it: The majority of the human race dies in infancy; of the survivors, a good many die in youth.
It is obvious that to Him human birth is important chiefly as the qualification for human death, and death solely as the gate to that other kind of life. We are allowed to work only on a selected minority of the race, for what humans call a normal life is the ex- ception. Apparently He wants some but only very few of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have had the experi- ence of resisting uS through an earthly life of sixty or seventy years. Well; there is our opportunity_ The smaller it is, the better we must use it.
Whatever you do, keep your patient as safe as you possibly can, Your affectionate uncle SCREWTAPE Screwtape Letters K
Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE