Nicole’s AP English Blog

            Screwtape introduces Glubose, the caretaker of the Wormwood’s patient’s mother, and four rules on how to keep their relationship in poor condition.

1.      “Keep his mind on the inner life.”

This means: force him to neglect the obvious about himself, and focus on his inner conversion.

2.      “It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous.”

This means: create a crude and erroneous portrayal of his mother so that he may be praying for an imaginary person.

3.      “When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other.  Work on that.”

This means: let the patient be irritated without believing that he irritates his mother.

4.      “You and Glubose must see to it that each of these two fools has a sort of double-standard.”

This means: encourage the patient to demand that his utterances be taken at face value and judged on actual words; make him judge his mother’s utterances with the fullest and most over-sensitive interpretation.

            It frightens me how similarly the “patient” and I exist.  I am now or have been quite guilty of these foolish actions.  It is obviously the aim of Lewis to render everyday foolishness as the work of demons.  Lewis’s opening attempts to influence his readers (me) are applicable if nothing else.  I haven’t begun to pray yet.

             In this letter Screwtape expounds his theories about how image is associated with faith.  People are supposedly the faces of their religions, which are then interpreted by society.  If a Jewish man wears clothes deemed “ridiculous”, then his religion must be absurd.  Everyone judges each other based on appearance; that’s a petty argument Screwtape.  However, the notion that spirituality is largely pictorial is true and supported by all faiths.  Wormwood is told to focus on the image of his patient’s churchgoers to disturb his belief.

            “The Enemy allows this disappointment or anti-climax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman.  The Enemy

allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavor.  It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek.”

            God supposedly allows this disappointment to occur in order to prove the concept of “free will” or “free love”.

I finally rediscovered the blog I made this summer; alas I thought the password was lost forever on this devious computer of mine.  It quite apparently was not, which is why I may now begin to dissect my choice of literature for this semester, The Screwtape Letters.  I chose this particular piece based on my admiration for C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.  My sister learned to read before she hit kindergarten from those educational stories which had the most basic sentence structure imaginable. ‘It rides a bike.’  I for one couldn’t understand why the main character was being called It in such books. (As far as I know they weren’t written by Stephen King, although It did look particularly like a clown.)  Instead, my dad and I would take turns reading Lewis’s fantastic children’s stories to each other; this is my clichéd story of learning how to read and loving C.S. Lewis.  I read one of his earliest works, Out of the Silent Planet, several years ago; this first installment of The Space Triology left me with little interest in further reading his work.

While I know that the Chronicles are his most popular writing, his primary focus of writing was as a Christian apologist.  I purchased The Screwtape Letters months before the independent assignment was given, with the intention of reading it for a look into more of Lewis’s prominent fiction.  So far I have read the first four pages (the first chapter), which I found intriguing.  Uncle Screwtape, a senior demon, relays his thoughts on how to capture a man’s mind to his nephew, dear Wormwood. 

“Your business is to fix his attention on the stream [of immediate sense experiences].  Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’.” 

I find that I am the character engulfed in “real life”- and wonder how this novel is going to react with my present lack of religious belief.  I find it ironic that Lewis’s demon has literature christened as “invaluable”, since the author is still trying to press the issues of belief into my face.  Do I waste time reading or experiencing what is “invaluable”?