prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather. You see,it is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradualdecay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt aspain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again andagain defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and theinarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it—all thisprovides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition. If, on theother hand, the middle years prove prosperous, our position is even stronger.Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is “finding his place in it”,while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his wideningcircle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure ofabsorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home inearth which is just what we want. You will notice that the young are generallyless unwilling to die than the middle-aged and the old.The truth is that the Enemy, having oddly destined these mere animals to lifein His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger offeeling at home anywhere else. That is why we must often wish long life to ourpatients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unravellingtheir souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth. Whilethey are young we find them always shooting off at a tangent. Even if wecontrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incalculable winds offantasy and music and poetry—the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or thesight of a horizon—are always blowing our whole structure away. They will notapply themselves steadily to worldly advancement, prudent connections, and thepolicy of safety first. So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our bestmethod, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe thatearth 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 asgood sense or Maturity or Experience. Experience, in the peculiar sense we teachthem to give it, is, by the bye, a most useful word. A great human philosophernearly let our secret out when he said that where Virtue is concerned“Experience is the mother of illusion”; but thanks to a change in Fashion, andalso, of course, to the Historical Point of View, we have largely rendered hisbook innocuous.How valuable time is to us may be gauged by the fact that the Enemy allowsus 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 importantchiefly 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 therace, for what humans call a “normal life” is the exception. Apparently He wantssome—but only a very few—of the human animals with which He is peoplingHeaven to have had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of sixtyor seventy years. Well, there is our opportunity. The smaller it is, the better wemust use it. Whatever you do, keep your patient as safe as you possibly can,Your affectionate uncleSCREWTAPE
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MAGDALEN COLLEGEJuly 5, 1941
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at his elbow in a moment. Before I
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like. Keep everything hazy in his m
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the imagined mother will ever flow
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meant to ask Him for charity, let t
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The Screwtape LettersMY DEAR WORMWO
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The Screwtape LettersVIMY DEAR WORM
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The Screwtape LettersVIIMY DEAR WOR
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The Screwtape LettersVIIIMY DEAR WO
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The Screwtape LettersIXMY DEAR WORM
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Your affectionate uncleSCREWTAPE
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I see much (indeed more than I like
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