Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE XXII
MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
So! Your man is in love--and in the worst kind he could possibly have fallen into--and with a girl who does not even appear in the report you sent me.
You may be interested to learn that the little misunderstanding with the Secret Police which you tried to raise about some unguarded expressions in one of my letters has been tided over.
If you were reckoning on that to secure my good offices, you will find yourself mistaken.
You shall pay for that as well as for your other blunders.
Meanwhile I enclose a little booklet, just issued, on the new House of Correction for Incompetent Tempters.
It is profusely illustrated and you will not find a dull page in it.
I have looked up this girl's dossier and am horrified at what I find.
Not only a Christian but such a Christian--a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic, mouse-like, watery, insignificant, virginal, bread-and-butter miss.
The little brute.
She makes me vomit.
She stinks and scalds through the very pages of the dossier.
It drives me mad, the way the world has worsened.
We'd have had her to the arena in the old days.
That's what her sort is made for.
Not that she'd do much good there, either.
A two-faced little cheat (I know the sort) who looks as if she'd faint at the sight of blood and then dies with a smile.
A cheat every way. Looks as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth and yet has a satirical wit.
The sort of creature who'd find ME funny!
Filthy insipid little prude--and yet ready to fall into this booby's arms like any other breeding animal.
Why doesn't the Enemy blast her for it, if He's so moonstruck by virginity--instead of looking on there, grinning?
He's a hedonist at heart.
All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a faAade.
Or only like foam on the sea shore.
Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure.
He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are "pleasures for evermore".
Ugh!
I don't think He has the least inkling of that high and austere mystery to which we rise in the Miserific Vision.
He's vulgar, Wormwood.
He has a bourgeois mind.
He has filled His world full of pleasures.
There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least--sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working, Everything has to be twisted before it's any use to us.
We fight under cruel disadvantages.
Nothing is naturally on our side. (Not that that excuses you.
I'll settle with you presently.
You have always hated me and been insolent when you dared.)
Then, of course, he gets to know this woman's family and whole circle.
Could you not see that the very house she lives in is one that he ought never to have entered?
The whole place reeks of that deadly odour.
The very gardener, though he has only been there five years, is beginning to acquire it.
Even guests, after a week-end visit, carry some of the smell away with them.
The dog and the cat are tainted with it.
And a house full of the impenetrable mystery.
We are certain (it is a matter of first principles) that each member of the family must in some way be making capital out of the others--but we can't find out how.
They guard as jealously as the Enemy Himself the secret of what really lies behind this pretence of disinterested love.
The whole house and garden is one vast obscenity.
It bears a sickening resemblance to the description one human writer made of Heaven; "the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence"
Music and silence--how I detest them both!