It is after men have given in to the irremediable, after they have despaired of relief and ceased to think even a half-hour ahead, that the dangers of humbled and gentle weariness begin.
To produce the best results from the patient's fatigue, therefore, you must feed him with false hopes.
Put into his mind plausible reasons for believing that the air-raid will not be repeated. Keep him comforting himself with the thought of how much he will enjoy his bed next night.
Exaggerate the weariness by making him think it will soon be over; for men usually feel that a strain could have been endured no longer at the very moment when it is ending, or when they think it is ending.
In this, as in the problem of cowardice, the thing to avoid is the total commitment.
Whatever he says, let his inner resolution be not to bear whatever comes to him, but to bear it "for a reasonable period"--and let the reasonable period be shorter than the trial is likely to last.
It need not be much shorter; in attacks on patience, chastity, and fortitude, the fun is to make the man yield just when (had he but known it) relief was almost in sight.
I do not know whether he is likely to meet the girl under conditions of strain or not.
If he does, make full use of the fact that up to a certain point, fatigue makes women talk more and men talk less.
Much secret resentment, even between lovers, can be raised from this.
Probably the scenes he is now witnessing will not provide material for an intellectual attack on his faith--your previous failures have put that out of your power.
But there is a sort of attack on the emotions which can still be tried.
It turns on making him feel, when first he sees human remains plastered on a wall, that this is "what the world is really like" and that all his religion has been a fantasy.
You will notice that we have got them completely fogged about the meaning of the word "real"'.
They tell each other, of some great spiritual experience,
"All that really happened was that you heard some music in a lighted building"; here
"Real" means the bare physical facts, separated from the other elements in the experience they actually had.
On the other hand, they will also say
"It's all very well discussing that high dive as you sit here in an armchair, but wait till you get up there and see what it's really like": here "real" is being used in the opposite sense to mean, not the physical facts (which they know already while discussing the matter in armchairs) but the emotional effect those facts will have on a human consciousness.
Either application of the word could be defended; but our business is to keep the two going at once so that the emotional value of the word "real" can be placed now on one side of the account, now on the other, as it happens to suit us.
The general rule which we have now pretty well established among them is that in all experiences which can make them happier or better only the physical facts are "Real" while the spiritual elements are "subjective"; in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them the spiritual elements are the main reality and to ignore them is to be an escapist.
Thus in birth the blood and pain are "real", the rejoicing a mere subjective point of view; in death, the terror and ugliness reveal what death "really means".
The hatefulness of a hated person is "real"--in hatred you see men as they are, you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a "real" core of sexual appetite or economic association.
Wars and poverty are "really" horrible; peace and plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain sentiments.
The creatures are always accusing one another of wanting "to cat the cake and have it"; but thanks to our labours they are more often in the predicament of paying for the cake and not eating it.
Your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of Reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment,
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE XXXI
MY DEAR, MY VERY DEAR, WORMWOOD, MY POPPET, MY PIGSNIE,
How mistakenly now that all is lost you come whimpering to ask me whether the terms of affection in which I address you meant nothing from the beginning.
Far from it!
Rest assured, my love for you and your love for me are as like as two peas.
I have always desired you, as you (pitiful fool) desired me.
The difference is that I am the stronger.
I think they will give you to me now; or a bit of you.
Love you? Why, yes.
As dainty a morsel as ever I grew fat on.
You have let a soul slip through your fingers.
The howl of sharpened famine for that loss re-echoes at this moment through all the levels of the Kingdom of Noise down to the very Throne itself.
It makes me mad to think of it.
How well I know what happened at the instant when they snatched him from you!
There was a sudden clearing of his eyes (was there not?) as he saw you for the first time, and recognised the part you had had in him and knew that you had it no longer.
Just think (and let it be the beginning of your agony) what he felt at that moment; as if a scab had fallen from an old sore, as if he were emerging from a hideous, shell-like tetter, as if he shuffled off for good and all a defiled, wet, clinging garment.
By Hell, it is misery enough to see them in their mortal days taking off dirtied and uncomfortable clothes and splashing in hot water and giving little grunts of pleasure--stretching their eased limbs.
What, then, of this final stripping, this complete cleansing?
The more one thinks about it, the worse it becomes.
He got through so easily!
No gradual misgivings, no doctor's sentence, no nursing home, no operating theatre, no false hopes of life; sheer, instantaneous liberation.
One moment it seemed to be all our world; the scream of bombs, the fall of houses, the stink and taste of high explosive on the lips and in the lungs, the feet burning with weariness, the heart cold with horrors, the brain reeling, the legs aching; next moment all this was gone, gone like a bad dream, never again to be of any account.
Defeated, out-manuuvred fool!