from The Screwtape Letters
“Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury.
And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied.
The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more
often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. Now you will have noticed that
nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned
on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor
(when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up
when he looked forward to a tête-à-tête with the friend), that throw him out of gear.
Now he is not yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy
are in themselves too much for it. They anger him because he regards his time as his
own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the
curious assumption, ‘My time is my own’. Let him have the feeling that he starts each
day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that
portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous
donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must
never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been
made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.
You have here a delicate task. The assumption which you want him to go on making is so absurd that, if once it is questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defence. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels. ... Now if he thinks about his assumption for a moment, even he is bound to realise that he is actually in this situation every day. When I speak of preserving this assumption in his mind, therefore, the last thing I mean you to do is to furnish him with arguments in its defence. There aren’t any. Your task is purely negative. Don’t let his thoughts come anywhere near it. Wrap a darkness about it; and in the centre of that darkness let his sense of ownership-in-Time lie silent, uninspected, and operative.”
~C. S. Lewis
[The Screwtape Letters – Set in Hell, one of Satan’s senior tempters, Screwtape, schemes meticulously to capture the soul of an unsuspecting human on earth.]
You have here a delicate task. The assumption which you want him to go on making is so absurd that, if once it is questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defence. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels. ... Now if he thinks about his assumption for a moment, even he is bound to realise that he is actually in this situation every day. When I speak of preserving this assumption in his mind, therefore, the last thing I mean you to do is to furnish him with arguments in its defence. There aren’t any. Your task is purely negative. Don’t let his thoughts come anywhere near it. Wrap a darkness about it; and in the centre of that darkness let his sense of ownership-in-Time lie silent, uninspected, and operative.”
~C. S. Lewis
[The Screwtape Letters – Set in Hell, one of Satan’s senior tempters, Screwtape, schemes meticulously to capture the soul of an unsuspecting human on earth.]
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