MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
Yes. A period of sexual temptation is an excellent time for working in a
subordinate attack on the patient's peevishness. It may even be the main attack,
as long as he thinks it the subordinate one. But here, as in everything else,
the way must be prepared for your moral assault by darkening his intellect.
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 t?te-?-t?te 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
his chattels. He is also, in theory, committed a total service of the Enemy; and
if the Enemy appeared to him in bodily form and demanded that total service for
even one day, he would not refuse. He would be greatly relieved if that one day
involved nothing harder than listening to the conversation of a foolish woman;
and he would be relieved almost to the pitch of disappointment if for one
half-hour in that day the Enemy said "Now you may go and amuse yourself". 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.
The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are
always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in
Hell and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern resistance to chastity
comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies—those vast and perilous
estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find
themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure
of Another! It is as if a royal child whom his father has placed, for love's
sake, in titular command of some great province, under the real rule of wise
counsellors, should come to fancy he really owns the cities, the forests, and
the corn, in the same way as he owns the bricks on the nursery floor.
We produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We teach
them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun—the finely
graded differences that run from "my boots" through "my dog", "my servant", "my
wife", "my father", "my master" and "my country", to "my God". They can be
taught to reduce all these senses to that of "my boots", the "my" of ownership.
Even in the nursery a child can be taught to mean by "my Teddy-bear" not the old
imagined recipient of affection to whom it stands in a special relation (for
that is what the Enemy will teach them to mean if we are not careful) but "the
bear I can pull to pieces if I like".
And at the other end of the scale, we have taught men to say "My God" in a sense not really very different from "My boots", meaning "The God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services and whom I exploit from the pulpit—the God I have done a corner in".
And all the time the joke is that the word "Mine" in its fully possessive sense
cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In he long run either Our
Father or the Enemy will say "Mine" of each thing that exists, and specially
of each man. They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time,
their souls, and their bodies really belong—certainly not to them, whatever
happens. At present the Enemy says "Mine" of everything on the pedantic,
legalistic ground that He made it: Our Father hopes in the end to say "Mine" of
all things on the more realistic and dynamic ground of conquest,
Your affectionate uncle,
Letter TWENTYONE
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