MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I sometimes wonder whether you think you have been sent into the world for your
own amusement. I gather, not from your miserably inadequate report but from that
of the Infernal Police, that the patient's behaviour during the first raid has
been the worst possible.
He has been very frightened and thinks himself a great coward and therefore feels no pride; but he has done everything his duty demanded and perhaps a bit more. Against this disaster all you can produce on the credit side is a burst of ill temper with a dog that tripped him up, some excessive cigarette smoking, and the forgetting of a prayer. What is the use of
whining to me about your difficulties? If you are proceeding on the Enemy's idea
of "justice" and suggesting that your opportunities and intentions should be
taken into account, then I am not sure that a charge of heresy does not lie
against you. At any rate, you will soon find that the justice of Hell is purely
realistic, and concerned only with results. Bring us back food, or be food
yourself.
The only constructive passage in your letter is where you say that you still
expect good results from the patient's fatigue. That is well enough. But it
won't fall into your hands. Fatigue can produce extreme gentleness, and quiet of
mind, and even something like vision. If you have often seen men led by it into
anger, malice and impatience, that is because those men have had efficient
tempters. The paradoxical thing is that moderate fatigue is a better soil for
peevishness than absolute exhaustion. This depends partly on physical causes,
but partly on something else. It is not fatigue simply as such that produces the
anger, but unexpected demands on a man already tired. Whatever men expect they
soon come to think they have a right to: the sense of disappointment can, with
very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury. 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,
Letter THIRTY
SCREWTAPE