the book.
As I have grown up, I have chased the story upon which our lives as humans are built. I have allowed my creativity to flow in a manner that I am always gazing off into the distance, attempting to look through the veil of reality, towards inspiration’s doorstep. In my experience, the best stories, the “Great Books” that I have read - (A Farewell to Arms, Mere Christianity, The Great Gatsby, among others…) - are stories that peel back the veil draping our world. The Screwtape Letters, however, is a story that does more than just that.
C.S Lewis is the writer I grew up on. My family, a Christian family, pushed us to understand the hidden (truly not so hidden) nature of Narnia’s tales, and I became infatuated with the world itself, even to the extent of playing Prince Caspian for Halloween multiple years in a row. But, I wanted to read about other aspects of our world–the myths, the scientific endeavors, sports, and so I looked elsewhere as I aged. As I arrived at my preteen years I found myself reading quite a lot of Rick Riordan's fantasy mythology books. I was fascinated by the similarities between mythologies, and it made me question the “truth” of religion as a whole. This inevitably led me to being a bit more distant from my family in some regard.
One day, desiring to read the next Percy Jackson novel, I went to Barnes and Noble with my father. As we arrived, he told me that I could not get the Percy Jackson novel if I did not also purchase The Screwtape Letters first. And so I did. But I put off reading it, almost afraid of the truth I was bound to uncover from the mind(or the stumbling around) of CS Lewis. And that is where this story begins. After a few months of it sitting on my bedside table underneath scattered sheets of paper from stories I had written, I picked it up and read the first page. And then. Being the rebellious type, I went to sleep. Only to find myself picking up the next page the next night. And the cycle continued. And with that cycle I found myself pushing back on the truth it revealed because I was not mature enough to recognize the simplistic truth in the words he wrote. And then I finished it for the first time, and realized I must go back for seconds. This was something I truly never did, at least at that point in my life. And with that being the reason for me reading the book in the first place, I have found a home within it.
Each letter to Wormwood from Screwtape is a moment of human frailty and naivete being thrust into the spotlight upon which we view the livelihood of life itself as these characters are not human and yet they experience the humanity of indecision, of death itself(as they are in close contact with death), and the idea that there must be a “good” as what they are doing is “evil.” I think the experience this book provided for me was to always look for the rips in reality as inspiration strikes. Seeking out inspiration allows the inherent death of the self to be forgotten and, in turn, to craft something purely among the life you are forced to live. We all will die, and as we write, we must understand that fact, for C.S. Lewis understood this dilemma. This is why the patient must suffer, why we must make the patient question. Because we as humans are patients of life, and death is truly the end so understanding that frailty of life is what will force us to question our “self” and question the world and reality upon which we have been placed within.
Our world is often hidden by the complexity the human experience provides us. Are we then to stand still and simply allow the world to revolve as it has without questioning the complexity we all should take part in? As The Screwtape Letters does brilliantly, there are moments when you write, where you sing, and when you dance where the simplistic devotion of the self becomes the thing you understand. Here is just one of those moments where Screwtape, writing to Wormwood speaks directly to the human mind. “If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don’t let him get away from that invaluable ‘real life.’ But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is ‘the results of modern investigation.” The idea of ignorance being bliss, if bliss turns out to be eternal damnation, is exactly the fear in which Lewis writes. And it’s the fear in which I write. The veil will be shut completely if ignorance breeds, because ignorance breeds insanity if our questions become ignorant.
Lewis encountered the other side (either metaphorically or truthfully) and understood that what he saw was something important. To be something that hides reality, and conveys this feeling of imperfect perfection. Telling us as man(kind) that we must be ignorant for the truth as the truth is nothing we should want.This is always a struggle for me, should I be ignorant to the chaos, or will my ignorance breed insanity? Blurring the lines between reality and the world we live so within is exactly the dilemma Lewis writes about. That was the point of Narnia was it not? To open up a gate to a world where nothing was hidden. The characters understood that Aslan was the hero. That they were meant to serve, and that the evil cold that fell upon the stories was meant to be just that. Cold.
This entire book is a question of morality, and recently, I have discovered the most interesting metaphor for morality itself. The sentence. There is a subjectivity in how we interpret these sentences. As there is with morality. Must good be based upon a moral foundation such as God? Or are we able to fashion ourselves as apes in the manner that allows us to understand “good” and “evil” as purely the question of harm being caused upon us? Let me expand upon this dilemma. This sentence is five words. And this sentence is, too. Also, this one as well. But if I expand the sentence length to nine. Then, I create a dilemma. The dilemma is that within the sentence, within the paragraphs the sentences make up, the humanity within the sentence is what causes change, much is the case with humans themselves. Morality shifts and changes depending on our own experience(this is not talking about absolute truths, simply those of subjectivity) and in that the sentence provides the platform to explore that subjectivity. Is our morality bound by these monotonous ideas of what right and wrong truly is? Or is it bound by nothing but the experience we put forth, forced to shift and change just as the sentence does. That is what I see in Lewis’ writing of the Screwtape Letters.
In my own life there has always been this chase to understand the understandable. Perhaps that is why my father encouraged me to read the book in the first place. He saw something within me, a desire to understand something. And this book provided that. I was skeptical at first, but once I realized something within the story, it shifted my entire way of viewing this world. I must never settle in my learning. The justification to never settle in my learning, to never allow myself to be something purely among the world, but rather to stick out. If I think I have learned and yet the words and the stats and the data end up flowing out of my head as an eternal stream of nothingness then THIS infatuation with learning will dwindle simply because it is not able to provide my soul with anything to which I should remember. I must never be ignorant to the things beyond the veil, and that is exactly what our world is attempting to push onto us. Our world will blind our eyes and our senses with constant affirmation of ‘progress’ when truly we are nothing more than the sum of each other. If our lostness ends up causing us decay, then I want no part of that. C.S. Lewis wants no part of that either.
