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XIII
MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
It seees to tell a very si and the short of it is that you have let the rave, and I really see no reason why I should try to shield you from the consequences or your inefficiency A repentance and renewal of what the other side call "grace" on the scale which you describe is a defeat of the first order It amounts to a second conversion - and probably on a deeper level than the first
As you ought to have known, the asphyxiating cloud which prevented your attacking the patient on his walk back from the old mill, is a well-known phenoenerally appears when He is directly present to the patient under certain modes not yet fully classified Some humans are permanently surrounded by it and therefore inaccessible to us
And now for your blunders On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends In the second place, you allowed him to walk down to the old h country he really likes, and taken alone In other words you allowed hinorant as not to see the danger of this? The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unive the man who feels the to da hied in self-pity for iinary distresses - you would try to protect him at all costs froenuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and un to da off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures How can you have failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him meet? Didn’t you foresee that it would just kill by contrast all the tru him to value? And that the sort of pleasure which the book and the walk gave hierous of all? That it would peel off fro on it, andhi him from the Enemy, you wanted to detach hi so Now, all that is undone
Of course I know that the Enemy also wants to detach men from themselves, but in a different way Remember always, that He really likes the little vermin, and sets an absurd value on the distinctness of every one of the their selves, He onlythe claives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be hted to see the even their innocent wills to His, He hates to see the away from their own nature for any other reason And we should always encourage thes and i-point, hich the Eneet hiained; even in things indifferent it is always desirable substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a hus I myself would carry this very far I wouldpersonal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is so quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting sta of virtue theetfulness about them which I distrust Thein the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-arainst some of our subtlest modes of attack You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the "i teer taste for tripe and onions
It rereat thing is to prevent his doing anything As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance Let the little brutein it Let him, if he has any bent that rite a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilising the seeds which the Ene but act No aination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will As one of the huthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened The , the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel,
Your affectionate uncle
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