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XXI

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

Yes A period of sexual te in a subordinate attack on the patient’s peevishness Itas he thinks it the subordinate one But here, as in everything else, the wayhis 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-te throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of ti 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¨ºte-¨¤-t&uear Now he is not yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy are in theards his ti stolen You uard in his mind the curious assu that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours Let hirievous tax that portion of this property which he has to enerous 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 ht

You have here a delicate task The assu 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 ht 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 Eneo 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 assu I uments 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 hu up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell and weso 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 coreat 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 fro", "my servant", "my wife", "my father", "ht to reduce all these senses to that of "my boots", the "ht to ined 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 fro "The God on whouished 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 hu run either Our Father or the Ene that exists, and specially of each man They will find out in the end, never fear, to who - certainly not to them, whatever happens At present the Eneround that He made it: Our Father hopes in the end to say "Mine" of all things on the round of conquest,

Your affectionate uncle

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