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XXII

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

So! Your man is in love - and in the worst kind he could possibly have fallen into - and with a girl who does not even appear in the report you sent me Youwith the Secret Police which you tried to raise about souarded expressions in one ofon that to secure ood offices, you will find yourself mistaken You shall pay for that as well as for your other blunders Meanwhile I enclose a little booklet, just issued, on the new House of Correction for Incompetent Tempters It is profusely illustrated and you will not find a dull page in it

I have looked up this girl’s dossier and am horrified at what I find Not only a Christian but such a Christian - a vile, sneaking, sinificant, virginal, bread-and-butter miss The little brute She es of the dossier It drives me mad, the way the world has worsened We’d have had her to the arena in the old days That’s what her sort is ood there, either A two-faced little cheat (I know the sort) who looks as if she’d faint at the sight of blood and then dies with a smile A cheat every way Looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and yet has a satirical wit The sort of creature who’d find ME funny! Filthy insipid little prude - and yet ready to fall into this booby’s ar animal Why doesn’t the Eneinity - instead of looking on there, grinning?

He’s a hedonist at heart All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade Or only like foam on the sea shore Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and ht hand are "pleasures for ever of that high and austere mystery to which we rise in the Miserific Vision He’s vulgar, Woreois mind He has filled His world full of pleasures There are things for hu in the least - sleeping, washing, eating, drinking,has to be twisted before it’s any use to us We fight under cruel disadvantages Nothing is naturally on our side (Not that that excuses you I’ll settle with you presently You have always hated ets to know this woman’s family and whole circle Could you not see that the very house she lives in is one that he ought never to have entered? The whole place reeks of that deadly odour The very gardener, though he has only been there five years, is beginning to acquire it Even guests, after a week-end visit, carry so and the cat are tainted with it And a house full of the impenetrable mystery We are certain (it is a matter of first principles) that eachcapital out of the others - but we can’t find out how They guard as jealously as the Enemy Himself the secret of what really lies behind this pretence of disinterested love The whole house and garden is one vast obscenity It bears a sickening resemblance to the description one huions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence"

Music and silence - how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since our Father entered Hell - though longer ago than huht years, could express - no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise - Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile - Noise which alone defends us fro scruples, and impossible desires We will make the whole universe a noise in the end We have already ards the Earth The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end But I ad like it Research is in progress Meanwhile you, disgusting little -

[Here the MS breaks off and is resumed in a different hand]

In the heat of composition I find that I have inadvertently allowed ly dictating the rest to nise it as a periodical phenomenon Some rumour of it has reached the humans and a distorted account of it appears in the poet Milton, with the ridiculous addition that such changes of shape are a "punishment" imposed on us by the Enemy A more modern writer - sorasped the truth Transforlorious manifestation of that Life Force which Our Father would worship if he worshipped anything but himself In my present form I feel even more anxious to see you, to unite you to myself in an indissoluble embrace,

(Signed) TOADPIPE

For his Abysmal Sublimity Under Secretary

Screwtape, TEBSetc