Page 32 (1/1)

XXXI

MY DEAR, MY VERY DEAR, WORMWOOD, MY POPPET, MY PIGSNIE,

Howto ask me whether the ter fro Far from it! Rest assured, my love for you and your love for me are as like as two peas I have always desired you, as you (pitiful fool) desired er I think they will give you to me now; or a bit of you Love you? Why, yes As dainty a rew fat on

You have let a soul slip through your fingers The howl of sharpened fah all the levels of the Kingdom of Noise down to the very Throne itself It makes me mad to think of it Hoell I knohat happened at the instant when they snatched hi of his eyes (was there not?) as he saw you for the first tinised the part you had had in hier Just think (and let it be the beginning of your agony) what he felt at that moment; as if a scab had fallen fro froood and all a defiled, wet, clinging garh to see the off dirtied and unco little grunts of pleasure - stretching their eased li, this co? The h so easily! No gradualho theatre, no false hopes of life; sheer, instantaneous liberation One moment it seemed to be all our world; the screah explosive on the lips and in the lungs, the feet burning eariness, the heart cold with horrors, the brain reeling, the legs aching; next ain to be of any account Defeated, out-man&339;uvred fool! Did you mark how naturally - as if he’d been born for it - the earthborn vermin entered the new life? How all his doubts beca of an eye, ridiculous? I knohat the creature was saying to itself! "Yes Of course It alas like this All horrors have followed the sa you into a kind of bottle-neck till, at the very ht you must be crushed, behold! you were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well The extraction hurt more and htmare and then you woke You die and die and then you are beyond death How could I ever have doubted it?

As he saw you, he also saw Them I knoas You reeled back dizzy and blinded, radation of it! - that this thing of earth and sliht and converse with spirits before whom you, a spirit, could only cower Perhaps you had hoped that the awe and strangeness of it would dash his joy But that is the cursed thing; the gods are strange to e He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realised what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not "Who are you?" but "So it was you all the ti woke memories The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded nition made him free of their company almost before the limbs of his corpse became quiet Only you were left outside

He saw not only Theotten in a bed, could look on Hiht to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a Man You would like, if you could, to interpret the patient’s prostration in the Presence, his self-abhorrence and utter knowledge of his sins (yes, Wory of your own choking and paralysing sensations when you encounter the deadly air that breathes from the heart of Heaven But it’s all nonsense Pains he may still have to encounter, but they embrace those pains They would not barter thehts of sense, or heart, or intellect, hich you could once have tehts of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door He is caught up into that world where pain and pleasure take on transfinite values and all our arithmetic is dismayed Once more, the inexplicable meets us Next to the curse of useless tereatest curse upon us is the failure of our Intelligence Department If only we could find out what He is really up to! Alas, alas, that knowledge, in itself so hateful and , should yet be necessary for Power! Sometimes I am almost in despair All that sustains me is the conviction that our Realism, our rejection (in the face of all temptations) of all silly nonsense and claptrap, must win in the end Meanwhile, I have you to settle with Most truly do I sign ly and ravenously

affectionate uncle

SCREWTAPE