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Copywork
About This Passage
This is one of Lewis's most haunting paragraphs: a portrait of a life drained away not by dramatic sin but by sheer emptiness. He turns a Christian description of the Enemy — one 'without whom Nothing is strong' — into a chilling truth about the power of the void, then unspools a single long sentence cataloguing the small, aimless ways a man fritters his best years. Copying it trains a writer to sustain a long accumulating sentence whose very length enacts the slow, dreary leaking-away it describes.
The Christians describe the Enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong’. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of th...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct the argument of Screwtape's twelfth letter in sequence, then identify the single principle that governs all its tactics. How can you tell that the unnoticed drift, not any dramatic fall, is the letter's true subject?
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape's chief fear is that the man might 'awaken... to a sense of his real position,' so the change of direction must seem 'trivial and revocable.' Is the deepest danger to the man the drift itself or his ignorance of it — and why does Lewis make one of these primary? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to defend your reading.
- Screwtape is 'almost glad' the man remains 'a churchgoer and a communicant,' since the outward 'habits of a Christian' let him think his 'spiritual state is much the same.' Why does Lewis treat the survival of empty religious habits as more useful to the devils than their loss? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to develop your answer.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
The curved path of one body circling another under its pull.
Item 2
Too strong to be opposed or held back.
Item 3
Distress or difficulty, especially financial; awkward shame.
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Critical Thinking
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