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Copywork
About This Passage
Here Lewis compresses a whole moral psychology into two balanced sentences. Each disposition of the soul is sorted by the direction in time it faces: gratitude turns to the past, love to the present, while fear, greed, and ambition all lean into the future. Copying this passage trains the hand in antithesis — the art of setting one half of a sentence against the other — and shows a writer how a single, symmetrical line can map the inner life so cleanly that the argument seems to prove itself.
Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct Screwtape's fifteenth letter to Wormwood in sequence — the lull in the war, the Enemy's wish that people attend to eternity and the Present, the devils' preference for the temporal Future, and the rule about planning. Then name the central claim: that the direction of a man's attention in time, not the events themselves, is the real battleground.
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape says the Enemy wants people attending to 'the Present,' 'the point at which time touches eternity,' while the devils labour to fix them on 'the Future.' Why is Screwtape so intent on which region of time the man's mind inhabits, and how is being present to today different in kind from being lost in tomorrow? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to defend your reading.
- Screwtape prizes the Future because it is 'unknown' and makes people 'think of unrealities,' so that 'nearly all vices are rooted in the future.' Why is an imagined tomorrow so much more fertile soil for fear and craving than the moment a person is actually living? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to develop your answer.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Belonging to time; bounded and passing, not eternal.
Item 2
Corresponding in a way that supports a meaningful parallel.
Item 3
The condition of being real and in effect now, not merely possible.
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Critical Thinking
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