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Copywork
About This Passage
This single sentence is the philosophical climax of the letter, and copying it slowly lets a writer feel how Lewis turns a whole argument on one image. He grants the modern assumption — that a person 'owns' his body — and then dismantles it by describing what that body actually is: a 'vast and perilous estate,' charged with 'the energy that made the worlds,' which a person did not choose to enter ('without their consent') and cannot choose to keep ('ejected at the pleasure of Another'). The grammar enacts the point: the long appositive and the two relative clauses pile up everything the man did not do and cannot control, until the bald verb 'own' collapses under them. Copying it trains a writer to mount an argument inside a description, and to see that a thing one neither made, chose, nor can retain is plainly not a thing one owns.
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 thems...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct the argument of Screwtape's twenty-first letter to Wormwood in sequence — the resolve to darken the intellect before the moral assault, the analysis of anger as 'misfortune conceived as injury,' the guarded and indefensible assumption that 'My time is my own,' the admission that time is 'pure gift,' the corruption of the possessive pronoun, the claim that no one truly owns even his body, and the closing thesis about 'Mine.' Then state the letter's central argument about human nature: that a false sense of ownership is the hidden root of both a quick temper and a refusal to receive one's life as a gift.
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape builds a small argument: men are angered only by 'misfortune conceived as injury,' injury depends on 'the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied,' and therefore 'the more claims on life' a man makes, the more often he feels wronged. Why does Lewis place this analysis of anger before the assault on the man's temper, and how does the chain of reasoning expose a quick temper as the offspring of pride? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to defend your reading.
- In an earlier letter Screwtape preferred to keep the man from reasoning, fighting truth with confusion rather than honest argument; here he says outright that 'the way must be prepared for your moral assault by darkening his intellect,' and that the assumption about owning time must be kept 'uninspected' because 'there aren't any' arguments for it. How do these two letters together reveal a deliberate strategy of preventing thought, and why does an assumption that can remain 'operative' only while unexamined thereby confess its own falsehood? Use details from this letter and the earlier one to Wormwood to develop your answer.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Formed in the mind; regarded or interpreted in a particular way.
Item 2
Full of danger; fraught with risk.
Item 3
Movable items of personal property owned outright.
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Critical Thinking
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