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Copywork
About This Passage
This is the rhetorical and philosophical climax of the book. The first sentence is a sustained periodic structure built on an audacious simile — earthly delights set beside a raddled harlot, against a beloved believed dead and now at the door — and the second names the idea directly: a world where pain and pleasure take on transfinite values. Copying it teaches periodic syntax, extended simile, and how diction can register the collapse of ordinary measure.
All the delights of sense, or heart, or intellect, with which you could once have tempted him, even the delights of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Give a concise summary of this final letter, then identify the single most important sentence or moment in it. Explain why it matters to the book's argument as a whole and what it reveals about the contest Lewis has been staging.
Discussion Questions
- The man greets the shining ones with 'So it was you all the time' and recovers 'that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory.' What does Lewis's vision of death assume about the relationship between this life and what lies beyond, and why might a reader judge that assumption earned or unearned by the book as a whole? Use details from the letter to Wormwood.
- Of everything in this final letter — the death, the recognition, the vision of the Presence, Screwtape's collapse into appetite — which moment most deserves to be called the true climax of the whole book, and why? What would a reader misunderstand by passing over it quickly? Use details from the letter to Wormwood.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Beyond every finite measure; greater than any ordinary number.
Item 2
Lying face-down in total submission or awe.
Item 3
Feebly or falsely sentimental.
+ 3 more vocabulary words in the complete study guide
Critical Thinking
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