"And for those of you who've been emailing me asking me why I didn't do more with the Screwtape Letters, more like Gatsby..."

"... my answer to that is that the lack of interest in the question asked in this post shows why that project doesn't fly. The Gatsby project flew. It turned on minds that accepted the turn-on and took off."

The last line of my comment explaining why I have yet to fulfill what may seem to be a promise to complete an assignment I really only gave myself.

And this post gets not only a Gatsby project tag, but also a written strangely early in the morning tag.

It's okay if you don't volunteer to sit for my outside-of-law-school exams. I have plenty of exams written by nonvolunteers that I am duty-bound to read. This post is about a duty I felt I had to write the answer to my own exam, which I only gave because I wanted to write that answer. But if the question inspired no one else, then I tend to think that my answer would only have seemed weird or annoying or — the worst — unreadable.

Or is that the worst? The devil nags me to ask. The devil says: Wouldn't it be a fascinating new project to write a blog called "Unreadable Things"?

"The assignment on this blog exam (written early in the morning of the day I plan to compose another law school exam) is..."

"... Using only that passage, discuss whether Mitch H. or Althouse's response accords with the ideas of the devil."

Scroll up for what Mitch H. said, then down for my response, and then the next 2 comments are a passage from "The Screwtape Letters."

"You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him."

Advice from the devil in "The Screwtape Letters," which I found doing a search in my ebook, looking for boredom, which I did after this outburst of mine on the topic of boredom and the devil.

In "The Screwtape Letters," the devil tells of a man who arrives in hell and says: "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked." He was damned not because of indulgence in "sweet sins" but because he spent his time "in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off."

"I come from 7 suicides, perhaps more."

Said Mariel Hemingway, who's in a new documentary called "Running From Crazy," the trailer for which I've embedded below:

The granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, Mariel has had to contend with a lot during her life. While millions celebrate her father as one of the all-time greatest writers, Mariel has struggled with the history of mental illness in her family.

Note the headslappingly bad error in that passage, which is in USA Today, where they seem to be running from editing.



There's some New Age-y spirituality in that, but it seems to be mostly about a wholesome experience in the mountains and earnest* physical exercise. What would you do if substance abuse, depression, and suicide seemed to "curse" your family? Just to call it a "curse," which MH does, is to give it a spiritual quality, as if one — like Scalia — believed in the Devil. If you think something is engrained in your genetic structure, it might be preferable to conceive of that thing as a separate entity that you could fight.

***

That Scalia business got me to download "The Screwtape Letters," and searching for "suicide," I came up with this, as the devil Screwtape talks about how to use love to turn "an emotional, gullible man" away from God:

[F]eed him on minor poets and fifth-rate novelists of the old school until you have made him believe that ‘Love’ is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically meritorious. This belief is not much help, I grant you, in producing casual unchastity; but it is an incomparable recipe for prolonged, ‘noble’, romantic, tragic adulteries, ending, if all goes well, in murders and suicides. Failing that, it can be used to steer the patient into a useful marriage....

I love the happenstance of "novelist" appearing in that passage, but no one would put Hemingway at the 5th rate level. Even Hemingway haters. Here's a Hemingway quote:

Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.

That chimes with Mariel's less-well-put thoughts on walking the hills.

***

*  No pun intended. Noticed only on proofreading.

"The Screwtape Letters" is not an egg salad sandwich.

In yesterday's Boardwalk Café, Saint Croix said:

I should have said this in the Scalia post — the devil made me not do it — but one of the interesting things about The Screwtape Letters is the insight that a devil is simply an angel with free will.

Thus if you believe in an afterlife — and an overwhelming number of people believe in an afterlife — you should acknowledge devils. They are simply angels who are in rebellion with God. Which God allows, because God believes in free will for humanity.

What a fantastic book The Screwtape Letters is.

I would pay money for Althouse to blog that book!

Pay money to get me to blog about something? That's been done... to get me to eat an egg salad sandwich. I'd written a post — back in 2005 — listing "10 things I've never done," and #2 was "Eaten egg salad, devilled eggs, or cold hard-boiled eggs" — hmm, interesting second appearance of the Devil in this post! — and somehow that led to my saying you'd have to pay me $200 to eat an egg salad sandwich, and some commenters got together and collected $200 and PayPal'd it to me, and I blogged — vlogged! — The Eating of the Egg Salad Sandwich.

But I didn't want to eat an egg salad sandwich. Reading the "Screwtape Letters" is something I would like to do. I read it years ago — and I'm old so that "years ago" in the history of Althouse is almost half a century ago — but I'd like to read it again, especially with the ability to blog it and the context of Scalia's recent remarks about it.

So I added it to my Kindle. You can add it too: here. And if you use that link, you'll be sending me a little money (without paying more). If you like this blog, you can funnel money to me by entering Amazon through the Althouse portal and buying something, anything, at some point before clicking away. But to get me to blog on specific topics, you could attempt the Egg Salad Method. That might work for some things — bloggable, vloggable things, for the right price. You could also just ask, as Saint Croix did, and it might work, if I'm interested enough. This blog is all and only about what interests me.

So I bought "The Screwtape Letters" and read a few pages last night. Here's the first thing I highlighted, and I'll put it here out of context, because you know that I like isolating sentences from their context — so sue me — for the purposes of discussion. That's what we did last winter with The Gatsby Project, which actually has one post that got the "egg salad" tag. It was the post with the "salads of harlequin designs." Remember?

I'm not saying these "Screwtape Letters" posts will only be isolated sentences in the manner of The Gatsby Project. But I am getting us started with this sentence, as the devil Screwtape advises his nephew devil on how to screw with some human being, referred to as "the patient":

"By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?"

ADDED:  I've got to put that sentence in the context of its paragraph, because as it stands, out of context, it creates the impression that the God-oriented position is the avoidance of reason and the acceptance of authority. That isn't so:

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle on to the Enemy’s own ground. 

"The Enemy" = God. This is the Devil's perspective.

He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. 

So there's a distinction between "argument" and "really practical propaganda." Something rates as argument — and it works better for aligning with God — and something else is the Devil's territory. That is called "really practical propaganda." When are we to think that's argument, and God has a fighting chance, and when are we to think that's just practical propaganda, and we ought to be wary?

By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’.

A connection is made between propaganda (which is not true argument) and living in the moment, paying attention to the stream of immediate sense experiences. And true argument is connected to turning away from daily, worldly life, and attending to universal issues.

This reminds me that blogging — I said it just above — is really paying attention the stream of immediate experiences, though this form of following the stream (and creating a stream) is abstracted from one's own bodily senses, other than the vision of text and pictures on the screen and the touch of touch-typing.

I've got to admit — I've been saying it for years — that I think living in the real world and paying attention to it is exactly what one ought to do, and I am very skeptical of the kind of people who move too quickly to abstract ideals. That puts me in the position of C.S. Lewis's devils, and it's C.S. Lewis I mistrust.

What Justice Scalia really means when he says he believes in the Devil.

About halfway her wonderful interview with Justice Scalia, after some discussion of homosexuality in legal and in Catholic doctrine, Jennifer Senior pushes the old judge to worry about how history will look back on his era of the Court. The first prompt — "Justice ­Kennedy is now the Thurgood Marshall of gay rights" — gets merely a nod. She tries again, with another non-question: "I don’t know how, by your lights, that’s going to be regarded in 50 years." He says doesn't know and he doesn't care:

Maybe the world is spinning toward a wider acceptance of homosexual rights, and here’s Scalia, standing athwart it. 

Some might hear "standing athwart" homosexual rights and get an amusingly unintentionally sexual picture of Scalia straddling gay men. But I assume it's an allusion to William F. Buckley's famous 1955 mission statement for The National Review: "It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." The topic was history, you know. And who else says "standing athwart"?

Scalia has shifted from the topic of Kennedy's legacy to his own and — declining to guess what the people of the future will think — he says: "When I’m dead and gone, I’ll either be sublimely happy or terribly unhappy."

That is, he pulls Senior back to the perhaps-more-comfortable topic of religion. She obliges, asking him if he believes in heaven and hell, which he does, and they go back and forth about who goes where, and then, as she proceeds to a new topic — "your drafting process" — he pulls her back again: "I even believe in the Devil."

You do?

Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.

He's already connected his Catholicism to the accession to the authority of Catholic doctrine. The devil is in the doctrine, he's Catholic, and ergo, he believes in the Devil.

Asked for evidence of the Devil lately, Scalia says:

You know, it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore....

What he’s doing now is getting people not to believe in him or in God. He’s much more successful that way.

Later, he asks Senior if she's read "The Screwtape Letters," and not having read "The Screwtape Letters" in decades, I'm not sure if he's lifting these nifty observations from C.S. Lewis or not.

Senior wants to know whether it's "terribly frightening to believe in the Devil." He says:

You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

He seems to be trying to get a reaction out of her, because she defends with: "I hope you weren’t sensing contempt from me. It wasn’t your belief that surprised me so much as how boldly you expressed it." He says:

I was offended by that. I really was.

She doesn't grasp his statement or at least what she says next indicates that she didn't. She says: "I’m sorry to have offended you," as if he was an ordinary person taking offense, when in fact, he's cracking a joke. The joke is to point at her surprise at his bold expression. It was a subtle way to say: Hey, I thought I was famous for bold expression! But he's not so bold — or so bad a comedian — as to redo a joke to drive it home. Either you get it or you don't. He moves forward. Here's where he brings up "The Screwtape Letters," which she says she's read. He says:

So, there you are. That’s a great book. 

That suggests all the interesting things he's throwing out about the Devil are ideas in or closely tracking that book he likes.

It really is, just as a study of human nature.

And there you are. He believes in the Devil not just, perhaps, because he yields to the authority of a religion of dogma and authority, but he believes in the Devil because the Devil is a literary device for exploring human nature, and how can we not believe in human nature and literature?