Lewis: Screwtape on Time

Yesterday's post motivated me to dig up C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters to find the passage where he shreds the whole notion of "my" time.

A quick caveat for those who are unfamiliar with the book. It's written as a series of letters from an older uncle demon (Screwtape) to his nephew demon (Wormwood) who is assigned to a man who just became a Christian. Uncle Screwtape's job is to help Wormwood get his man away from God ("the Enemy" as Screwtape calls him).

Here's a chunk of the portion on time:

"Men are not angered by mere misfortune but my misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied...Now you will notice that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him...

They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it has been stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption "My time is my own."

Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possesor of twenty-four hours...what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.

You have here a delicate task. The assumption which you want him to go on making is so absurd that, if once questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defense. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels."