This week, I chose to write about letter 15. This letter just stuck out to me when reading because of the topics it discussed. The main part of this letter was discussing the past, present, and future and also about eternity. Screwtape talks about what living in each will bring the patient and decides that living in the future is the best way to persuade the patient. A caption that stood out to me was, "It is far better to make live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already so that the thought about the Future inflames hope and fear." I liked this passage because it made perfect sense. Out of all the of the letters, they have all seemed to hold a fiction sort of message, but I feel as though we do live a mojority of our lives concentrated on the Future. We are constantly questioning ourselves about next week, next year and so forth. He continues talking about how the Future is least like eternity and how the present and past are not as important. Another caption that stood out to me was, "Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, and ambition look ahead. Do you agree with this statement? Do we really think this way? This was the biggest question I had of myself.
This was definetely my favorite letter that we read thus far!! :) (and i was able to understand it!!)
2 comments:
I had the same reaction to this letter as you did and wrote about many of the same things that you talked about. I agree with your statement about how a lot of our lives to day revolve around planning for the future. I personally live my life very much in the future whether i am planning when I have time to complete what assignments or what I am doing the next weekend. I do agree with the statement that all of those emotions lie in the future, but only because the future is unknown an all of those emotions play into the unknown.
In a lot of regards I do agree with this letter, for when I think of the future I am often afraid of what will come. The future makes me feel anxious because I am worried that what I want to happen will not. However, I think the future brings hope to people, and reflecting on what you want the future to have encourages us to do specific good things in the present. As long as an individual realizes they cannont control everything, anticipating the future in not neccesarily a bad thing.
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