"Your Affectionate Uncle, Screwtape"

I've been reading C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters the past week or so. It's a very interesting little collection of fictitious letters written by a senior demon to his nephew, a young temptor named Wormwood. I know reading this sort of thing probably makes me come across as pretentious and more intellectual than I am (especially since I also tend to enjoy the not-so-finer things in life as well, such as beer and pizza and Street Fighter II...the game, not the atrocious movie). But I've been a big fan of C. S. Lewis for years now, ever since I first read the Chronicles of Narnia in like elementary or junior high. Lewis has this way of mixing his religious message with wit, intelligence, insight, style, and a dash of humor that makes his work irresistable...at least, to me, anyway.

It's also interesting to see how this work played a part in two other important works, though they are works of a vastly different nature. The first is Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, the second is the novel Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. In the former, Watterson used the name Wormwood for Calvin's teacher. I think I actually pinpointing the passage in the Screwtape Letters that inspired this. It's in the first "letter," and reads: "From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!" I think I laughed for a good five minutes when I read that.

As far as Lewis' influence on Good Omens, that's a bit more subtle. In the novel, Pratchett and Gaiman developed a character named Crowley, a demon on earth whose job it was to get as many people damned to hell as possible. Crowley went about this in rather unorthodox ways, such as designing a highway around London that, when viewed from above, made the shape of an unholy symbol of evil and power, the name of which escapes me at the moment. It was designed to channel the low-level anger, hate, and aggression that people felt on a daily basis about travelling on that stretch of road into a sort of spiritual funnel, and really add a slight dark tinge, a tarnish to thousands and thousands of souls per day. Crowley thought in terms of quantity, really--he was doing his job, not because he hated mankind, and not because he particularly wanted to damn thousands to hell, but because he was supposed to. He was something of a craftsman, and took pride in doing his job well, mind--it's just that really he rather liked humans.

On the other hand, he had to deal with two other demons, Hastur and Ligur, who are more of what Crowley thinks of as the old-school demons. They take a more qualitative approach to temptation and damnation. They work and weddle at a single soul for an entire lifetime, really working on that one person until that individual is finally damned. They are demons of the Screwtape variety, actually--they go after their targets one at a time, relishing that personal touch.

Anyway, that's the extent of excitement here, except that I'm still trying to get enrolled. My professor needs to set my class approval at four hours instead of three so that I can be enrolled full time. Eight hours doesn't cut it; I need that one extra hour, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to be doing enough extra work to earn that extra hour anyway.

~chaos cricket

Song of the Moment: Jackson Browne, "Late for the Sky"