Staring at a Dead, Cold Fire…
April 22, 2010 12:23 pmYou can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”.
The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but 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.
You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
~Your affectionate uncle, SCREWTAPE
The Screwtape Letters
Author: C. S. Lewis
I suppose this may be the essential warning to which I now bristle at the engagement of time with social networking and video games. My generation seems to be particularly susceptible to this drifting gaze into the flickering pixels of a digital fire.
It’s not so much the value judgment of the activity itself as it is the tendency for it to take root in our posture and slowly become our expectation for enjoyment, a passive dissipation into nothingness… a silent withdrawal into the placid gaze of The Brave New World.
A friend of mine recently passed on this video from OK GO. I think this is an endearing example of how to escape this temptation towards postmodern nihilistic narcissism.
Making a big silly Rude Goldberg Machine could be deemed a completely worthless activity by anyone looking to quantify the value quotient of the effort. But, watching this… thinking about all the fun effort that went into getting it to work, and then absorbing the emotional connection to the message of “This Too Shall Pass” is a beautiful moment.
This is why I love the arts, how can anyone justify this endeavor going in and how can anyone not concede its necessity after seeing it accomplished? A wonderful paradox of life engagement…
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