The Covid Screwtape Letters - Excerpts
Look for the forthcoming NEW book later this year!
Excerpts from Prologue & Chapter 2
“Lest Satan should get an advantage of us: for we are not ignorant of his devices.”
- 2 Corinthians 2:11 (KJV)
Hell keeps minutes.
This will surprise those who imagine the place as fire and shrieking, all fiercely carnivirous, all chaos, no administration. The letters in this book should cure that misconseption. Whatever else those years were, and they were many things, including a real plague with real dead, they were also, below, a project: scoped, staffed, minuted, and reviewed. Great evil is seldom loud. It is procedural. It files away everything, and you never noticed.
How this file surfaced I will not fully explain, partly to protect what must still be protected, mostly because I cannot for fear of retribution. I can say that the letters arrived the way everything true about those years arrived: late, out of order, in pieces, and through the very procedures that had been built to bury such things. Call it a leak if you like. Call it, as the lawyers say, production assets. Somewhere in the middle of the correspondence, the senior devil assures his nephew that his own records are kept in the one archive that has never seen the light of day. You are holding the reply. This are the pantheon fruits of our FOIA request.
The file is incomplete, these type of files always are, and where the gaps fall, I have left them; the silences of devils are instructive too. The books, we are promised, get opened in the end. Regard this as an early draft, a forgotten manuscript.
What you hold, then, is the working correspondence of two devils. The elder, Screwtape, has seen plagues enough to find them boring. The younger, talented, careerist, anxious for commendation, signs himself Dr. F., Undersecretary for Respiratory Affairs. Readers who come hunting a particular face behind the initial will leave unsatisfied, and should. Hell assigns specific desks with like-minded biographies. The Undersecretary is a post, a titular honorarium and these denoted pedastals outlive their occupants. Or more likely, their occupants have stepped off.
Notice, as you read, what the two of them almost never discuss: the virus. It drifts through these pages as weather, a thing that happened to be happening. Their professional interest was never the disease, but what fear it could instill. Their focus is always how the virus could be spun into action, what the virus could be taught to do, to love, to truth, to worship, to children, to memory, to the face across the table.
Their patient was never the sick man. It was you.
Two notes on method, because the book asks something of its reader.
First: devils on the record praise what should appall them and dread what should be cherished, so everything here arrives upside down and must be read in a mirror. When the correspondents gloat, someone was being broken. When they grow uneasy and sense the event horizons: quiet houses, mothers doing arithmetic, men who frame the letters that ended their careers, any two witnesses comparing notes, you have found the exact coordinates where the light was getting in. Their contempt is a map. I know no better index of what actually mattered in those years than the short list of things these two feared.
Second: do not cite these letters as history. Devils are indifferent to facts and say so with pride; the figures they spout to one another prove nothing and were never meant to. But a devil reporting to a devil about the work cannot afford to lie about the work; Hell audits, and so the correspondence is unreliable about every number and unimpeachable about every untoward intention. Cite nothing. Recognize everything.
And you will recognize it. That is the last thing to say, and the reason the book exists. The famous rooms are mostly offstage here. The files return, instead, to kitchens, thresholds, classrooms, group chats, parish halls, nursing-home windows, the seating of dinner tables, because that, by the devils’ own accounting, is where the era was actually decided, and theirs is the one accounting in this matter I have come to trust. Few readers will get far without meeting a letter they wrote, or received, or chose, gently, with sorrowful wording, not to send. I met several of mine. I finished anyway, and I mention it only because the devils, late in the file, name the last weapon they keep for the day when all the others have been blunted: the tiredness of readers.
So read it rested. Take it slowly; it was done to you slowly. And when you have finished, do the one thing this correspondence fears from its first page to its last: say what you saw, plainly, out loud, to someone near.
It was always the nearness they were after.
