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.

---

Chapter 2 - The Mask: Symbol of Submission

“False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”

- William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act I, Scene VII

Letter VI - Dr. F. to Screwtape

My Dear Uncle,

A boy in my sector is learning to talk this year. Unfortunately for him, the human mouths he would mimic are covered, his teacher’s, the grocer’s, the better part of his mother’s day, and so he is doing his best with eyebrows. I open with this small impact as a touchpoint of the season’s inventory, and the season, Uncle, is this: the free citizens of the West have covered their faces. I ask you to sit with that sentence a moment, as I have. No conqueror ever managed it. Mohammed came close but we triumphed in covering the male counterparts as well! You said the mask deserved a letter of its own; it has since earned a volume.

Their litany to date has been: a frightened spring, a bulbous chart, a quiet fortnight renewing itself, the cadence your last letter described, and then this: the faces of the West withdrawn from circulation, like a currency recalled.

Understand what we have and have not issued. A temporary measure is simply a tool with a date on it. This has no date, but it has acquired a meaning: it is a confession of virtue, worn in public, the first garment in living memory that announces the wearer’s morality at fifty yards. Lockdown was a intangible policy of shut doors; a man could pace his floor for weeks and resent it privately. The mask is a tangible policy of the person. It rides the breath, tugs at the ears, dampens against the lip. It is a policy they can feel against their skin, and that discomfort is now rehearsed hourly.

First, I must also report a complication which I believe we have successfully converted into an asset. Our opening messages, you will recall, discouraged the flimsy cloth, not needed by the well, reserved only for the wards. Then the doctrine reversed, and the article became sacred. I braced for damage; hypocrisy is the one charge the laity can prosecute without counsel. The damage did not come. The reversal was absorbed, retailed to the public as the science evolving. Absorbed, Uncle, is the word I adore here, because absorption is the product. To obey a stable rule, a man needs only obedience. To obey a rule that has reversed, he must surrender his memory of the rule before, must agree, in some back room of his head, that what was said was never quite said. Practice this twice and the faculty that compares yesterday with today learns to ask for instructions before it speaks tomorrow. You will remember my anxieties regarding comparison. We are now manufacturing the antidote, and the public wears it on its face.

The technical disputes, weaves, droplets, inches, aerosolization (especially that!), continue, and I leave them undisturbed, for the cloth’s office was never chiefly respiratory. The face was always the problem, Uncle. The face is where they are specific. A crowd can be managed; a face insists on being someone. And the mouth carries half their grammar: the smile, the frown, the half-laugh, the tremble before tears, embarrassment, tenderness. Cover it and you do not merely filter the breath. You abridge the person. To cover the face is to efface the self, and we have arranged for the effacement to be self-administered, daily, with elastic.

The yields are everywhere. An old man at the pharmacy asks the clerk to repeat herself, twice, then pretends he has heard and returns home without his task fulfilled; he had been reading lips for years without knowing it, and goes home having purchased silence, which he calls not making a fuss. A widow at a rationed funeral receives condolences from a row of anxious foreheads. You can still smile with your eyes, they keep telling one another. Eyes do something, Uncle. From a stranger at six feet, it reads mostly as watching. I’m told a man’s untoward imagination is heightened because he cannot verify attractiveness in the face, so his gaze wanders elsewhere and his shame aggregates hourly for the lust-adjacent moment we have manufactured. After all, even the leper has a size 1 waist.

And the sorting, instantaneous, universal, unpaid. Covered: safe, obedient, kind. Bare: reckless, selfish, suspect. No warrant, no public tribunal; a man’s character is now adjudicated at the threshold, by glance, in under a second. We have never fielded a faster court decision. Fear, meanwhile, has entered the inventory of the pocket: wallet, keys, phone... mask, four mnemonic beats, performed without thought. The first three items are designed for a free world. The fourth is against it. The hand now remembers fear on the way out of the house.

Enforcement costs us nothing. A woman in a bakery lowered her mask to make herself understood to the man I mentioned above, and was corrected by a stranger in the queue before any official could have been summoned. The stranger held no office and required none; the office has been decentralized with innate instructions. Whole populations now serve as unpaid minor officials, and they enforce this mechanism with an energy no salary could buy, because they are paid in standing, its a wonder anyone sleeps at night with virtue signals beaming brightly from every pair of eyes peaking above the dutiful masked compliant population. A further yield I had not projected: the anxious wear it with relief. For some of them the face was always an exposure, being seen the heaviest tax of their social day. We have issued them a sanctioned veil and named the hiding responsibility. They are not merely compliant, Uncle. They are grateful.

And I have found a household, a particular couple, and I mean to measure the season by their actions; I am keeping their file on my own desk. A husband and a wife, comfortable, a good house on a quiet street, one child, two cars. I have entered them in the registry as the Volunteers, because that is the whole of their art: no one ever has to ask them. The new constabulary are paid in standing, as I reported, and standing is a wage; withhold it, and they resign. These two enforce our mandates unbidden, at their own expense, and thank us for the opportunity.

Mark what we were given to work with, Uncle, because it was nothing but virtue. He is a protector by birth, he stands between his family and the world and is proud to stand there. She is conscientious to the point of restlessness; she cannot let a rule lie unobserved or a targeted task go undone. In a duller decade the two of them would have died quietly, somewhat admired but mostly unremarkable. The era found me the seam in each to make them powerful, if only for this season. His penchant to protect I turned a few degrees outward, until it became a browbeating patrol. Her conscience I turned the same few degrees, until it became a busybody’s sanctioned watch. By June, he was stopping strangers on the footpath to account for their nearness; it is the cloth that licenses the stopping, Uncle; a bare face at forty yards has become a thing one citizen may take up with another, like smoke seen over a neighbor’s fence. By September she had learned the number one rings to report a gathering, and had rung it, over a christening, the returned home and slept the sleep of the just. They have not felt themselves change. They tell each other, nightly, across the kitchen table, that they have simply begun, at last, to care.

For the archive, I commend the doorway of the restaurant, where the liturgy is at its most refined. The patron masks to cross the threshold, walks ten feet behind a hostess, sits, and unmasks for ninety minutes of talk and chewing among strangers. Should he rise, the cloth quickly returns for the twelve yards to the lavatory and the twelve yards back. The virus, in this cosmology, is a creature of exquisite manners: ferocious in vestibules and corridors, harmless wherever food is served; it hunts the standing and respects the seated. No one believes this. That is the achievement. They perform it anyway, for the hostess, for the room, for their own membership, and every performance teaches the muscle that notices absurdity to keep its findings to itself. A man who will costume himself for the walk to the lavatory has accepted the essential terms: his perception is negotiable; his standing is not. The fogged spectacles alone repay this effort. I keep a small file of these moments just to laugh.

You will ask for outcome figures. Of course, I decline to keep any. A tool is judged worthy by outcomes; a ritual is deemed worthy by meaning alone; and I have moved the visage article from the first category to the second. The formula of consecration is two words: for others. I did not coin it; I only priced it. It converts fear into generosity at scale. The frightened man is no longer hiding, he is giving. Conformity is rebranded compassion; suspicion, prudence; and fear’s old appetite for company becomes a work of mercy. We have made the mask mean love, Uncle, and a man who will quarrel all day with a regulation will, frankly, avoid a quarrel with love.

Now the anxieties, filed per protocol. The cloth sits unevenly. The clerk wears it ten hours; the man she serves, ten minutes. The young talking boy I mentioned looks up at his teacher and finds only eyes above fabric, and has begun reading foreheads for temperment. The old, as noted, are missing more than sound. And in my surveillance of parents I record the first appearances of a word that concerns me. Not uncomfortable. Not inconvenient. Indignity. A tired mother, watching her son mask for the third recess of the day, has stopped asking whether it is comfortable and begun asking whether it is small sacrifice or not. Discomfort, Uncle, is a sensation, and sensations fatigue. Indignity is a claim, and claims can and do organize.

My question for doctrine: how do I keep a billion small losses filed under inconvenience?

Your devoted nephew,

Dr. F.

Undersecretary for Respiratory Affairs

P.S. They have begun manufacturing the article in patterns, florals, team colors, seasonal prints. I confess the holly print disquieted even me. An emergency with a product line is an emergency that has decided to stay.

Letter VII - Screwtape to Dr. F.

My Dear Dr. F.,

Your report gave me an entire afternoon of satisfaction. However, I warn both of us: distrust that sensation. Satisfaction is the posture in which our kind is most often found asleep at the rail. You have built something genuinely fine, and you have understood, by my count, rather less than half of it.

First: you were right to leave the technical quarrels running, and you must never let them settle. Every hour the humans spend disputing weaves and droplets is an hour spent agreeing on the premise underneath both positions, that the question is material. It is not. If the cloth stopped everything, or nothing, our position would be identical, provided the article continues to mean what you have made it mean. The deeper work was never filtration. It is formation.

Second, your question, how to keep the losses filed under inconvenience, has most of its answer already in your inventory; you have only to see what you are holding. The one fatal misstep would be to let the article be experienced as oppression. Oppression is a known stimulant. It has summoned more courage out of that species than we have ever managed to put back, and martyrs have been cut from cheaper cloth than this. No. The mask must remain what you have made it: a token of care. Which means the language must stay tender, all the way down. A small burden, reluctantly asked. For the vulnerable. Children are resilient. You can still smile with your eyes. Keep the entire vocabulary in the nursery register, and file every spiritual loss, recognition, expression, the freedom of one face toward another, under inconvenience. The filing is the whole mechanism, nephew: it makes the loss unspeakable by making it minor. A man may rise against an indignity; no man rises against an inconvenience without becoming, publicly, the smallest person in the room. Your tired mother is not dangerous so long as she cannot say the word indignity aloud without hearing how it sounds next to it’s just a piece of cloth. And the citizens she might have recruited will go on enforcing tenderly, for cruelty is most durable when it is experienced by the cruel as compassion.

Your Volunteers, next. Please nephew, strike the label before it sets. It flatters you, not them, and a flattered tempter mislabels his own assets. These two are not your discovery, nephew; they are the oldest stock in the house. Every plague century mints the identical pair, and I keep a drawer of them going back to the lazarettos: the Matron, who holds the street under observation from behind her curtain and keeps the record of who called on whom, and the Marshal, who plants himself at the gate and rules on who may pass. The faces are reissued each century; the office is eternal. In Milan they carried the health board’s staff and hunted the untori I told you of. Yours carry an application on a telephone and an inexhaustible supply of conviction.

Here is the instruction that will keep your pride from spoiling them. They are not being made cruel, cruelty is the amateur’s aim, and it spoils, for a cruel man may weary of himself or be shamed out of it. They are being made righteous, which keeps. The righteous cannot be shamed; to them shame is merely the wicked resisting the good. Your Marshal takes no pleasure in stopping the stranger, he believes he is saving him, and the man’s resentment only proves the peril. Your Matron did not relish her call; she wept over it, and the weeping is the bolt thrown home. A woman who has suffered to inform on her neighbor will defend to her grave the necessity that made her suffer, for if it was not necessary, what is she? Keep them in that grief, nephew. It is the most commodious cell we have ever furnished, and the door locks only from the inside.

Now the face, since you have at last begun to see it. The Enemy committed an extravagance there which we have never forgiven. No two faces issued alike, and then the claim that He knows each one by heart. The face is where the species defeats our redux. A man can hate a class for thirty years without missing a meal; show him a single face from inside that class, at the wrong moment, in the wrong light, and the whole account comes under audit. Shame keeps its office in the face. So does courage. Mercy is transacted there almost exclusively, the face is where one soul discovers that another is looking back. Your bureaucrats survive by never being looked back at; an order covering a million children is permitted only because no single obeying child conveys their confusion and marked sadness, except through the mask . So mark what your cloth has actually done. It has not blinded anyone. It has made the street a procession of categories, covered, bare; safe, suspect, where there was a procession of persons. A category cannot be absorbed at sight. That is not a side effect. That is the work. And it extends our oldest inversion to point-blank range: a man may now stand a yard from his neighbor and still withhold his face. Absence, worn. See that it goes on meaning devotion.

Your next assignment is saturation. Move the article from emergency to scenery. I want it in the advertisements, on the photographs, where it filters nothing, which is precisely its value there, for meaning is the only work an image can do. On the mannequins. On the school posters with their round, smiling letters. On the clergy at their livestreams; on celebrities at their ceremonies; in the children’s cartoons; in the airline videos with their serene, half-erased crews. Patterns, team colors, your holly print. The goal is not that the mask be required. Requirements can be repealed. The goal is that its absence come to feel indecent, the bare face in public reading as a kind of undress. Law compels the body, nephew. Indecency instructs the soul.

As for the contradictions your restaurant liturgy displays so handsomely: stop apologizing for them in your filings. You still account absurdity a cost. Properly managed, absurdity is not a weakness in the regime; it is one of its tests. Any rule that makes sense can be obeyed in mere agreement. The doorway ritual asks for something better: that a man override the report of his own eyes in favor of the meaning assigned by authority, and then, this is the kernel, that he not say what he noticed. Each performance is a small referendum on which shall be master, his perception or his standing, and we want the question rehearsed daily until it no longer feels like a question.

Which brings me to the man you did not mention, and he is the one I think about: the quiet one who has noticed. Not the shouters, the shouters manage themselves, and a fine or two will keep them shrill and unpersuasive. I mean the decent man at the table, doing silent arithmetic about the corridor and the chair. Your entire task with him is the administration of his loneliness. He must never learn how many of him there are. Keep him unsure whether his observations are intelligent or merely unkind; that is the hinge, for a decent man will suppress a true thought indefinitely if he suspects the thought is cruel. Give him nothing so vivifying as persecution. Certainly, make your preparations for censorship, that will come soon enough. But be cautious. He will eventually give pause at the office in a candid moment of truth. He will indeed notice the dinner invitation that stops coming. Fines make martyrs. Pauses make members.

The children require their own paragraph, and here your reporting tends sentimental in the wrong direction: you cite their adaptability as a success. Of course they adapt. Children adapt to anything; that was never in question and was never the prize. Adaptation is not evidence that nothing was bent. Adaptation is the bending. The sapling tied to the stake does not complain either. I read mention another report of a boy who chose the dinosaur print and felt lucky, let him feel lucky; his mother, watching him feel lucky, is the one who goes quiet, and her you will file under inconvenience as instructed. What the boy is learning underneath the print is the catechism we could never have taught openly: that the other person is, first, a risk. Approach is the exception; distance, the rule; the stranger, a hazard until cleared. A child who learns strangers as hazards before he learns them as faces will furnish us with business for decades. On the harm itself: publish nothing, claim nothing, and forbid the eager among your staff to gloat in trade journals. Let it arrive late and diffuse, an anecdote here, a specialist’s worried report there, a grief with no date on it. Harm that arrives all at once produces inquiries. Harm that arrives gradually produces essays.

And now lift your eyes from the cloth, because the cloth was never the objective. Today it is fabric over the mouth. Tomorrow it will be a credential in the pocket; after that, some other token, the form will change and the changing itself is useful, since every new token re-runs the training from the beginning. What we are installing is the reflex beneath all tokens: I prove my goodness by displaying public obedience. Say that sentence slowly until you hear everything inside it. A creature that proves its goodness by display has moved its conscience out of doors, relocated it to the audience, and a conscience approval kept by the audience is an approval we can edit. The artifact is not the achievement. The reflex, the reaction, the retribution for disobedience is the achievement.

Two cautions in closing. Do not press humiliation openly. We are not after conquest, which is loud and breeds resistance; we are after participation, which is quiet and breeds itself. The ideal subject is not the man ordered into the mask but the man who feels the stranger approaching on the path and reaches up, unbidden, to draw the cloth over his nose, a small bow performed for no audience but his own conscience, which now reports to us. The safest mask is the one adjusted by the wearer before anyone asks. Once the gesture is self-administered, the enforcement has moved indoors, where no repeal can reach it.

And when the cloth finally comes off, seasons end, nephew; I have outlived thousands, do not mourn the prop. If you have worked properly, the loss will by then be stored where grief cannot take inventory. The man will not miss the open faces of strangers; he will have stopped expecting them. The child will not mourn what the street withheld from him; he never learned its name. Your talking boy will carry the era at the edges of his sentences for sixty years, and no listener will ever learn what she is hearing. She will be hearing the cloth, nephew: a language keeps what a childhood pays. What cannot be imagined cannot be mourned, and what cannot be mourned cannot be reclaimed. So let the masks come off on schedule, with ceremony if they like. Your assignment is the face beneath: see that it emerges trained, guarded at the mouth, careful at the eyes, a face that has learned to behave like a mask.

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape