Blame C. S. Lewis
In grading the written reports our students wrote this month on The Screwtape Letters, I realized that I've been agitated for years over something C. S. Lewis nailed eloquently years ago, and I'm only now catching on what to call the source of my agitation. Actually, it's likely that the notion stuck in my craw years ago when I first read The Screwtape Letters, and I remembered the concept and forgot the term or the source--which happens very often to me. It's one of the crosses of being incapable of remembering many details, and having a generally poor memory.
I wonder if my daughter-in-law Clarissa read Lewis too. Part of our conversation over canning apples the other day indicated she might have done so. Her contribution to the discussion was to recount what she observed when she was growing up. One of her friends, the only daughter in a family of many boys, always had a great many food preservation chores to do with her mother. Clare sympathized with her, knowing how much work it was, until the day when she realized that much of what her friend and the friend's mother were occupied with qualified in Clare's mind as being slightly ridiculous and very unnecessary. "They canned way more than was necessary, and they took the long way around on everything. Instead of scalding the peaches and slipping off the skins easily, they peeled them all by hand. They didn't need to can Danish Dessert and all kinds of pie filling. When I realized this, I decided I don't pity you any more. I really don't appreciate people acting like food snobs. As though only certain brands or certain ways of doing things with food are good enough." She's a girl after my own heart--that Clare. I promise, though, that I did nothing in this conversation to prompt Clare's sentiments.
Lewis calls food snobbery the Gluttony of Delicacy, in contrast to the Gluttony of Excess. Read all about it in chapter 17, or listen to the chapter read aloud here. Listening to it will take a little more than six minutes. Basically, the mentor Demon Screwtape is telling his apprentice demon nephew Wormwood that he must take full advantage of the desire people have to indulge in food made exactly to their own liking, and served in the amount they prefer. The patient's mother is an example. She is "always turning from what has been offered her to say with a demure little sigh and a smile 'Oh please, please . . . all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest, weeniest bit of really crisp toast.'"
Lewis calls it "the 'All-I-want' state of mind. All she wants is a cup of tea properly made, or an egg properly boiled, or a slice of bread properly toasted. But she never finds any servant or any friend who can do these simple things 'properly'--because her 'properly' conceals an insatiable demand for the exact . . . " She has no regard for the inconvenience her demands cause other people.
Please God, spare me from the Gluttony of Delicacy. And thanks, God, for giving C.S. Lewis that insight about gluttony, and the ability to put it into compelling words.
He's a funny man, that C. S. Lewis, but I like him.
I wonder if my daughter-in-law Clarissa read Lewis too. Part of our conversation over canning apples the other day indicated she might have done so. Her contribution to the discussion was to recount what she observed when she was growing up. One of her friends, the only daughter in a family of many boys, always had a great many food preservation chores to do with her mother. Clare sympathized with her, knowing how much work it was, until the day when she realized that much of what her friend and the friend's mother were occupied with qualified in Clare's mind as being slightly ridiculous and very unnecessary. "They canned way more than was necessary, and they took the long way around on everything. Instead of scalding the peaches and slipping off the skins easily, they peeled them all by hand. They didn't need to can Danish Dessert and all kinds of pie filling. When I realized this, I decided I don't pity you any more. I really don't appreciate people acting like food snobs. As though only certain brands or certain ways of doing things with food are good enough." She's a girl after my own heart--that Clare. I promise, though, that I did nothing in this conversation to prompt Clare's sentiments.
Lewis calls food snobbery the Gluttony of Delicacy, in contrast to the Gluttony of Excess. Read all about it in chapter 17, or listen to the chapter read aloud here. Listening to it will take a little more than six minutes. Basically, the mentor Demon Screwtape is telling his apprentice demon nephew Wormwood that he must take full advantage of the desire people have to indulge in food made exactly to their own liking, and served in the amount they prefer. The patient's mother is an example. She is "always turning from what has been offered her to say with a demure little sigh and a smile 'Oh please, please . . . all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest, weeniest bit of really crisp toast.'"
Lewis calls it "the 'All-I-want' state of mind. All she wants is a cup of tea properly made, or an egg properly boiled, or a slice of bread properly toasted. But she never finds any servant or any friend who can do these simple things 'properly'--because her 'properly' conceals an insatiable demand for the exact . . . " She has no regard for the inconvenience her demands cause other people.
Please God, spare me from the Gluttony of Delicacy. And thanks, God, for giving C.S. Lewis that insight about gluttony, and the ability to put it into compelling words.
He's a funny man, that C. S. Lewis, but I like him.
posted by Mrs. I (Miriam Iwashige) at
8:03 PM
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