"And for those of you who've been emailing me asking me why I didn't do more with the Screwtape Letters, more like Gatsby..."

"... my answer to that is that the lack of interest in the question asked in this post shows why that project doesn't fly. The Gatsby project flew. It turned on minds that accepted the turn-on and took off."

The last line of my comment explaining why I have yet to fulfill what may seem to be a promise to complete an assignment I really only gave myself.

And this post gets not only a Gatsby project tag, but also a written strangely early in the morning tag.

It's okay if you don't volunteer to sit for my outside-of-law-school exams. I have plenty of exams written by nonvolunteers that I am duty-bound to read. This post is about a duty I felt I had to write the answer to my own exam, which I only gave because I wanted to write that answer. But if the question inspired no one else, then I tend to think that my answer would only have seemed weird or annoying or — the worst — unreadable.

Or is that the worst? The devil nags me to ask. The devil says: Wouldn't it be a fascinating new project to write a blog called "Unreadable Things"?

"The assignment on this blog exam (written early in the morning of the day I plan to compose another law school exam) is..."

"... Using only that passage, discuss whether Mitch H. or Althouse's response accords with the ideas of the devil."

Scroll up for what Mitch H. said, then down for my response, and then the next 2 comments are a passage from "The Screwtape Letters."

"You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him."

Advice from the devil in "The Screwtape Letters," which I found doing a search in my ebook, looking for boredom, which I did after this outburst of mine on the topic of boredom and the devil.

In "The Screwtape Letters," the devil tells of a man who arrives in hell and says: "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked." He was damned not because of indulgence in "sweet sins" but because he spent his time "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."

"I come from 7 suicides, perhaps more."

Said Mariel Hemingway, who's in a new documentary called "Running From Crazy," the trailer for which I've embedded below:

The granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, Mariel has had to contend with a lot during her life. While millions celebrate her father as one of the all-time greatest writers, Mariel has struggled with the history of mental illness in her family.

Note the headslappingly bad error in that passage, which is in USA Today, where they seem to be running from editing.



There's some New Age-y spirituality in that, but it seems to be mostly about a wholesome experience in the mountains and earnest* physical exercise. What would you do if substance abuse, depression, and suicide seemed to "curse" your family? Just to call it a "curse," which MH does, is to give it a spiritual quality, as if one — like Scalia — believed in the Devil. If you think something is engrained in your genetic structure, it might be preferable to conceive of that thing as a separate entity that you could fight.

"The Screwtape Letters" is not an egg salad sandwich.

In yesterday's Boardwalk Café, Saint Croix said:

I should have said this in the Scalia post — the devil made me not do it — but one of the interesting things about The Screwtape Letters is the insight that a devil is simply an angel with free will.

Thus if you believe in an afterlife — and an overwhelming number of people believe in an afterlife — you should acknowledge devils. They are simply angels who are in rebellion with God. Which God allows, because God believes in free will for humanity.

What a fantastic book The Screwtape Letters is.

I would pay money for Althouse to blog that book!

Pay money to get me to blog about something? That's been done... to get me to eat an egg salad sandwich. I'd written a post — back in 2005 — listing "10 things I've never done," and #2 was "Eaten egg salad, devilled eggs, or cold hard-boiled eggs" — hmm, interesting second appearance of the Devil in this post! — and somehow that led to my saying you'd have to pay me $200 to eat an egg salad sandwich, and some commenters got together and collected $200 and PayPal'd it to me, and I blogged — vlogged! — The Eating of the Egg Salad Sandwich.

But I didn't want to eat an egg salad sandwich. Reading the "Screwtape Letters" is something I would like to do. I read it years ago — and I'm old so that "years ago" in the history of Althouse is almost half a century ago — but I'd like to read it again, especially with the ability to blog it and the context of Scalia's recent remarks about it.

So I added it to my Kindle. You can add it too: here. And if you use that link, you'll be sending me a little money (without paying more). If you like this blog, you can funnel money to me by entering Amazon through the Althouse portal and buying something, anything, at some point before clicking away. But to get me to blog on specific topics, you could attempt the Egg Salad Method. That might work for some things — bloggable, vloggable things, for the right price. You could also just ask, as Saint Croix did, and it might work, if I'm interested enough. This blog is all and only about what interests me.

So I bought "The Screwtape Letters" and read a few pages last night. Here's the first thing I highlighted, and I'll put it here out of context, because you know that I like isolating sentences from their context — so sue me — for the purposes of discussion. That's what we did last winter with The Gatsby Project, which actually has one post that got the "egg salad" tag. It was the post with the "salads of harlequin designs." Remember?

I'm not saying these "Screwtape Letters" posts will only be isolated sentences in the manner of The Gatsby Project. But I am getting us started with this sentence, as the devil Screwtape advises his nephew devil on how to screw with some human being, referred to as "the patient":

"By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?"

What Justice Scalia really means when he says he believes in the Devil.

About halfway her wonderful interview with Justice Scalia, after some discussion of homosexuality in legal and in Catholic doctrine, Jennifer Senior pushes the old judge to worry about how history will look back on his era of the Court. The first prompt — "Justice ­Kennedy is now the Thurgood Marshall of gay rights" — gets merely a nod. She tries again, with another non-question: "I don’t know how, by your lights, that’s going to be regarded in 50 years." He says doesn't know and he doesn't care:

Maybe the world is spinning toward a wider acceptance of homosexual rights, and here’s Scalia, standing athwart it. 

Some might hear "standing athwart" homosexual rights and get an amusingly unintentionally sexual picture of Scalia straddling gay men. But I assume it's an allusion to William F. Buckley's famous 1955 mission statement for The National Review: "It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." The topic was history, you know. And who else says "standing athwart"?