It's rather strange to revisit The Screwtape Letters from the far side, as it were. It pains me to remember how much importance I once attached to this book, which convinced me after my first reading that I'd taken a wrong turn in life. I experienced the Sehnsucht, the yearning for one's spiritual home that cuts through all worldly perceptions, of which Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy. Listening to John Cleese's skillful reading of the Letters (most of them) only made the feeling worse. A set of audiocassette tapes of Cleese's reading of Screwtape Letters accompanied me on the long drive from San Diego to Seattle in October 1999, and when I got to the last letter I had to pull over somewhere near Springfield, OR in order to recover myself. I was too overwhelmed with emotion to drive.

Maybe believing in C. S. Lewis was always a mistake, but now the mistake is thoroughly made and I'm living with the consequences, and thus I can revisit his work with a sense of detachment. Dismantling the public cult of C. S. Lewis has been an indistinct and tenuous goal of ours, competing with far too many others, hence we've felt some sense of duty to revisit Lewis's work, and read the bits of it which escaped us during that big explosion of interest in the 1990s.

~Chara of Pnictogen

This is one of the funniest Google Ngram results I've ever come up with. "Paradigm shift" from 1960 onward. It's rising monotonically! (That is to say, its slope is always positive over time, never levelling out or falling.) Basically everyone's been more and more excited about a "paradigm shift", even though Western society's basically frozen in its tracks, unwilling to budge a single micron from its money-making principles and commitment to authoritarian leadership. Mainstream culture has been furiously amplifying nostalgia and tradition and political reaction. People openly wish World War II would come back, practically...and yet somehow there's rising excitement over shifting paradigms. It's wacky.

~Chara

I feel, at last, like I understand something that other folks probably regard as quite obvious: the reason the "normal" people are so vindictive about identity and "identity politics" is because they have, in fact, no sense of identity. They might even be waking up blank every morning like Harry du Bois after a blackout, piecing themselves together with the help of their own papers and records and everything, and that's why the notion of changing any of that stuff offends them so much.

I, we, all of us have struggled with identity, "impostor syndrome", and everything...it's taken a while. We feel like we're finally stitching together a satisfactory sense of self. It took a while. Self-loathing was my predominant emotion for so very many years....anyway, if there's a large collection of people who are all "normal" in approximately the same way and they're all reliant upon external information for their sense of self, then...what does that make them?

I have a hypothesis to propose, a metaphysical one: some clever entity set up a false Heaven in order to make instant salvation possible, or the illusion of it rather.

(cw: wacky blithering)

There's an unanswered question in the back of my mind. Among many, of course. This one is a bit...unpleasant to think about. Because the question is: "Why, of all the fictive fathers I could have identified with and felt the most compassion for, did it end up being Emiya Kiritsugu?"

Not Asgore. I have very complicated feelings about King Dad, sorry to say. But, yeah.

I fear we have too much in common.

~Chara of Pnictogen