Book Club

Last night was "Book Club night". I love those nights. Mostly because I get together with a bunch of really fun people and we discuss books. I know that most people make fun of "Book Clubs" and say that people just get together and gab and don't talk about the books. NOT THE CASE with ours. We actually spend an entire hour (sometimes longer) on the book we've read. Nobody makes you feel bad if you didn't finish it - or if you just didn't get it - or even if you didn't like it.
Last night we were discussing the book "The Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis. It was unanimously agreed upon that he was a very inspired author. Here are some of my favorite passages from the book. (Oh, the cunningness of the devil...)

"...we now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, we thus aggravate the females chronic horror of growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children. And that is not all. We have engineered a great increase in the licence which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being 'frank' and 'healthy' and getting back to nature. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist - making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible."

(Sorry to my friends and relatives that are really skinny - I don't mean any offense)

How does Satan work on us?

"It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out."

"...the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy (God). It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

Here is one that hit home to me because often times I have feelings and fail to act on them.

"Active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel."

I could go on and on - there are many more quotes that I love - but this post would take up half of your day to read it. So - suffice it to say, I will just advise every person who has not yet read this great book to do so!

Now - onto our next month's selection, "That Printer of Udells".

Happy Reading to you.