The different senses of the possessive pronoun

[soso]

Today's Reading

Screwtape encourages confusion and pride:

The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged.

The humans are always putting up claims /to ownership //which sound equally funny /in Heaven and in Hell

and we must keep them doing so.

* claims //which sound equally funny /in Heaven and in Hell

Much of the modem resistance to chastity comes /from men’s belief //that they ‘own’ their bodies

—those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy //that made the worlds,

in which they find themselves /without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!

It is as if a royal child //whom his father has placed, for love’s sake, in titular command of some great province,

under the real rule of wise counsellors, should come to fancy () he really owns the cities, the forests, and the corn,

in the same way /as he owns the bricks on the nursery floor.

We produce this sense of ownership /not only by pride but by confusion.

We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun

—the finely graded differences //that run from ‘my boots’ through ‘my dog’, ‘my servant’, ‘my wife’, ‘my father’, ‘my master’

and ‘my country’, to ‘my God’.

They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of ‘my boots’, the ‘my’ of ownership.

From The Screwtape Letters
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis

The Screwtape Letters. Copyright © 1942, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.