Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury

[soso]

Today's Reading

Screwtape outlines a fundamental deception:

Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury.

And the sense of injury depends on the feeling //that a legitimate claim has been denied.

The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured

and, as a result, ill-tempered.

Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion /so easily /as to find a tract of time //which he reckoned /on having at his own disposal /unexpectedly taken from him.

It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening),

or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tête-à-tête with the friend), that throw him out of gear.

Now he is not yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy are in themselves too much for it.

They anger him /because he regards his time /as his own and feels that it is being stolen.

You must therefore zealously guard in his mind [the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’].

Let him have the feeling //that he starts each day /as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours.

Let him feel /as a grievous tax that portion of this property //which he has to make over /to his employers,

and as a generous donation that further portion //which he allows to religious duties.

But [what he must never be permitted to doubt] is that [the total //from which these deductions have been made] was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.

* Let him feel /as a grievous tax that portion of this property //which he has to make over /to his employers

= Let him feel [that portion of this property //which he has to make over /to his employers] /as a grievous tax 

[that portion of this property //which he has to make over /to his employers]

명사구 + 형절 = 명사구

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.