Today's Reading
[No one /looking at world history /without some
preconception in favor of progress] could find in it a steady up
gradient.
* Gradient definition, the degree of inclination, or the rate of ascent or descent, in a highway, railroad, etc. ; slope
There is often progress within a given field over a limited
period.
A school of pottery or painting, a moral effort in a particular
direction, a practical art like sanitation or shipbuilding, may
continuously improve over a number of years.
If this process could
spread to all departments of life and continue indefinitely,
there would
be “progress” of the sort () our fathers believed in.
But it never seems
to do so.
Either it is interrupted (by barbarian irruption or the even
less resistible infiltration of modern industrialism)
or else, more
mysteriously, it decays.
[The idea //which here shuts out the Second Coming
from our minds],
the idea of the world slowly /ripening to perfection, is
a myth, not a generalization from experience.
And it is a myth //which
distracts us from our real duties and our real interest.
It is our
attempt to guess the plot of a drama //in which we are the characters.
But
how can the characters in a play guess the plot?
We are not the
playwright, we are not the producers, we are not even the audience.
We
are on the stage.
[To play well the scenes //in which we are “on”] concerns
us much more
than to guess about the scenes //that follow it.
* A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes plays.
From The World's Last Night
Compiled in The Business of Heaven
The World's Night.
Copyright © 1952, 1955, 1958, 1959, 1960 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd.
"Screwtape Proposes a Toast" copyright © 1959 by Helen Joy Lewis. All
rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. The Business of Heaven.
Editing of this collection and preface by Walter Hooper. Copyright ©
1984 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission
of HarperCollins Publishers.
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