/lit/ - Literature

If your patient is already quite proud, you may be able to convince him that only certain books are worthy of his time. The high-minded reader of fantasy, for instance, can be quickly converted to read only classics, particularly if he has absorbed the delicious elitism of /lit/. This is a dangerous game, because there is always a chance he will actually enjoy the classics, but if you are careful there is no cause for concern. The point, as with directing him towards a Purpose, is to keep all pleasure out of reading. Why should he enjoy himself reading Tolkien and Martin when we might make him miserable reading Alexander Pope? To make reading a duty, one that he does with less and less relish each time he sits down to do it, that should be your goal. Not only does this open up the possibility that he will simply quit, it will make him dull and insensitive to the works he is reading. They may be foul and steeped in the Enemy’s nonsense, but if he barely pays attention, then there is no harm. You may even be able to make everything about the Enemy repellent to him, just by the constant connection between the feeling of boredom, which he will come to associate with reading, and the ideas in the classics themselves. This would be a true triumph, and one that would turn the Enemy’s natural advantage in literature to the side of Our Father Below.

But you must never forget that you are working on the Enemy’s ground, even when there is a great deal of room for you to maneuver. Of course, you know that it is very difficult (but by no means impossible! Pride is a marvelous tool.) to turn his Scriptures against him, but many young tempters foolishly think that other works are different. Do not make the all-too-common mistake of believing that the books of the twentieth-century atheists, let alone the old pagan epics, are anything but fundamentally on the Enemy’s side. In all of them, there are traces of his hated Spirit, even those that seem most amenable to our noble cause. I do not need to tell you that there are no libraries in Our Father’s House.