Literature in the Time of Coronavirus

Have suitcase, hand sanitizer, and disinfecting wipes; planning to travel!

We have tickets on Delta to return to Japan next Saturday. I’m supposed to start teaching at a different international Christian school in April. Then the coronavirus began its worldwide spread. The Japanese prime minister asked all elementary, middle, and high schools to close. United Airlines suspended flights to Japan. Delta cut back our Portland-Tokyo flight from daily to 3 times per week. So far, our tickets appear unaffected, but we are checking daily. 


What if…? What if the coronavirus pandemic explodes, and we can’t return to Japan as planned next Saturday? What if we go, and school closures there continue past the beginning of the new academic year in April? What if we go, and we can’t buy toilet paper? What if we go, and we can’t come back to see our families? The questions begin proliferating in my heart, with the toxic byproduct of worry which produces fear which can permeate my whole being.

Then I think of a work of literature which I have studied every year for the last 4 years with my 11th grade AP Language students: The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. Our literary objective in reading the book was to master an understanding of satire: it’s written as letters of advice from the experienced devil Screwtape, now promoted to a desk job up the “lowerarchy” (i.e. hierarchy), addressed to his nephew Wormwood, a novice tempter in the field with his first “patient” (i.e. human). Wormwood’s assignment is to preserve his patient from influence by “the Enemy” (i.e. God) and retain him for “Our Father Below.” 

The satire form allows the commentary on the foibles and follies of human nature to sneak in under my guard. I don't realize how true it is of me until I've laughed at the inverted advice. In letter 6 Screwtape tells Wormwood, “There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.”

What I need to do today, therefore, is to not worry about what will happen to me, but simply to act with love for God and my neighbor. Today that means joyfully, compassionately, and skillfully carrying out my obligations at the mission conference I’m attending. It also means protecting myself and my neighbor by washing my hands well, refraining from touching my face, and strengthening my body with good food and sleep. And it includes praying for peace in the uncertainty and leaving the “what-ifs” in the future since there is nothing I can do to affect them, and since all of them certainly won’t happen, and possibly none of them will.


As Screwtape continues:  

Your patient will, of course, have picked up the notion that he must submit with patience to the Enemy’s will. What the Enemy means by this is primarily that he should accept with patience the tribulation which has actually been dealt out to him--the present anxiety and suspense. It is about this that he is to say, “Thy will be done,” and for the daily task of bearing this that the daily bread will be provided. It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his appointed cross but only of the things he is afraid of.  

Let him regard them as his crosses: let him forget that, since they are incompatible, they cannot all happen to him, and let him try to practice fortitude and patience to them all in advance. For real resignation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible, and the Enemy does not greatly assist those who are trying to attain it: resignation to present and actual suffering, even where that suffering consists of fear, is far easier and is usually helped by this direct action. (Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter VI)

So, for the moment, my present cross is uncertainty. I plan to be on my way back to Japan at this time next week, and I act on those plans, but I also hold them loosely because the coronavirus and response to it could intervene. If they do, I will address myself to resignation to that fate when the time comes. Thank you, C.S. Lewis, for recollecting my scattered thoughts in this time

I am grateful for the thinkers and saints who have lived before me, who have captured their insights in writing. I am grateful for the way my profession as an English teacher has disciplined me to the repeated readings of the great writing that I teach each year. I hope the students in my classrooms get even a taste of what that’s like. 

How about you? What books have you re-read until certain parts of them have become part of the landscape of your soul?

P.S. A part of The Screwtape Letters was also significant to me when my mother was dying several years ago. I reflected on that in my post "Processing Death through Reading and Writing." I never would have thought that The Screwtape Letters would be so important, but there are at least 2 other passages that occur to me at times. They may be the subjects of another blog.