"Jammin' with James Lee Burke" by Anthony Rainone

A January magazine interview

October 2004

James Lee Burke is a polite man with a sense of humor and an easy laugh. Those facts conflicted with my preconceptions of this author who writes crime novels containing serious political-sociological themes and quick-breaking violence. While I expected someone more cynical or dour, to his credit (and no doubt contributing to his talent as an author), Burke also sees the lighter side of dark human predicaments.

Born in Houston, Texas, in 1936, Burke spent his childhood growing up along the Texas-Louisiana Gulf coast. He began reading and writing at an early age, and by the time Burke was 34 years old, he had three critically successful mainstream novels on the market: Half of Paradise (1965), To the Bright and Shining Sun (1970) and Lay Down My Sword and Shield (1971). But then he experienced what for most novelists would have been a career-ending event -- he went nine years "without publishing a hardback novel." His completed manuscript at that time, The Lost Get Back Boogie, amassed more than 100 rejections, which still remains "a publishing industry record," according to the author. During that dry spell, Burke managed to find a new agent in New York City and then did what many married men should probably do more often: he listened to the advice of his wife, Pearl, and as a result submitted his rejected novel to Louisiana State University Press, which finally accepted it. The Lost Get Back Boogie, published in 1986, went on to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and earn Burke a valuable lifelong lesson, that success is "a fickle lady" and guaranteed to leave you just as fast as she arrives.

By that point, the theme of American justice had been playing around in Burke's mind for some time, so after Boogie, he tried his hand at crime fiction. The resulting book, The Neon Rain (1987), introduced readers to Lieutenant Dave Robicheaux, a Vietnam veteran and New Orleans Police Department homicide detective. It was an instant hit with both mystery readers and critics. Today, the Robicheaux series -- 13 novels deep, and still expanding -- continues to run strong. Robicheaux is an "Everyman," a guy who fights for underdogs and people ignored by the larger portion of society -- folks whose lives are made expendable by men with wealth, power or privilege. In Neon Rain, it is the slaying of a young, black prostitute that outrages Robicheaux and leads him to investigate a much larger, more dangerous scenario. Similarly, it is the dumping of industrial waste on the property of a poor black woman that leads Robicheaux to the illegal doings of a rich landowner -- and into risky contact with the Mafia -- in this series' most recent installment, Last Car to Elysian Fields (2003).

Dave Robicheaux's fiery drive tends to rub his superiors the wrong way, and like many dedicated cops, it ultimately costs him his first marriage. But that drive remains an essential aspect of his makeup. There comes a moment in each Robicheaux novel, when the protagonist will cross the line and put his career and the fate of his family in jeopardy, whether he is facing off against evil ex-plantation overseer Legion Guidry, in Jolie Blon's Bounce (one of January's favorite books of 2002), or neo-nazi psychopath Walter Buchalter, in Dixie City Jam (1994). He simply sees no other course of action. Showing a touch of his dead father's Cajun sensibility and outlook, Robicheaux knows bad things are going to happen, but he can do no better than ride events out. He is powerless, for instance, to stop the murder of his second wife, Annie, in Heaven's Prisoners (1988), or to prevent the death of his next wife, Bootsie, from lupus.

Amid the fallout that resulted from battling fringe U.S. military agents in Neon Rain, Robicheaux packs up his belongings and boat and heads to Louisiana's New Iberia Parish, where he joins the sheriff's department. However, he remains only a stone's throw from the most important person in his life, Clete Purcel. When things get tough and complicated, Robicheaux can always count on Purcel, who started in this series as his NOPD partner, but subsequently left the force, only to re-emerge as a private investigator. Purcel is described as a "big man" who "fought to keep his weight down, unsuccessfully," and he is arguably the most chauvinistic, violence-prone and politically incorrect P.I. operating in the genre today. Purcel never appreciates the social or political repercussions of the crimes that Robicheaux investigates, but his heart is huge and he's careful to mangle only the civil rights of the miscreant. Burke sees the two men as descendants of Don Quixote and his loyal assistant, Sancho Panza. There is no denying the men's mutual devotion, though at times it's difficult to determine which of the two is attacking the windmill. At the end of Last Car to Elysian Fields, we find Robicheaux having resigned from the sheriff's department and Purcel opening an office in New Iberia. The trials and battles of these two warriors will carry on.

In 1997, Burke inaugurated a second series with the novel Cimarron Rose. Not only did that work win Burke his second Edgar Allan Poe Award (the first had been given to him in honor of his 1989 Robicheaux book, Black Cherry Blues), but it introduced the character Billy Bob Holland. He's a Texas Ranger-turned-lawyer, who lives and practices in Missoula, Montana -- which just happens to be one of author Burke's current hometowns (not surprisingly, the other is New Iberia, Louisiana). The fourth and latest Holland series installment, this year's In the Moon of Red Ponies, finds Billy Bob and his private-eye wife, Temple, along with their college student son, Lucas, pitted against an old nemesis, Wyatt Dixon, who's newly released from prison. Ex-rodeo clown Dixon made his first appearance in Bitterroot (2001), and like all Burke villains, he is a visceral, palpable creation that lives and breathes on the page. Yet the threats presented in Red Ponies don't come from Dixon alone. The novel also deals with a greater issue near to Burke's heart: the U.S. government's willingness to provide foreign nations with weapons that can be used against enemies, and its adamancy thereafter to cover its tracks. Burke has nothing but contempt for government elements with independent agendas, and sees them -- along with white-collar criminals -- as the most lethal forces in our modern society. Which is why, in Red Ponies, businessman Karsten Mabus is even more diabolical a foe than Dixon. Mabus is rich and controls numerous people, including state senators, and he nearly succeeds in killing both Holland and Temple. In a strange twist, miscreant Dixon actually becomes Holland's ally. Like Robicheaux, Billy Bob Holland is introspective and comes to realize at this tale's end that "Mabus is of our own manufacture," and that the "pursuit of wealth and power" can never bestow "virtue" on those with greed in their souls. Red Ponies has been nominated for a National Book Award, and it should be considered a strong challenger next year for an Edgar. (It was also nominated for a 2004 Pulitzer Prize, but didn't win.)

Beyond their rewardingly slavish devotion to rich descriptive settings, both the Billy Bob Holland and Dave Robicheaux series boast touches of the supernatural. Throughout the Holland stories, Burke's protagonist engages in lengthy conversations with his late Texas Ranger partner, L.Q. Navarro. The Robicheaux series is likewise infused with the spiritual. Alafair Burke, James Lee Burke's daughter and fellow crime novelist (Justice Calls), explains that In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (1993) and Jolie Blon's Bounce "have an element of the supernatural to them that challenges the distinction between the literal and metaphorical. In Electric Mist, the reader's never sure whether Dave's conversations with a dead confederate soldier are real. And, in Jolie Blon's Bounce, one begins to wonder whether Legion Guidry truly is Satan and not just a representation of human evil."

James Lee Burke's place in the hall of American crime-fiction fame is guaranteed, whether or not he fears the fickle lady of success riding off into the sunset without him. In Alafair's words, "His greatest contribution has been to throw down a challenge to bend the definition of the genre itself. His books are never traditional thrillers or whodunits. They're poetic and literary and lyrical, but just happen to have some crime and police involved. Put it this way, I don't know too many other crime writers who'll say they were influenced by Chaucer, Don Quixote and the Arthurian legends."

Not long ago, I had the chance to talk by phone with the 68-year-old Burke, during his book-promotion tour for In the Moon of Red Ponies. We discussed the inspirations for his literary villains, his accomplished use of first-person storytelling, the significance of music in the American South, and why he thinks his work will ultimately go out of fashion.

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Anthony Rainone: There are always many layers to your books, including some historical connection between characters, setting and plot. As Michael Connelly said about writing, it's like a balancing act. How do you approach writing a new novel?

James Lee Burke: I never know where a book is going. I have no plan. They just evolve and I incrementally discover the story.

Do you start with a question, or a premise?

It begins with a feeling of concern, of a dilemma of some kind. In the case of In the Moon of Red Ponies, if we don't change the way we're doing things, we'll destroy the earth ultimately. It's getting bad. [Laughs]

The bad guys in your books -- from Legion Guidry and William Buchalter to Wyatt Dixon -- are some of the nastiest villains in crime fiction.

Buchalter is a piece of work, all right. [Laughs]

Do you ever sit back after you've created these villains and ask yourself, "Where did I come up with someone like that?" Where do you get the essence of these characters?

You meet only two or three kinds of villains in [my] stories and novels. You meet the run-of-the-mill miscreants, the people who get into trouble, but are still like the rest of us. Then you meet the second group, [who are] sociopaths. They are in the minority. The third group, the ones that Dave Robicheaux and Billy Bob Holland have the most trouble with, [they're] those who have insinuated themselves into the mainstream of society. They're not legally criminals, but they do far more damage than people like Buchalter.

You also use a good number of Mafia characters in your fiction -- Fat Sammy Figorelli, from Last Car to Elysian Fields, for one. You've turned to them repeatedly in your novels and mined them as another source of danger.

They're big players in Louisiana. There's a famous comment that a member of the Chicago commission made years ago: Who gave [organized-crime boss] Frank Costello the right to own Louisiana? [Laughs] Because that's what occurred. I think Huey Long [Louisiana's governor and U.S. senator during the 1920s and 30s] cut a deal with Frank Costello, and Costello brought slot machines to Louisiana. The mob was headquartered in New Orleans [and] there's no question about their influence on Louisiana. It's enormous. There're many people who believe there were [Mafia men] in New Orleans who were instrumental in the murder of President Kennedy. Every investigation into the assassination goes back to the same names. It doesn't matter which avenue the person takes, it gets to the same locus at the center of what appears to have been a conspiracy. They're involved in all probability, in my view.

There seems to be a commingling of interests between the bad guys and the good guys in your books. The demarcation line is vague.

Oh, absolutely. Both groups live in the same noir world. And the attractions for both groups are basically the same. It's a rush living on the edge of an existentialistic existence. The character Darrel McComb [from In the Moon of Red Ponies] writes his Last Will and Testament and says, "Hey, I've never had to sell Tom McAn shoes." [Laughs] Most cops who are honest will admit they are drawn to certain aspects of that world that also draws criminals to it. They live in a world where the clichés that for most of us define society have no application to the realities of life. That's why most news reporters are cynics. They know the difference between the reality of how a city works and the way in which it's reported. You know that -- you're a journalist and I was, too. We went and filed the story, but [we didn't report] what was really occurring -- who was on the pad, which congressman was seen running nude down the hotel corridor spitting ice water and bourbon. [Laughs] It's not the kind of stuff going into a family newspaper.

There's an ethereal and spirit-like element to some of your books. Characters have vivid dreams, like Johnny American Horse [in Red Ponies]. Some of your players talk to ghosts, like Billy Bob Holland talks to L.Q. Navarro. And I wondered if Legion Guidry was more an embodiment of evilness, than human.

Oh, yeah. Shakespeare said all power lies in the world of dreams. The great body of human understanding is in the unconscious, in the world of dreams. That is how we figure out the reality.

What kind of research do you do for your books? Do you sit down with cops and talk?

I've never researched anything, and it probably shows. [Laughs]

No, not at all. I think there's a great deal of credibility in the ways that Robicheaux and Holland think and react.

I was a social worker once, working at times in association with California Parole and Probation. I worked with a lot of convicts and career criminals. And I was a newspaper reporter. Then, I worked for nine years for a Miami junior college that served as a kind of adjunct for the Miami PD. In truth, most of my work has to do with the larger society. I'm not really that knowledgeable about police work. The real story is in the psychology of the characters.

Why do you set your books in Montana and Louisiana? Why are those locales important to you?

They're both great places to write about, because their story -- the microcosm -- really reflects a much larger population, really reflects national issues. As Dave Robicheaux says, wars are fought in places nobody cares about. And the national issues that are probably most critical, most important, the war over them is being waged in places like Montana and Louisiana. And those issues are resources, energies and extracted industries. That's what it's all about. From Iraq to Afghanistan to the offshore oil fields of the Gulf of Mexico, that's what it's all about -- energy. There's no question about the flag we're operating under today -- it's energy. A massive need for it. You see, in Montana, extracted industries are trying to get into wilderness areas. That's the big issue. They're trying to drill right now on the edges of Glacier National Park. If they get in there, say good-bye to it, man, it's gone. No matter what they say, it's gone. It's like the discovery of gold by [General George Armstrong] Custer's expedition of 1873. The dye was cast as soon as gold was discovered on Indian lands.

The wars this country has waged have influenced your writing. The Vietnam War, for instance, has had a big impact on Dave Robicheaux.

Oh, yes. That theme is a very strong one. But the first novel in the Dave Robicheaux series, The Neon Rain, dealt with the smuggling of arms into Central America, aid to the [Nicaraguan] contras and a lot of other nasty characters down there. And that novel was written before the Iran-contra story broke. The point being, here I am writing this story in Kansas, while teaching English at a city university there. And if I knew about it, why was it a mystery to anyone else, other than Amnesty International, at that time? The first time I heard these stories was in 1981 or 1982, even about the shipment of arms through Israeli to Iran. I heard that story through Amnesty International, no later than 1982.

Prior to Neon Rain, you were more of a mainstream writer, for want of a better label. I've read that crime fiction lent itself well to the things you were already writing about, themes such as American justice. So that's why you started writing in the crime-fiction genre. Is all this true?

That is correct. Crime fiction has come to replace the sociological novel of the 1930s and 1940s. It's a way of talking not only about the underside of America, what Michael Harrington called "the Other America," [but] it's a way of talking about larger society as well. The only change that came about in my work was the creation of Dave Robicheaux in that series. A man who was sometimes a police officer, sometimes not, narrates the stories. That was the only change.

You write both the Robicheaux and Holland series from the first-person perspective. How do you ground yourself when you write one character, as opposed to the other? How do you separate them?

Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself. The character is already in the author, I think. The challenge is not to allow the ego of the character to dominate the story. I remember something the creator of the Bonanza series once said. He was asked how he created such a successful television series, and he said he created characters [that] an American family felt comfortable inviting into their living room every Sunday evening. It's a great line. Washington Irving talks about the same thing. He said a first-person narrator establishes a sense of familiarity and trust and intimacy with the reader that a third-person point of view cannot. America's most famous literary protagonists are usually in first-person, like Huckleberry Finn or Ishmael, in Moby-Dick. [Even] people who cannot read or write know who Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were.

I think your first-person voice is compelling. It's a lush, lyrical voice.

Thank you. Good writing is a matter of being a good listener. A good reporter learns that early on. If a guy just listens, the story will get said in one way or another.

So, let me ask you a very basic but important question: Who is Dave Robicheaux? What is his motivation?

Robicheaux is the Everyman from the morality plays of the Renaissance. He tries to give voice to those who have none. He is possessed of an awareness of events that will occur, but he can't control the outcome.

Robicheaux's paisano -- I hate the term "sidekick" -- is definitely not a politically correct character. The things Clete Purcel says are often shocking, but I find his comments so funny, that I'm almost crying from laughing so hard. He's an engaging character and is necessary to Robicheaux. 

Have you ever thought of writing a book from Purcel's viewpoint?

People have mentioned that. A movie producer talked once about doing something on just Clete. But you see, neither man is complete without the other. I think the greatest single aid to a writer is some appreciation of classical literature, [such as] the Renaissance and mythology. And you see -- Dave and Clete are descendants of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. So one is not complete without the other. The two of them form a third personality that's quite formidable.

Do you literally take themes from the Renaissance and plop them into your works?

No. They are metaphors used as illustrations.

You have a character named Alafair in your Robicheaux novels. Is she perhaps based on anyone we might know?

That's right. The character is based on our Alafair, who is our youngest child.

You must be very proud of your daughter's literary success over the last couple of years.

Yeah. Her novel Missing Justice just came out. She and I just did a joint interview. We have joint signings coming up. She's the first crime writer in the family. She's been writing murder mystery stories since the first grade. And she graduated first in her class from Stanford Law.

I loved Judgment Calls and I'm looking forward to reading this latest one.

Yeah, she's off to a very good start. The first book I thought was very good. She's got a great character in [Oregon Deputy District Attorney] Samantha Kincaid.

A few moments ago you mentioned a movie producer expressing interest in Purcel. Now, Heaven's Prisoners was already made into a movie, in 1996, featuring Robicheaux and Purcel. Did you like it?

Yes, I did. They had financial trouble. The production company, Savoy, went bankrupt during the production. [Laughs] But they gave it their best effort and they treated the material with respect. The director was very talented -- all of them, Eric Roberts, Alec Baldwin, Kelly Lynch, Teri Hatcher and Mary Stuart Masterson. It's pretty hard to complain about the cast.

Are any of your other works currently being talked up as future films?

There were a couple of big deals that looked like they were rounding third and on their way home, [but] they fell apart. One with Tommy Lee Jones, and one with HBO, but they went south. But it's the nature of the beast. If you know any Saudis there in New York, guys with lots of oil money who want to take a fling at making movies, give them my number. [Laughs]

Oh, sure, I bump into them all the time. But let's talk about The Lost Get Back Boogie, which I think was rejected -- what, 110 times? What was that whole ordeal like? How did you cope with it day in and day out?

By the time I was 34, I had published three novels in hardback in New York, and had a fair amount of success, and I was a Bread Loaf Fellow. I thought I was on board. With The Lost Get Back Boogie, I assumed it would be published. But, boy, I went 13 years before I was back in hardback again. And the agency that was handling my works sent everything back. They cut bait. It was pretty depressing. I started writing other things. I wrote short stories, I wrote other novels, but I couldn't sell anything. I sold one paperback. But I met my agent then. That was 26 years ago. Phillip Spitzer was driving a cab in Hell's Kitchen. He ran a one-man agency at night. He was my cousin Andre Dubus' agent. And Phillip kept [Boogie] under submission for nine years. And my wife kept saying, "Send it to Louisiana State University Press." I finally listened to [her]. I cut 80 pages from it, and Phillip and I sent it to LSU. And, by heavens, they took it. And they also took a collection of stories entitled The Convict. And they put me back in business again.

You've won two Edgar Awards -- something that most crime novelists will never do. What was that experience like for you?

It was great. Pearl and I went to the awards ceremony [for Black Cherry Blues, in 1989]. Crime-writing and mystery-writing novelists tend to be very nice people. The whole crowd is just fine folks. And they have a lot of fun. They had an orchestra playing all Glenn Miller and Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey swing. It was at the Sheraton, near Central Park.

An orchestra? Wow, I wish the Edgars organizers still did that. While we're on the subject of music, let me say that most readers get a sense from your novels that you have a great appreciation for music and musicians, Robert Johnson being a name that comes first to mind. Music seems very important to you.

Oh, yeah. I have a great interest [in music].

How does that affect your writing process?

I think a person who writes about blue-collar America, about the Southeast, ultimately [he or she is] going to have to write about the music of the people. If you think about [musicians] who come out of the South -- golly, it's the American story. The American mythos has its origins down south. I remember something that an anthropologist said, about 1958 or 1959, about [Elvis] Presley. He said the truth is, Americans are fascinated by Presley, because he has all the characteristics of a Greek god. He looked like a mythic character, but he also represented all the mystery of the South. He was this kid from a welfare project in Tupelo [Mississippi], who fulfilled the dream of every working-class person in this country. He stepped through the door of this magic kingdom, but then again it was fraught with peril. You know the story of Sun Record Company, huh?

I know Presley made his early records there.

He made a four-dollar recording for his mom. You see, Sam Phillips produced not only Presley's music, but [also the music of] Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison. Jimmy Lee Swaggert started there. Jerry Lee Lewis and Conway Twitty. There was something Jerry Lee Lewis said once. He said all of those guys came out of the same background -- the Assembly of God Church. That's where they all learned to sing and play. So in other words, their lives were like cultural vessels filled with all this great stuff -- music and religion and cultural desperation and poverty. The Beatles said the greatest single influence on their music was Carl Perkins.

I remember reading an article that explained how Presley took the roots of black music and put it into a form that white people could relate to and assimilate -- prejudices being what they were at the time.

[Elvis is] probably the father of rockabilly. People don't think of it that way. Those early pieces that he did, like Mystery Train and That's Alright Momma.

The southern African-American experience and musical expression -- that social fabric is very important to you. It pervades your work.

That's right. You see, we're surrounded by music. We always have been. The Big Bands of the 30s and 40s. The beboppers. The progressive bands, like [Dave] Brubeck and all of those great guys. Miles [Davis]. And the rock-'n'-roll era. People said rock-'n'-roll was just a flash in the pan, [but it's] been here for 50 years.

Your background is southern. You grew up originally in Texas, right?

I grew up in Texas and Louisiana during the Depression. That era is gone forever. There is an enormous difference in the way we live today. Today it's all about "we." There's boredom with despair, boredom with experience. Today, there's a desire to have extraordinary experiences brought to us. There is a spiritual pleasure in material goods. When I was growing up in the South, my friend and I would try to figure out how to get 10 cents to go to the movies. We'd figure it out. Maybe shine shoes. [Laughs]

Your work often teaches readers about southern social mores. I think right away of books such as White Doves at Morning [2002], which among other things, dealt with the Civil War.

Yeah. That, I think, is my best work.

Really. Why?

On the strength of the female characters.

You mentioned that Andre Dubus, Sr. [who died in 1999], was your cousin. How did you two interact, as writers?

Well, we're entirely different writers. He was the best short-story writer this country has ever produced. I have the highest regard for his talent. There is nobody better. He wrote about working-class people in small New England towns. He wrote about the deleterious forces that have destroyed the American family. The movie based on his work, In the Bedroom [2001], is a masterpiece. Hollywood snubbed it. But it is one of the best crime films. It captured ordinary people caught in unconscionable acts. Now there's a movie out based on another of his works: We Don't Live Here Any More. It's great. His boy [Andre Dubus III] is a fine novelist, too.

Which crime writers do you read?

There're some very good ones around. Of course, Michael Connelly is one of the best. Elizabeth George writes some really nice prose. Dennis Lehane's Mystic River is just a masterpiece, a great book. Connelly's Black Echo is going to remain a crime classic, I think. I think our greatest crime novelist was James M. Cain -- the most neglected writer in American Literature. I think Mildred Pierce would stand up against Henry James. It's a great novel. I'm surprised the feminists haven't caught onto it. [Cain] is totally ignored. It's a peculiarity. Academics appear to be liberal and without bias, but I don't think so. I was an academic for years. I taught at universities for years. Sometimes they think categorically and tend to dismiss writers that seem to be either proletarian in their emphasis, or seem to have some kind of categorical depth. They've never given much due to John Steinbeck, I think. Jack London is totally ignored. And these are great writers.

But perhaps they are considered too "popular."

There's nothing an academic finds more unpardonable than a writer becoming successful and rich. [Laughs]

I went to Amazon.com recently and plugged in your name. More than 4,000 references to your works came up. Web sites are certainly not absolute qualifiers of what's important, but they are yardsticks of a sort. What's it like to have accomplished so much in your career?

Well, winning is better than losing. Hemingway's son Gregory once asked his dad, "Isn't is important to be a good loser?" And Hemingway said, "Son, being a good loser requires one critical element: practice." [Laughs] More seriously, you learn at some point that success is a fickle companion and it leaves you as quickly as it comes. And if that person writes for money or success or fame, he'll never have any of those things. Those things find a person of their own accord. But again, they're temporary. I know that. I had all my problems in the middle of my career. But it'll happen again. The work will go out of fashion.

Oh, come on. I can't really see that happening. Not at this point. But that does lead me to ask: What projects are you working on now?

I just wrote three short stories and I've started another Dave Robicheaux novel. I'd like to get a collection of stories together, and I'd like to get the Robicheaux book moving along after this tour. I try to keep my goals short, in terms of time projections. I work every day and it takes me a year [to complete a book]. Years ago, I'd finish a book and see it drop into a bottomless well, when I'd start submitting it. Fortunately, most of what I write [nowadays] gets published, though it's hard to sell a short story. There aren't many places to sell them anymore.

Do you find it refreshing to write short fiction, to take a break from your novels?

Yeah, I love writing short stories. I just wrote -- I think the best story I've ever written. It's titled "Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine." It's a great story. It's under submission to The Atlantic, or The New Yorker. It's a tough go. There're so many people who write very good short stories in the business. There are only three or four [mainstream] magazines [that still publish short fiction], and then they publish one [piece] an issue.

I'd like to end with this last question. When you started out as a writer, what was your career goal? What did you aspire to do, and have you done that yet? 

I have always had one goal: to write the story as well as I can, and to capture the place as best I can. And to hope that it brings some benefit. | October 2004

 Anthony Rainone lives in New York City and is a contributing editor of January Magazine.

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From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lee_Burke :

Bibliography

Dave Robicheaux series:

The Neon Rain (1987)

Heaven's Prisoners (1988)

Black Cherry Blues (1989)

A Morning for Flamingos (1990)

A Stained White Radiance (1992)

In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (1993)

Dixie City Jam (1994)

Burning Angel (1995)

Cadillac Jukebox (1996)

Sunset Limited (1998)

Purple Cane Road (2000)

Jolie Blon's Bounce (2002)

Last Car to Elysian Fields (2003)

Crusader's Cross (2005)

Pegasus Descending (2006)

The Tin Roof Blowdown (2007)

Swan Peak (2008)

The Glass Rainbow (2010)

Creole Belle (2012)

Billy Bob Holland series:

Cimarron Rose (1997)

Heartwood (1999)

Bitterroot (2001)

In the Moon of Red Ponies (2004)

Hackberry Holland series:

Lay Down My Sword and Shield (1971)

Rain Gods (2009)

Feast Day of Fools (2011)

Miscellaneous:

Half of Paradise (1965)

To The Bright and Shining Sun (1970)

Two for Texas (1982)

The Lost Get-Back Boogie (1986)

White Doves at Morning (2002)

Short Stories Anthologies:

The Convict (1985)

Jesus Out to Sea (2007)

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Chapters 1, 3, 27, 28, and 29 from The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

The following short excerpt was published by Barbour & Company, Inc., P.O. Box 719, Uhrichsville, Ohio 44683

 Member of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association.

Nothing is as helpful to a young man's career as the advice of an experienced elder.  

The Screwtape Letters is a treasure of such wisdom, as it was penned to young tempter Wormwood by his worldly-wise devil of an uncle, Screwtape.

Anxious Uncle Screwtape's brisk, businesslike letters are full of fiendishly clever advice on the capture of this, or any, man.  (After all, Screwtaape knows a great, great deal about men and women and about the ways of the Enemy.)

Since its first publication, The Screwtape Letters has become justly famous and perennially best selling.  What the book acknowledges about human nature is as old as the world---but the wit and profound wisdom with which it is said have earned the book a lasting place in the religious literature of Christianity.

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From www.arthursbookshelf.com/.../lewis/c.%20s.%20lewis%20- %20the%20screwtape%20letters.pdf :

The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis

Preface

I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils.  One is to disbelieve in their existence.  The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.  They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.  The sort of script which is used in this book can be very easily obtained by anyone who has once learned the knack; but disposed or excitable people who might make a bad use of it shall not learn it from me.  

Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar.  Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle.  I have made no attempt to identify any of the human beings mentioned in the letters; but I think it very unlikely that the portraits, say, of Fr. Spike or the patient's mother, are wholly just.  There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.  

In conclusion, I ought to add that no effort has been made to clear up ;the chronology of the letters.  Chapter 17 appears to have been composed before rationing became serious; but in general the diabolical method of dating seems to bear no relation to terrestrial time and I have not attempted to reproduce it.  The history of the European War, except in so far as it happens now and then to impinge upon the spiritual condition of one human being, was obviously of no interest to Screwtape.

C. S. Lewis

Magdalen College

July 5, 1941

* *

Chapter 1

My Dear Wormwood,

I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you supposed that 'argument' was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous -- that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about. 

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle on to the Enemy's own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it "real life" and don't let him ask what he means by "real." 

Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy's!) you don't realise how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear what He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said "Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning," the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added "Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind," he was already half way to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of "real life" (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all "that sort of thing" just couldn't be true. He knew he'd had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about "that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic." He is now safe in Our Father's house. 

You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the 'ordinariness' of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don't let him get away from that invaluable "real life." But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is "the results of modern investigation." Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to 'teach'! 

Your affectionate uncle 

Screwtape

* *

Chapter 3

My Dear Wormwood,

 

I am very pleased by what you tell me about this man's relations with his mother. But you must press your advantage. The Enemy will be working from the center outwards, gradually bringing more and more of the patient's conduct under the new standard, and may reach his behavior to the old lady at any moment. You want to get in first. Keep in close touch with our colleague Glubose who is in charge of the mother, and build up between you in that house a good settled habit of mutual annoyance; daily pinpricks. The following methods are useful. 

 1. Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something inside him and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to the states of his own mind—or rather to that very expurgated (ORIGIN early 17th cent.--in the sense ‘purge of excrement’) version of them which is all you should allow him to see. Encourage this. Keep his mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself, which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked the same office.

 

 2. It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are always very "spiritual," that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism. Two advantages follow. In the first place, his 

attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself. Thus you can keep rubbing the wounds of the day a little sorer even while he is on his knees; the operation is not at all difficult and you will find it very entertaining. In the second place, since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that imaginary person daily less and less like the real mother—the sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table. In time, you may get the cleavage so wide that no thought or feeling from his prayers for the imagined mother will ever flow over into his treatment of the real one. I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment's notice from impassioned prayer for a wife's or son's "soul" to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.

 

 3. When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother's eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy—if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption. And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her. As he cannot see or hear himself, this is easily managed.

 

 4. In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face. To keep this game up you and Glubose must see to it that each of these two fools has a sort of double standard. Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother's utterances with the fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hence from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly convinced, that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing: "I simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper." Once this habit is well established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offence is taken.

Finally, tell me something about the old lady's religious position. Is she at all jealous of the new factor in her son's life?—at all piqued that he should have learned from others, and so late, what she considers she gave him such good opportunity of learning in childhood? Does she feel he is making a great deal of "fuss" about it—or that he's getting in on very easy terms? Remember the elder  brother in the Enemy's story.

Your affectionate uncle

  

SCREWTAPE 

* *

 Chapter 27 

 My Dear Wormwood, 

You seem to be doing very little good at present. The use of his "love" to distract his mind from the Enemy is, of course, obvious, but you reveal what poor use you are making of it when you say that the whole question of distraction and the wandering mind has now become one of the chief subjects of his prayers. That means you have largely failed. When this, or any other distraction, crosses his mind you ought to encourage him to thrust it away by sheer will power and to try to continue the normal prayer as if nothing had happened; once he accepts the distraction as his present problem and lays that before the Enemy and makes it the main theme of his prayers and his endeavors, then, so far from doing good, you have done harm. Anything, even a sin, which has the total effect of moving him close up to the Enemy, makes against us in the long run.

 

A promising line is the following. Now that he is in love, a new idea of earthly happiness has arisen in his mind: and hence a new urgency in his purely petitionary prayers—about this war and other such matters. Now is the time for  raising intellectual difficulties about prayer of that sort. False spirituality is always to be encouraged. On the seemingly pious ground that "praise and communion with God is the true prayer", humans can often be lured into direct disobedience to the Enemy who (in His usual flat, commonplace, uninteresting way) has definitely told them to pray for their daily bread and the recovery of their sick. You will, of course, conceal from him the fact that the prayer for daily bread, interpreted in a "spiritual sense", is really just as crudely petitionary as it is in any other sense. 

But since your patient has contracted the terrible habit of obedience, he will probably continue such "crude" prayers whatever you do. But you can worry him with the haunting suspicion that the practice is absurd and can have no objective result. Don't forget to use the "heads I win, tails you lose" argument. If the thing he prays for doesn't happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don't work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and "therefore it would have happened anyway", and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective.

 

You, being a spirit, will find it difficult to understand how he gets into this confusion. But you must remember that he takes Time for an ultimate reality. He supposes that the Enemy, like himself, sees some things as present, remembers others as past, and anticipates others as future; or even if he believes that the Enemy does not see things that way, yet, in his heart of hearts, he regards this as a peculiarity of the Enemy's mode of perception—he doesn't really think(though he would say he did) that things as the Enemy sees them are things as they are! If you tried to explain to him that men's prayers today are one of the innumerable coordinates with which the Enemy harmonises the weather of tomorrow, he would reply that then the Enemy always knew men were going to make those prayers and, if so, they did not pray freely but were predestined to do so. And he would add that the weather on a given day can be traced back through its causes to the original creation of matter itself—so that the whole thing, both on the human and on the material side, is given "from the word go." What he ought to say, of course, is obvious to us; that the problem of adapting the particular weather to the particular prayers is merely the appearance, at two points in his temporal mode of perception, of the total problem of adapting the whole spiritual universe to the whole corporeal universe; that creation in its entirety operates at every point of space and time, or rather that their kind of consciousness forces them to encounter the whole, self-consistent creative act as a series of successive events. Why that creative act leaves room for their free will is the problem of problems, the secret behind the Enemy's nonsense about "Love." How it does so is no problem at all; for the Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it. 

It may be replied that some meddlesome human writers, notably Boethius, have let this secret out. But in the intellectual climate which we have at last succeeded in producing throughout Western Europe, you needn't bother about that. Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating The Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man's own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the "present state of the question." To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; 

for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that "history is bunk."

 

Your affectionate uncle

   

 SCREWTAPE 

* *

Chapter 28

My Dear Wormwood,

When I told you not to fill your letters with rubbish about the war, I meant, of course, that I did not want to have your rather infantile rhapsodies about the death of men and the destruction of cities.  In so far as the war really concerns the spiritual state of the patient, I naturally want full reports.  And on this aspect you seem singularly obtuse (stupid, slow-witted).  Thus you tell me with glee that there is reason to expect heavy air raids on the town where the creature lives.  This is a crying example of something I have complained about already---your readiness to forget the main point in your immediate enjoyment of human suffering.  Do you not know that bombs kill men?  Or do you not realize that the patient's death, at this moment, is precisely what we want to avoid?  He has escaped the worldly friends with whom you tried to entangle him; he has "fallen in love" with a very Christian woman and is temporarily immune from your attacks on his chastity; and the various methods of corrupting his spiritual life which we have been trying are so far unsuccessful.  At the present moment, as the full impact of the war draws nearer and his worldly hopes take a proportionately lower place in his mind, full of his defence work, full of the girl, forced to attend to his neighbors more than he has ever done before and liking it more than he expected, "taken out of himself" as the humans say, and daily increasing in conscious dependence on the Enemy, he will almost certainly be lost to us if he is killed tonight.  This is so obvious that I am ashamed to write it.  I sometimes wonder if you young fiends are not kept out on temptation-duty too long at a time---if you are not in some danger of becoming infected by the sentiments and values of the humans among whom you work.  They, of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good.  But that is because we have taught them to do so.  Do not let us be infected by our own propaganda.  I know it seems strange that your chief aim at the moment should be the very same thing for which the patient's lover and his mother are praying---namely his bodily safety.  But so it is; you should be guarding him like the apple of your eye.  If he dies now, you lose him.  If he survives the war, there is always hope.  The Enemy has guarded him from you through the first great wave of temptations.  But, if only he can be kept alive, you have time itself for your ally.  The long, dull monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather.  You see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere.  The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it---all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition.  If, on the other hand, the middle years prove prosperous, our position is even stronger.  Prosperity knits a man to the World.  He feels that he is "finding his place in it," while really it is finding its place in him.  His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth which is just what we want.  You will notice that the young are generally less unwilling to die than the middle-aged and the old.

The truth is that the Enemy, having oddly destined these mere animals to life in His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else.  That is why we must often wish long life to our patients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unravelling their souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth.  While they are young we find them always shooting off at a tangent.  Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry---the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon---are always blowing our whole structure away.  They will not apply themselves steadily to worldly advancement, prudent connections, and the policy of safety first.  So inveterate (confirmed, hardened, incorrigible) is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or "science" or psychology, or what not.  Real worldliness is a work of time---assisted, of course, by pride, for we teach them to describe the creeping death as good sense or Maturity or Experience.  Experience, in the peculiar sense we teach them to give it, is, by the bye, a most useful word.  A great human philosopher nearly let our secret out when he said that where Virtue is concerned "Experience is the mother of illusion"; but thanks to a change in Fashion, and also, of course, to the Historical Point of View, we have largely rendered his book innocuous.

How valuable time is to us may be gauged by the fact that the Enemy allows us so little of it.  The majority of the human race dies in infancy; of the survivors, a good many die in youth.  It is obvious that to Him human birth is important chiefly as the qualification for human death, and death solely as the gate to that other kind of life.  We are allowed to work only on a selected minority of the race, for what humans call a "normal life" is the exception.  Apparently He wants some---but only a very few---of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of sixty or seventy years.  Well, there is our opportunity.  The smaller it is, the better we must use it.  Whatever you do, keep your patient as safe as you possibly can.

Your affectionate uncle

Screwtape

* *

Chapter 29

My Dear Wormwood,

Now that it is certain the German humans will bombard your patient's town and that his duties will keep him in the thick of the danger, we must consider our policy.  Are we to aim at cowardice---or at courage, with consequent pride---or at hatred of the Germans?

Well, I am afraid it is no good trying to make him brave.  Our research department has not yet discovered (though success is hourly expected) how to produce any virtue.  This is a serious handicap.  To be greatly and effectively wicked a man needs some virtue.  What would Attila have been without his courage, or Shylock without self-denial as regards the flesh?  But as we cannot supply these qualities ourselves, we can only use them as supplied by the Enemy---and this means leaving Him a kind of foothold in those men whom, otherwise, we have made most securely our own.  A very unsatisfactory arrangement, but, I trust, we shall one day learn to do better.

Hatred we can manage.  The tension of human nerves during noise, danger, and fatigue, makes them prone to any violent emotion and it is only a question of guiding this susceptibility into the right channels.  If conscience resists, muddle him.  Let him say that he feels hatred not on his own behalf but on that of the women and children, and that a Christian is told to forgive his own, not other people's enemies.  In other words let him consider himself sufficiently identified with the women and children to feel hatred on their behalf, but 'not' sufficiently identified to regard their enemies as his own and therefore proper objects of forgiveness.

But hatred is best combined with Fear.  Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is purely painful---horrible to anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember; Hatred has its pleasures.  It is therefore often the 'compensation' by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear.  The more he fears, the more he will hate.  And Hatred is also a great anodyne for shame.  To make a deep wound in his charity, you should therefore first defeat his courage.

 Now this is a ticklish business.  We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice.  Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, the Enemy permits war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame.  The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is lest we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing with consequent repentance and humility.  And in fact, in the last war, thousands of humans, by discovering their own cowardice, discovered the whole moral world for the first time.  In peace we can make many of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them.  There is here a cruel dilemma before us.  If we promoted justice and charity among men, we should be playing directly into the Enemy's hands; but if we guide them to the opposite behavior, this sooner or later produces (for He permits it to produce) a war or a revolution, and the undisguisable issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupor.

This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy's motives for creating a dangerous world---a world in which moral issues really come to the point.  He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply 'one' of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.  A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.  Pilate was merciful till it became risky.

It is therefore possible to lose as much as we gain by making your man a coward; he may learn too much about himself!  There is, of course, always the chance, not of chloroforming the shame, but of aggravating it and producing Despair.  This would be a great triumph.  It would show that he had believed in, and accepted, the Enemy's forgiveness of his other sins only because he himself did not fully feel their sinfulness---that in respect of the one vice which he really understands in its full depth of dishonor he cannot seek, nor credit, the Mercy.  But I fear you have already let him get too far in the Enemy's school, and he knows that Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it.

As to the actual technique of temptations to cowardice, not much need be said.  The main point is that precautions have a tendency to increase fear.  The precautions publicly enjoined on your patient, however, soon become a matter of routine and this effect disappears.  What you must do is to keep running in his mind (side by side with the conscious intention of doing his duty) the vague idea of all sorts of things he can do or not do, 'inside' the framework of the duty, which seem to make him a little safer.  Get his mind off the simple rule ("I've got to stay here and do so-and-so") into a series of imaginary life lines ("If A happened---though I very much hope it won't---I could do B---and if the worst came to the worst, I could always do C").  Superstitions, if not recognized as such, can be awakened.  The point is to keep him feeling that he has 'something,' other than the Enemy and courage the Enemy supplies, 'to fall back on,' so that what was intended to be a total commitment to duty becomes honeycombed all through with little unconscious reservations.  By building up a series of imaginary expedients (convenient, although possibly immoral) to prevent "the worst coming to the worst" you may produce at that level of his will which he is not aware of, a determination that the worst 'shall not' come to the worst.  Then, at the moment of real terror, rush it out into his nerves and muscles and you may get the fatal act done before he knows what you're about.  For remember, the 'act' of cowardice is all that matters; the emotion of fear is, in itself, no sin and, though we enjoy it, does us no good.

Your affectionate uncle

Screwtape

Some Chapters from Book 10 in Augustine's Confessions

From http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/englishconfessions.html :

Augustine's Confessions, translated by E.B. Pusey

The Chapter titles come from John K. Ryan's translation in 1960.

Book 10  A Philosophy of Memory

Chapter 1  Joy and Hope

     Let me know Thee, O Lord, who knowest me: let me know Thee, as I am known. Power of my soul, enter into it, and fit it for Thee, that Thou mayest have and hold it without spot or wrinkle. This is my hope, therefore do I speak; and in this hope do I rejoice, when I rejoice healthfully. Other things of this life are the less to be sorrowed for, the more they are sorrowed for; and the more to be sorrowed for, the less men sorrow for them. For behold, Thou lovest the truth, and he that doth it, cometh to the light. This would I do in my heart before Thee in confession: and in my writing, before many witnesses. 

Chapter 2  The Soul Seen Plain

     And from Thee, O Lord, unto whose eyes the abyss of man's conscience is naked, what could be hidden in me though I would not confess it? For I should hide Thee from me, not me from Thee. But now, for that my groaning is witness, that I am displeased with myself, Thou shinest out, and art pleasing, and beloved, and longed for; that I may be ashamed of myself, and renounce myself, and choose Thee, and neither please Thee nor myself, but in Thee. 

     To Thee therefore, O Lord, am I open, whatever I am; and with what fruit I confess unto Thee, I have said. Nor do I it with words and sounds of the flesh, but with the words of my soul, and the cry of the thought which Thy ear knoweth. For when I am evil, then to confess to Thee is nothing else than to be displeased with myself; but when holy, nothing else than not to ascribe it to myself: because Thou, O Lord, blessest the godly, but first Thou justifieth him when ungodly. My confession then, O my God, in Thy sight, is made silently, and not silently. For in sound, it is silent; in affection, it cries aloud. For neither do I utter any thing right unto men, which Thou hast not before heard from me; nor dost Thou hear any such thing from me, which Thou hast not first said unto me. 

Chapter 3  The Ears of Men

     What then have I to do with men, that they should hear my confessions-- as if they could heal all my infirmities- a race, curious to know the lives of others, slothful to amend their own? Why seek they to hear from me what I am; who will not hear from Thee what themselves are? And how know they, when from myself they hear of myself, whether I say true; seeing no man knows what is in man, but the spirit of man which is in him? But if they hear from Thee of themselves, they cannot say, "The Lord lieth." For what is it to hear from Thee of themselves, but to know themselves? and who knoweth and saith, "It is false," unless himself lieth? But because charity believeth all things (that is, among those whom knitting unto itself it maketh one), I also, O Lord, will in such wise confess unto Thee, that men may hear, to whom I cannot demonstrate whether I confess truly; yet they believe me, whose ears charity openeth unto me. 

10.3.4

     But do Thou, my inmost Physician, make plain unto me what fruit I may reap by doing it. For the confessions of my past sins, which Thou hast forgiven and covered, that Thou mightest bless me in Thee, changing my soul by Faith and Thy Sacrament, when read and heard, stir up the heart, that it sleep not in despair and say "I cannot," but awake in the love of Thy mercy and the sweetness of Thy grace, whereby whoso is weak, is strong, when by it he became conscious of his own weakness. And the good delight to hear of the past evils of such as are now freed from them, not because they are evils, but because they have been and are not. With what fruit then, O Lord my God, to Whom my conscience daily confesseth, trusting more in the hope of Thy mercy than in her own innocency, with what fruit, I pray, do I by this book confess to men also in Thy presence what I now am, not what I have been? For that other advantage I have seen and spoken of. But what I now am, at the very time of making these confessions, many men wish to know about this, who have or have not known me, who have heard from me or of me; but their ear is not at my heart where I am, whatever I am. They wish then to hear me confess what I am within; whither neither their eye, nor ear, nor understanding can reach; they wish it, as ready to believe- but will they know? For charity, whereby they are good, telleth them that in my confessions I lie not; and she in them, believeth me. 

Chapter 8  The Fields of Memory

     I will pass then beyond this power of my nature also, rising by degrees unto Him Who made me. And I come to the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses. There is stored up, whatsoever besides we think, either by enlarging or diminishing, or any other way varying those things which the sense hath come to; and whatever else hath been committed and laid up, which forgetfulness hath not yet swallowed up and buried.

     When I enter there, I require what I will to be brought forth, and something instantly comes; others must be longer sought after, which are fetched, as it were, out of some inner receptacle; others rush out in troops, and while one thing is desired and required, they start forth, as who should say, "Is it perchance I?" These I drive away with the hand of my heart, from the face of my remembrance; until what I wish for be unveiled, and appear in sight, out of its secret place. Other things come up readily, in unbroken order, as they are called for; those in front making way for the following; and as they make way, they are hidden from sight, ready to come when I will. All which takes place when I repeat a thing by heart. 

10.8.13

     There are all things preserved distinctly and under general heads, each having entered by its own avenue: as light, and all colors and forms of bodies by the eyes; by the ears all sorts of sounds; all smells by the avenue of the nostrils; all tastes by the mouth; and by the sensation of the whole body, what is hard or soft; hot or cold; or rugged; heavy or light; either outwardly or inwardly to the body. All these doth that great harbour of the memory receive in her numberless secret and inexpressible windings, to be forthcoming, and brought out at need; each entering in by his own gate, and there laid up. Nor yet do the things themselves enter in; only the images of the things perceived are there in readiness, for thought to recall. Which images, how they are formed, who can tell, though it doth plainly appear by which sense each hath been brought in and stored up? For even while I dwell in darkness and silence, in my memory I can produce colors, if I will, and discern between black and white, and what others I will: nor yet do sounds break in and disturb the image drawn in by my eyes, which I am reviewing, though they also are there, lying dormant, and laid up, as it were, apart. For these too I call for, and forthwith they appear. And though my tongue be still, and my throat mute, so can I sing as much as I will; nor do those images of colors, which notwithstanding be there, intrude themselves and interrupt, when another store is called for, which flowed in by the ears. So the other things, piled in and up by the other senses, I recall at my pleasure. Yea, I discern the breath of lilies from violets, though smelling nothing; and I prefer honey to sweet wine, smooth before rugged, at the time neither tasting nor handling, but remembering 

only. 

10.8.14

     These acts I perform within myself, in the vast court of my memory. For there are present with me, heaven, earth, sea, and whatever I could think on therein, besides what I have forgotten. There also meet I with myself, and recall myself, and when, where, and what I have done, and under what feelings. There be all which I remember, either on my own experience, or as taken on trust from others . Out of the same store do I myself with the past continually combine fresh and fresh likenesses of things which I have experienced, or, from what I have experienced, have believed: and thence again infer future actions, events and hopes, and all these again I reflect on, as present. "I will do this or that," say I to myself, in that great receptacle of my mind, stored with the images of things so many and so great, "and this or that will follow." "O that this or that might be!" "God avert this or that!" So speak I to myself: and when I speak, the images of all I speak of are present, out of the same treasury of memory; nor would I speak of any thereof, were the images absent. 

10.8.15

     Great is this force of memory, excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber! Who ever sounded the bottom thereof? Yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature; nor do I myself comprehend all that I am. Therefore is the mind too limited to contain itself? And where is this power belonging to it which it does not grasp? Is it outside it, and not within it? How then does it not comprehend it? A wonderful admiration surprises me, amazement seizes me upon this. And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by; nor wonder that when I spake of all these things, I did not see them with mine eyes, yet could not have spoken of them, unless I then actually saw the mountains, billows, rivers, stars which I had seen, and that ocean which I believe to be, inwardly in my memory, and that, with the same vast spaces between, as if I saw them abroad. Yet did not I by seeing draw them into myself, when with mine eyes I beheld them; nor are they themselves with me, but their images only. And I know by what sense of the body each was impressed upon me. 

Chapter 9  A Higher Memory

     Yet not these alone does the unmeasurable capacity of my memory retain. Here also is all, learnt of the liberal sciences and as yet unforgotten; removed as it were to some inner place, which is yet no place: nor are they the images thereof, but the things themselves. For, what is literature, what the art of disputing, how many kinds of questions there be, whatsoever of these I know, in such manner exists in my memory, as that I have not taken in the image, and left out the thing, or that it should have sounded and passed away like a voice fixed on the ear by that impress, whereby it might be recalled, as if it sounded, when it no longer sounded; or as a smell while it passes and evaporates into air affects the sense of smell, whence it conveys into the memory an image of itself, which remembering, we renew, or as meat, which verily in the belly hath now no taste, and yet in the memory still in a manner tasteth; or as any thing which the body by touch perceiveth, and which when removed from us, the memory still conceives. For those things are not transmitted into  the memory, but their images only are with an admirable swiftness caught up, and stored as it were in wondrous cabinets, and thence wonderfully by the act of remembering, brought forth. 

Chapter 10  Learning as Remembrance

     But now when I hear that there be three kinds of questions---Does a certain thing exist? What it is? What are its properties?---I do indeed hold the images of the sounds of which those words be composed, and that those sounds, with a noise passed through the air, and that they no longer exist. But the things themselves which are signified by those sounds, I never reached with any sense of my body, nor ever discerned them otherwise than in my mind; yet in my memory have I laid up not their images, but themselves. Which how they entered into me, let them say if they can; for I have gone over all the avenues of my flesh, but cannot find by which they entered. 

     For the eyes say, "If those images were colored, we reported of them." The ears say, "If they sound, we gave knowledge of them." The nostrils say, "If they smell, they passed by us." The taste says, "Unless they have a savour, ask me not." The touch says, "If it have not size, I handled it not; if I handled it not, I gave no notice of it." Whence and how entered these things into my memory? I know not how. For when I learned them, I gave not credit to another man's mind, but recognised them in mine; and approving them for true, I commended them to it, laying them up as it were, whence I might bring them forth when I willed. In my heart then they were, even before I learned them, but in my memory they were not. Where then? Or wherefore, when they were spoken, did I acknowledge them, and said, "So is it, it is true," unless that they were already in the memory, but so thrown back and buried as it were in deeper recesses, that had not the suggestion of another drawn them forth I had perchance been unable to conceive of them? 

Chapter 11  Thought and Memory

     Wherefore we find, that to learn these things whereof we imbibe nor the images by our senses, but perceive within by themselves, without images, as they are, is nothing else, but by conception, to receive, and by marking to take heed that those things which the memory did before contain at random and unarranged, be laid up at hand as it were in that same memory where before they lay unknown, scattered and neglected, and so readily occur to the mind familiarised to them. 

     And how many things of this kind does my memory bear which have been already found out, and as I said, placed as it were at hand, which we are said to have learned and come to know which were I for some short space of time to cease to call to mind, they are again so buried, and glide back, as it were, into the deeper recesses, that they must again, as if new, he thought out thence, for other abode they have none: but they must be drawn together again, that they may be known; that is to say, they must as it were be collected together from their dispersion: whence the word "cogitation" is derived. For cogo (collect) and cogito (re-collect) have the same relation to each other as ago and agito, facio and factito. But the mind hath appropriated to itself this word (cogitation), so that, not what is "collected" any how, but what is "recollected," i.e., brought together, in the mind, is properly said to be cogitated, or thought upon. 

Chapter 13  Memory of Memories 

     All these things I remember, and how I learnt them I remember. Many things also most falsely objected against them have I heard, and remember; which though they be false, yet is it not false that I remember them; and I remember also that I have discerned between those truths and the false things said about them. And I perceive 

that the present discerning of these things is different from remembering that I often discerned them, when I  thought about them. I both remember then to have often understood these things; and what I now discern and understand, I lay up in my memory, that hereafter I may remember that I understand it now. So then I remember also to have remembered; as if hereafter I shall call to remembrance, that I have now been able to remember these things, I shall in truth recall it by the power of memory. 

Chapter 14  Problems of Memory

     The same memory contains also the affections of my mind, not in the same manner that my mind itself contains them, when it feels them; but far otherwise, according to a power of its own. For without rejoicing I remember myself to have joyed; and without sorrow do I recollect my past sorrow. And that I once feared, I review without fear; and without desire call to mind a past desire. Sometimes, on 

the contrary, with joy do I remember my bygone sorrow, and with sorrow, joy. This is not to be wondered at, as far as the body is concerned, for mind is one thing, and body another. If I therefore with joy remember some past pain of body, it is not so strange a thing. But now seeing this very memory itself is mind (for when we give a thing in charge, to be kept in memory, we say, "See that you keep it in mind"; and when we forget, we say, "It did not come to my mind," and, "It slipped out of my mind," calling the memory itself the mind; this being so, how is it that when with joy I remember my past sorrow, the mind hath joy, the memory hath sorrow; the mind upon the joyfulness which is in it, is joyful, yet the memory upon the sadness which is in it, is not sad? Does the memory perchance not belong to the mind? Who will say so? The memory then  is, as it were, the belly of the mind, and joy and sadness, like sweet and bitter food; which, when committed to the memory, are as it were passed into the belly, where they may be stowed, but they cannot be tasted. Ridiculous (absurd, comical) it is to imagine these to be alike; and yet they are not entirely different. 

10.14.22

     But, behold, out of my memory I bring it, when I say there be four perturbations (anxiety; mental uneasiness) of the mind, desire, joy, fear, sorrow; and whatsoever I can dispute thereon, by dividing each into its subordinate species, and by defining it, in my memory find I what to say, and thence do I bring it: yet am I not disturbed by any of these perturbations, when by calling them to mind, I remember them; yea, and before I recalled and brought them back, they were there; and therefore could they, by recollection, thence be brought. 

     Perchance, then, as meat is by chewing the cud brought up out of the belly, so by recollection these out of the memory. Why then does not the speaker, thus recollecting, taste in the mouth of his musing the sweetness of joy, or the bitterness of sorrow? Is the comparison unlike in this, because not in all respects like? For who would willingly speak thereof, if so often as we name grief or fear, we should be compelled to be sad or fearful? And yet could we not speak of them, did we not find in our memory, not only the sounds of the names according to the images impressed by the senses of the body, but notions of the very things themselves which we never received by any avenue of the body, but which the mind itself perceiving by the experience of its own passions, committed to the memory, or memory itself retained them for itself, even though they had not been committed to it. 

Chapter 15  Image and Reality

     But whether by images or no, who can readily say? Thus, I name a stone, I name the sun, the things themselves not being present to my senses, but their images to my memory. I name a bodily pain, yet it is not present with me, when nothing aches: yet unless its image were present to my memory, I should not know what to say thereof, nor in discoursing discern pain from pleasure. I name bodily health; being sound in body, the thing itself is present with me; yet, unless its image also were present in my memory, I could by no means recall what the sound of this name should signify. Nor would the sick, when health were named, recognise what were spoken, unless the same image were by the force of memory retained, although the thing itself were absent from the body. 

I name numbers whereby we number; and not their images, but themselves are present in my memory. I name the image of the sun, and that image is present in my memory. For I recall not the image of its image, but the image itself is present to me, calling it to mind. I name memory, and I recognise what I name. And where do I recognise it, but in the memory itself? Is it also present to itself by its image, and not by itself? 

Chapter 16  The Problem of Forgetting

     What, when I name forgetfulness, and withal recognise what I name, how do I recognise the reality, unless I  remember it? I speak not of the sound of the name, but of the thing which it signifies: which if I had forgotten, I could not recognise what that sound signifies. When then I remember memory, memory itself is, through itself, present with itself: but when I remember forgetfulness, there are present both memory and forgetfulness; memory whereby I remember, forgetfulness which I remember. But what is forgetfulness, but the privation of memory? How then is it present that I remember it, since when present I cannot remember? But if what we remember we hold it in memory, yet, unless we did remember forgetfulness, we could never at the hearing of the name recognise the thing thereby signified, then forgetfulness is retained by memory. Present then it is, that we forget not, and being so, we forget. It is to be understood from this that forgetfulness when we remember it, is not present to the memory by itself but by its image: because if it were present by itself, it would not cause us to remember, but to forget. Who now shall search out this? Who shall comprehend how it is? 

10.16.25

     Lord, I truly labor at this task, yea and toil in myself; I am become a heavy soil requiring over much sweat of the brow. For we are not now searching out the regions of heaven, or measuring the distances of the stars, or enquiring the balancings of the earth. It is I myself who remember, I the mind. It is no matter for wonder that what I am not is far distant from me. But what is nearer to me than myself? Consider: the power of my own memory is not understood by me; though I cannot so much as name myself without it. For what shall I say, when it is clear to me that I remember forgetfulness? Shall I say that that is not in my memory, which I remember? Or shall I say that forgetfulness is for this purpose in my memory, that I might not forget? Both were most absurd. What third way is there? How can I say that the image of forgetfulness is retained by my memory, not forgetfulness itself, when I remember it? 

     How could I say this either, seeing that when the image of any thing is impressed on the memory, the thing itself must needs be first present, whence that image may be impressed? For thus do I remember Carthage, thus all places where I have been, thus men's faces whom I have seen, and things reported by the other senses; thus the health or sickness of the body. For when these things were present, my memory received from them images, which being present with me, I might look on and bring back in my mind, when I remembered them in their absence. If then this forgetfulness is retained in the memory through its image, not through itself, then plainly itself was once present, that its image might be taken. But when it was present, how did it write its image in the memory, seeing that forgetfulness by its presence effaces (erases) even what it finds already noted? And yet, in whatever way, although that way be past conceiving and explaining, yet certain am I that I remember forgetfulness itself also, whereby what we remember is effaced (erased). 

Chapter 17  Beyond Memory

     Great is the power of memory, a fearful thing, O my God, a deep and boundless manifoldness; and this thing is the mind, and this am I myself. What am I then, O my God? What nature am I? A life various and manifold, and exceeding immense. Behold in the plains, and caves, and caverns of my memory, innumerable and innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things, either through images, as all bodies; or by actual presence, as the arts; or by certain notions or impressions, as the affections of the mind, which, even when the mind doth not feel, the memory retaineth, while yet whatsoever is in the memory is also in the mind- over all these do I run, I fly; I dive on this side and on that, as far as I can, and there is no end. So great is the force of memory, so great the force of life, even in the mortal life of man. What shall I do then, O Thou my true life, my God? I will pass even beyond this power of mine which is called memory: yea, I will pass beyond it, that I may approach unto Thee, O sweet Light. What sayest Thou to me? See, I am mounting up through my mind towards Thee who abidest above me. Yea, I now will pass beyond this power of mine which is called memory, desirous to arrive at Thee, whence Thou mayest be arrived at; and to cleave unto Thee, whence one may cleave unto Thee. For even beasts and birds have memory; else could they not return to their dens and nests, nor many other things they are used unto: nor indeed could they be used to any thing, but by memory. I will pass then beyond memory also, that I may arrive at Him who hath separated me from the four-footed beasts and made me wiser than the fowls of the air, I will pass beyond memory also, and where shall I find Thee, Thou truly good and certain sweetness? And where shall I find Thee? If I find Thee without my memory, then do I not retain Thee in my memory. And how shall I find Thee, if I remember Thee not? 

Chapter 18  Lost Things Found Again

     For the woman that had lost her drachma, and sought it with a light; unless she had remembered it, she had never found it. For when it was found, whence should she know whether it were the same, unless she remembered it? I remember to have sought and found many a thing; and this I thereby know, that when I was seeking any of them, and was asked, "Is this it?" "Is that it?" So long said I "No," until that were offered me which I sought. Which had I not remembered (whatever it were) though it were offered me, yet should I not find it, because I could not recognise it. And so it ever is, when we seek and find any lost thing.

     Notwithstanding, when any thing is by chance lost from the sight, not from the memory (as any visible body), yet its image is still retained within, and it is sought until it be restored to sight; and when it is found, it is recognised by the image which is within: nor do we say that we have found what was lost, unless we recognise it; nor can we recognise it, unless we remember it. But this was lost to the eyes, but retained in the memory. 

Chapter 19  The Forgotten Name

     But what when the memory itself loses any thing, as falls out when we forget and seek that we may recollect? Where in the end do we search, but in the memory itself? and there, if one thing be perchance offered instead of another, we reject it, until what we seek meets us; and when it doth, we say, "This is it"; which we should not unless we recognised it, nor recognise it unless we remembered it. Certainly then we had forgotten it. Or, had not the whole escaped us, but by the part whereof we had hold, was the lost part sought for; in that the memory felt that it did not carry on together all which it was wont, and maimed, as it were, by the curtailment of its ancient habit, 

demanded the restoration of what it missed? For instance, if we see or think of some one known to us, and having forgotten his name, try to recover it; whatever else occurs, connects itself not therewith; because it was not wont to be thought upon together with him, and therefore is rejected, until that present itself, whereon the knowledge reposes equably as its wonted object. And whence does that present itself, but out of the memory itself? for even when we recognise it, on being reminded by another, it is thence it comes. For we do not believe it as something new, but, upon recollection, allow what was named to be right. But were it utterly blotted out of the mind, we should not remember it, even when reminded. For we have not as yet 

utterly forgotten that, which we remember ourselves to have forgotten. What then we have utterly forgotten, though lost, we cannot even seek after. 

Chapter 20  What All Men Seek

     How then do I seek Thee, O Lord? For when I seek Thee, my God, I seek a happy life. I will seek Thee, that my soul may live. For my body liveth by my soul; and my soul by Thee. How then do I seek a happy life, seeing I have it not, until I can say, where I ought to say it, "It is enough"? How seek I it? By remembrance, as though I had forgotten it, remembering that I had forgotten it? Or, desiring to learn it as a thing unknown, either never having known, or so forgotten it, as not even to remember that I had forgotten it? is not a happy life what all will, and no one altogether wills it not? Where have they known it, that they so will it? Where seen it, that they so love it? Truly we have it, how, I know not. Yea, there is another way, 

wherein when one hath it, then is he happy; and there are, who are blessed, in hope. These have it in a lower kind, than they who have it in very deed; yet are they better off than such as are happy neither in deed nor in hope. Yet even these, had they it not in some sort, would not so will to be happy, which that they do will, is most certain. They have known it then, I know not how, and so have it by some sort of knowledge, what, I know not, and am perplexed whether it be in the memory, which if it be, then we have been happy once; whether all severally, or in that man who first sinned, in whom also we all died, and from whom we are all born with misery, I now enquire not; but only, whether the happy life be in the memory? For neither should we love it, did we not know it. We hear the name, and we all confess that we desire the thing; for we are not delighted with the mere sound. For when a Greek hears it in Latin, he is not delighted, not knowing what is spoken; but we Latins are delighted, as would he too, if he heard it in Greek; because the thing itself is neither Greek nor Latin, which Greeks and Latins, and men of all other tongues, long for so earnestly. Known therefore it is to all, for they with one voice be asked, "would they be happy?" They would answer without doubt, "they would." And this could not be, unless the thing itself whereof it is the name were retained in their memory. 

Chapter 21  The Longed-for Life

     But is it so, as one remembers Carthage who hath seen it? No. For a happy life is not seen with the eye, because it is not a body. As we remember numbers then? No. For these, he that hath in his knowledge, seeks not further to attain unto; but a happy life we have in our knowledge, and therefore love it, and yet still desire to attain it, that we may be happy. As we remember eloquence then? No. For although upon hearing this name also, some call to mind the thing, who still are not yet eloquent, and many who desire to be so, whence it appears that it is in their knowledge; yet these have by their bodily senses observed others to be eloquent, and been delighted, and desire to be the like (though indeed they would not be delighted but for some inward knowledge thereof, nor wish to be the like, unless they were thus delighted); whereas a happy life, we do by no bodily sense experience in others.

As then we remember joy? Perchance; for my joy I remember, even when sad, as a happy life, when unhappy; nor did I ever with bodily sense see, hear, smell, taste, or touch my joy; but I experienced it in my mind, when I rejoiced; and the knowledge of it clave to my memory, so that I can recall it with disgust sometimes, at others with longing, according to the nature of the things, wherein I remember myself to have joyed. For even from foul things have I been immersed in a sort of joy; which now recalling, I detest and execrate; otherwhiles in good and honest things, which I recall with longing, although perchance no longer present; and therefore with sadness I recall former joy. 

10.21.31

     Where then and when did I experience my happy life, that I should remember, and love, and long for it? Nor is it I alone, or some few besides, but we all would fain be happy; which, unless by some certain knowledge we knew, we should not with so certain a will desire. But how is this, that if two men be asked whether they would go to the wars, one, perchance, would answer that he would, the other, that he would not; but if they were asked whether they would be happy, both would instantly without any doubting say they would; and for no other reason would the one go to the wars, and the other not, but to be happy. Is it perchance that as one looks for his joy in this thing, another in that, all agree in their desire of being happy, as they would (if they were asked) that they wished to have joy, and this joy they call a happy life? Although then one obtains this joy by one means, another by another, all have one end, which they strive to attain, namely, joy. Which being a thing which all must say they have experienced, it is therefore found in the memory, and recognized whenever the name of a happy life is mentioned. 

Chapter 22  The Only Happiness

     Far be it, Lord, far be it from the heart of Thy servant who here confesseth unto Thee, far be it, that, be the joy what it may, I should therefore think myself happy. For there is a joy which is not given to the ungodly, but to those who love Thee for Thine own sake, whose joy Thou Thyself art. And this is the happy life, to rejoice to Thee, of Thee, for Thee; this is it, and there is no other. For they who think there is another, pursue some other and not the true joy. Yet is not their will turned away from some semblance (outward appearance, show) of joy.