The old mill

The old mill is the destination of a solitary walk through countryside the patient genuinely likes, and a setting for tea that gives him real pleasure. Screwtape identifies the visit as one of the mistakes that helped the patient recover from Wormwood’s efforts: unlike the vanity and tedium presented as pleasure by the World, the walk reconnects him with his own preferences and becomes part of his spiritual renewal.

The Walk and Its Setting

The patient walks alone to the old mill through countryside he really likes. He has tea there, making the visit more than a passing encounter with a place: it is an occasion of uncomplicated enjoyment, away from the company of the patient’s new friends and their expectations.

Screwtape groups the walk with the patient’s enjoyment of a book he reads for its own sake. He regards both as real pleasures, not as performances intended to produce clever remarks or social approval. The walk’s importance therefore lies not only in where the patient goes, but in the kind of attention and satisfaction the experience permits.

A Threat to Wormwood’s Strategy

Wormwood has been trying to draw the patient away from faith through the World, which Screwtape describes as substituting vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium for genuine pleasure. The walk to the old mill works against that strategy. As Screwtape explains, real pleasure can act as a touchstone of reality: its contrast with manufactured substitutes makes those substitutes harder to value.

The visit also interrupts a broader effort to estrange the patient from himself. Wormwood had made progress in turning him away from his own nature, but the book and walk make him feel that he is coming home and recovering himself. Screwtape consequently treats the old mill visit as part of a serious defeat, rather than as an insignificant leisure outing.

The Mill and the Enemy’s Presence

Screwtape recalls that an asphyxiating cloud prevented Wormwood from attacking the patient on his walk back from the old mill. He calls this a well-known phenomenon associated with the Enemy’s direct presence to the patient under certain modes, though he says those modes have not been fully classified. Some humans, he adds, are permanently surrounded by this protection and are inaccessible to the Devils.

The walk thus carries two related consequences in Screwtape’s account: its ordinary pleasure helps restore the patient’s sense of reality, and the return journey is marked by a protection that blocks Wormwood’s attack. The old mill remains a modest country destination, but its place in the narrative joins physical movement, personal preference, and spiritual resistance.