Express Lane Entrance
Beware sidetracks! Hellbent get
Where they are going
I see the signs on my commute every morning and afternoon. ‘Express Lane Entrance’ and I am reminded of the Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis:
It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
Screwtape Letters XII
As I see other drivers speed around me, in and out of the express lane, regardless of the law, I also think about this short story:
The Wolf Who Went Places
A wealthy young wolf, who was oblivious of everything except himself, was tossed out of college for cutting classes and corners, and he decided to see if he could travel around the world in eighty minutes.
“That isn’t possible,” his grandmother told him, but he only grinned at her.
“The impossible is the most fun,” he said.
She went with him to the door of the old Wolf place. “If you go that fast, you won’t live to regret it,” she warned him, but he grinned again, showing a tongue as long as a necktie.
“That’s an old wolves’ tale,” he said, and went on his reckless way.
He bought a 1959 Blitzen Bearcat, a combination motorcar and airplane, with sky-rocket getaway, cyclone speedrive, cannonball takeoff, blindall headlights, magical retractable monowings, and lightning pushbutton transformationizer. “How fast can this crate go without burning up?” he asked the Blitzen Bearcat salesman.
“I don’t know,” the salesman said, “but I have a feeling you’ll find out.”
The wealthy young wolf smashed all the ground records and air records and a lot of other things in his trip around the world, which took him only 78.5 minutes from the time he knocked down the Washington Monument on his takeoff to the time he landed where it had stood. In the crowd that welcomed him home, consisting of about eleven creatures, for all the others were hiding under beds, there was a speed-crazy young wolfess, with built-in instantaneous pickup ability, and in no time at all the wolf and his new-found mate were setting new records for driving upside down, backward, blindfolded, handcuffed, and cockeyed, doubled and redoubled.
One day, they decided to see if they could turn in to Central Park from Fifth Avenue while traveling at a rate of 175 miles an hour, watching television, and holding hands. There was a tremendous shattering, crashing, splitting, roaring, blazing, cracking, and smashing, ending in a fiery display of wheels, stars, cornices, roofs, treetops, glass, steel, and people, and it seemed to those spectators who did not die of seizures as they watched that great red portals opened in the sky, swinging inward on mighty hinges, revealing an endless nowhere, and then closed behind the flying and flaming wolves with a clanking to end all clanking, as if those gates which we have been assured shall not prevail had, in fact, prevailed.
MORAL: Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.
James Thurber
Further Fables for Our Time
Thurber, James Grover (1894-1961)
1956
Edition used as base for this ebook: London: Hamish Hamilton, 1956 [first U.K. edition]
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1055
The Screwtape Letters, by CS Lewis, was initially published, chapter/letter, by chapter, in The Guardian on May 2nd, 1941. Based on the public domain etext provided by Gutenberg Canada Ebooks. ( public domain under Canadian copyright law)
No Haiku For You 