Recently I’ve been working on my review of the Murder, She Wrote episode Death Takes a Curtain Call. It’s a really good episode and has one of my favorite characters in it. Ironically, though I was excited to get to it, I’m finding it much harder to finish the episode review than I normally do precisely because it is such a good episode. There’s a lot to say, and praising a thing well is much harder than criticizing self-evident problems. There’s a lesson in there, I think.

This may be related to why C.S. Lewis said that he wrote The Screwtape Letters only from the demons’ perspective, which left the book unbalanced. The problem was that letters from an archangel to the man’s guardian angel would need to have all of the virtues that a perfect being of superhuman intellect would naturally imbue into them, and to do that Lewis would need to have an equal intellect and equal perfection. This was a wise choice for The Screwtape Letters, but I think that the difficulty in praising a thing well causes problems in the case when there is no requirement for the praise to be perfect. That is, it makes it very tempting for people to leave off praising things that they should praise. And that’s a mistake, because it tends to lead other people to have a distorted view of life. As Dale Carnegie rightly observed, any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. As a result, there tends to be tons of complaining in life, while the better things often go unpraised. When the good things are praised, it’s often by people who don’t appreciate the difficulty of praising things well and in consequence give mediocre if not outright bad praise.

So next time you hesitate to praise something, give yourself an extra push to do it. It’s probably better for the world than keeping silent.

And I’ll get to work on that Murder, She Wrote review.