nyny

read another good book

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading Gregory Maguire's "Wicked," the novel that birthed the Broadway musical of the same name. I was pleasantly surprised with the depth of issues with which the book dealt, such as death, evil, desire, choices, belief, and intentions. Here are a couple of passages that speak of evil in a thought-provoking way:

"To the grim poor there need be no pour quoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her-- is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is at the very least a question of definitions."

This is a conversation between several people at a dinner party. It's a tad lengthy, but interesting.

"Evil isn't doing bad things, it's feeling bad about them afterward. There's no absolute value to behavior. First of all--"
"Institutional inertia," claimed the Witch. "But whatever is the great attraction of absolute power anyway?"
"That's why I say it's merely an affliction of the psyche, like vanity or greed, and we all know vanity and greed can produce some pretty astounding results in human affairs, not all of them reprehensible."
"It's an absence of good, that's all. The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace."
"Evil is an early or primitive sate of moral development. All children are fiends by nature. The criminals among us are only those who didn't progress...".
"I think it's a presence, not an absence. Evil's an incarnated character, an incubus or a succubus. It's an other. It's not us."
"Evil isn't a thing, it's not a person, it's an attribute like beauty."
"It's a power, like wind."
"It's an infection."
"It's metaphysical, essentially: the corruptibility of creation--"
"Blame it on the Unnamed God then."
"But did the Unnamed God create evil intentionally, or was it just a mistake in creation?"
"It's not of air and eternity, evil isn't; it's of earth; it's physical, a disjointedness between our bodies and our souls. Evil is inanely corporeal, humans causing one another pain, no more no less--."
"No, you're all wrong, our childhood religion had it right: Evil is moral at its heart--the selection of vice over virtue; you can pretend not to know, you can rationalize, but you know it in your conscience--."
"Evil is an act, not an appetite. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal."
"Oh no, evil is repressing that appetite. I never repress any appetite."
"The real thing about evil isn't any of what you said. You figure out one side of it--the human side, say--and the eternal side goes into the shadow. Or vice versa. It's like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret."

posted by becka @ 9:48 PM