Reading in Exile

I'm never quite sure if the problem of evil is really a problem at all. The problem, of course, is that there is evil (or, for a more precisely posed problem, meaningless or unredeemed or pointless evil), but if there were a God as He has been classically understood (as all good, all powerful, all knowing, perfectly loving) then He would want to and be able to prevent evil, and so there should be no evil. Since there is evil, then by that fact we can know that there is no God. Evil is variously understood by different proponents of the problem--most often as suffering (or, better, meaningless suffering) or as any privation (any lack of something that ought to exist). There are certainly more sophisticated versions of the problem, such as the one posed by Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov . (Yes, that link leads to the Pevear and Volokhosky translation, and I defy anyone who asserts falsely that the Garnett translation is better.) On these more sophisticat...

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest . Wallace describes, rather plausibly (more so than, say, Camus' account of Don Juan in The Myth of Sisyphus ), the motivations for anonymous sex. The description comes in the midst of one of the character Orin Incandenza's many sexual encounters, which are always with women he names only as "the Subject", who are mostly young mothers: "It is not about consolation...It is not about conquest or forced capture. It is not about glands or instincts or the split-second shiver of leaving yourself; not about love or about whose love you deep-down desire, by whom you feel betrayed. Not and never about love, which kills what needs it. It feels...rather to be about hope, an immense, wide-as-the-sky hope of finding a something in each Subject's fluttering face, a something the same that will propitiate hope, somehow, pay its tribute, the need to be assured that for a mome...