January 26, 2003
The End of the Affair
Amanda Butler has a great excerpt from The End of the Affair. Email her and bug her to blog more thoughts on the book. I suspect they'd be brilliant. A few quotes she didn't include (as soon as I can get my DNS configured, these will be up on my usual page)
I'm tired and I don't want any more pain. I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love. Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don't want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time.
You've taken her, but You haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don't want your peace and I don't want Your love. . . I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.
Two things:
1: Does anybody have other examples in literature or the bible of people using "You" to speak to God in the second person? If so, can you tell me whether or not the "y" is capitalized in these examples?
2: In my opinion, what makes The End of The Affair so interesting is that it's a great challenge to knee-jerk utilitarians (like I used to be, and often still am). Here is a coherent novel about people acting in ways that maximize what they call their "pain," and their "hate," and "jealousy." We might say that these people are acting irrationally, but they are acting coherently, and the usual definition of economic irrationality doesn't seem to apply. We could say that they are misusing the term "pain" (by "misusing" we mean "using in a non-utilitarian fashion") but that is a dangerous road. When utilitarians say that one ought to maximize one's pleasures and minimize one's pains, or when economists say that rational people simply do maximize their pleasures and minimize their pains, what counts as a pleasure and what counts as a pain? How do we explain the common tendency to mull over and rehash lost loves and the equally common tendency to refer to this as painful?
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