The Problem of Pain

C. S. Lewis

He never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

And here is the real problem: so much mercy yet still there is Hell.

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.

This is the ultimate law--the seed dies to live, the bread must be cast upon the waters, he that loses his soul will save it. But the life of the seed, the finding of the bread, the recovery of the soul, are as real as the preliminary sacrifice.

As usual, Lewis adroitly sidesteps almost all my misunderstandings and roadblocks to faith, mapping out with clarity and simplicity the most difficult problems of Christianity. I never cease to be amazed by Lewis's willingness to admit when he is uncertain, his very assurance in standing on his own shaky soil. Yet it always seems that he carries so much more wisdom than the experts he conscientiously defers to.
In The Problem of Pain he turns to the fundamental paradox of a good and loving God who allows pain and suffering--often times looking like the source of this pain and suffering. Lewis doesn't explain away every difficulty, nor do I believe that was his original purpose. He merely (as if anything this man did was "mere") sheds light upon so many of the silly and childish misunderstandings Christians of our day still labor under. While he may not solve all the issues at heart in the aforementioned paradox, he sure does a famously good job in resolving many of them.
But beyond this, beyond the philosophy and theology that slides out from between the pages, you get a sense of the deep emotion which ran through this man. If ever I have come across a man who means what he says, C. S. Lewis is that man. In the simplest and calmest of statements he does nothing more than mean the full and truest sense of what he says--and in this, he shatters your supposed understanding of everything.

Blindness

Jose Saramago

That night the blind man dreamt that he was blind.

I had heard much about Saramago concerning his lack of punctuation and paragraphing, but was pleasantly surprised that despite such conveniences, his book was still easy to read. I rarely lost track of who was speaking even though the switches between various characters and the narration are often only noted by a capitalized letter. Whatever Saramago withholds in punctuation he makes up for in the logical flow of conversation.
As far as the story goes, I thought Blindness was a brilliant idea. A disease of blindness which robs an entire city (or perhaps more) is one of the most terrifying things I can imagine. Saramago demonstrates very clearly how dependent we are on sight. I tried to rethink the story with different senses being absent but the most chaotic has to be a loss of sight. Although we imagine we have a healthy respect for how much we rely on sight, Saramago's Blindness opens the door to the true inner workings of our minds and how much of a role the input from our eyes plays.
But while the concept of Blindness is staggering and awesome, concepts are not enough to make a story. Blindness lacks much of what makes a real story step out from the common mass of tales. Once the concept is laid out, the story progresses as most could have worked out in their own minds. There is little in Blindness beyond its guiding concept which really sends the reading into contemplation. While gripping in many parts, particularly because of the pathetic willingness of many of the characters to accept abuse--like so many dumb inhuman sheep--the story only rises to impressiveness in instances. And the same can be said of Saramago's narration. He has his moments of rhetorical genius, but they are moments only in the many pages.
I am not yet certain what to make of the ending, but I wish that Saramago had toyed more with the idea of blindness with perfect eyes. He only ever hints at this idea and in the last moments of the book explodes it, but more could have been done throughout the book to challenge just how much we who are not blind actually see. Whatever the case, the book is worth a perusal, perhaps more.

Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace

'So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.'

One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza's The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naivete is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it's natural that Himself's dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive. Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

David Foster Wallace (and I use the whole name here because the author of a work as sprawling and massive as Infinite Jest must needs be referred to by all three names) has done justice at least to one of Shakespeare's lines. If you choose to launch out into the muddy and vast waters of Infinite Jest, be assured that you won't find your way home any time soon. But the book is not a difficult read, only slow. David Foster Wallace throws the meaning of entertainment at his readers every page they flip. Whether directly through the films of the deceased J. O. Incandenza (one of the most important dead characters I have yet come across) or through the various addictions of Infinite Jest's characters, the question of what entertainment is and how we choose to sell our freedom for it is never far away.
For such a large and at times rambling book, readers might find the ending frustrating, incredibly frustrating, but keep the title and purpose in mind and it's abruptness may not be so disturbing as it first seems. Whether I am insane when I think this or not, I couldn't help imagining that David Foster Wallace was poking fun at us by writing an hugely entrapping book of huge length about addiction to entertainment. Addiction is going to be so large a topic in your head as you read this, you'll forget that it might be exactly what it is about.
In addition to the sheer magnificence of the abstraction behind this work, I found the actual storyline to be almost as intriguing. Any story which involves the Quebec Seperatist movements, an artsy film maker with such titles under his belt as "Annular Fission for Everyone," "Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell, "Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony," "Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators," and "Blood Sister: One Tough Nun" simply must be interesting. But David Foster Wallace takes it many steps further with his inclusion in the plot of such treats as a terminally beautiful woman, subsidized time (think year-numbers turned commercials), Found Drama (read the book), and almost a hundred pages worth of pointless notes provided purely for the reader's entertainment (think about this for a little while). And of course there is the title piece of the book, a work by that same J.O.I. which is supposedly fatally entertaining. I don't know if David Foster Wallace was inspired by the Monty Python bit about the fatally funny joke, but it doesn't really matter in the long run.
I won't attempt to continue about the book's plot any further since it is so muddled and complex it would be terribly difficult to expound upon it here and not crash blogspot's website. But there is also a simplicity about Infinite Jest which links everything back and around and into itself. I have the feeling this is one of those books which needs to be read several dozen times before anything near a full understanding of it can be approached.
And finally there is David Foster Wallace's style. He writes with a spoken verbosity which often disregards the conventions of grammar but is rarely confusing. He includes a sort of uncertainty which lends immense depth to the novel, making it seem as if he can't quite see into the hearts and souls of his characters. In the spirit of Catch-22 and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, David Foster Wallace is playful and dances about with his words.