Ultimately, the horror of this story is that the
div—or, symbolically, the uncaring universe—isn’t really responsible for Qais’s misfortune.
Baba Ayub is the person charged with making the agonizing decisions about his son: whether or not to let Qais die, and here, whether or not to take Qais home. The horror of life, one might say, is that we’re required to make difficult decisions, some of which result in suffering for other people. Even opting out of decision-making is itself a kind of decision (we’ll see this very clearly in chapter 6). With this in mind, people’s only relief is to forget: to forget what others have done to them, but mostly to forget what they
themselves are capable of.