Truth and the Problem of Evil  Theme Analysis

“You think of a fellow who an hour before was so full of life and fun, and he’s lying dead; it’s all so cruel and so meaningless. It’s hard not to ask yourself what life is all about and whether there’s any sense to it or whether it’s all a tragic blunder of blind fate.”

“I wish I could make you see how much fuller the life I offer you is than anything you have a conception of. I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It’s illimitable. It’s such a happy life. There’s only one thing like it, when you’re up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you. You feel such a sense of exhilaration that you wouldn’t exchange it for all the power and glory in the world.”

[…] “But Larry,” she interrupted him desperately, “don’t you see you’re asking something of me that I’m not fitted for, that I’m not interested in and don’t want to be interested in? How often have I got to repeat to you that I’m just an ordinary, normal girl.”

“It’s a long arduous road he’s starting to travel, but it may be that at the end of it he’ll find what he’s seeking.”

“What’s that?”

“Hasn’t it occurred to you? It seems to me that in what he said to you he indicated it pretty plainly. God. […] Unfortunately you don’t know what experience he had in the war that so profoundly moved him. I think it was some sudden shock for which he was unprepared. I suggest to you that whatever it was that happened to Larry filled him with a sense of the transiency of life, and an anguish to be sure that there was a compensation for the sin and sorrow of the world.”

“Larry is, I think, the only person I’ve met who’s completely disinterested. It makes his actions seem peculiar. We’re not used to people who do things simply for the love of God whom they don’t believe in.”

“Sophie wallows in the gutter because she likes it. Other women have lost their husbands and children. It wasn’t that that made her evil. Evil doesn’t spring from good. The evil was there always. When that motor accident broke her defenses it set her free to be herself. Don’t waste your pity on her; she’s now at heart what she always has been.”

“Until the soul has shed the last trace of [egoism] it cannot become one with the Absolute.”

“You talk very familiarly of the Absolute, Larry, and it’s an imposing word. What does it actually signify to you?”

“Reality. You can’t say what it is; you can only say what it isn’t. The Indians call it Brahmin. It’s nowhere and everywhere. All things imply and depend on it. It’s not a person, it’s not a thing, it’s not a cause. It has no qualities. It transcends permanence and change; whole and part, finite and infinite.”

“You Europeans know nothing about Americans. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We care nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well, sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it’s merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think we’ve set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.”