The open­ing pas­sage of Chap­ter 7:

There is a school of phi­los­o­phy which holds that there is no such thing in the world as evil, and that what strikes the com­mon sense of mankind as evil is only “the absence of Being where Being should be.” The argu­ment, sim­ple and inge­nious, runs so: no being is per­fect in this uni­verse, except the Supreme Being; all other beings are imper­fect, and are con­stantly striv­ing to become more per­fect; but, in so far as they are imper­fect they lack true Being, and it is this imper­fec­tion which appears to us as Evil. Adher­ents of this doc­trine are quite obdu­rate. I once over­heard a two-hour argu­ment in which one dis­putant was at last crowded to the wall with the instance of a drunken hus­band stran­gling his wife and two babies, and was asked whether he did not con­sider this an instance of evil? “No,” he replied with great calm, “prop­erly under­stood it is merely an absence of Being where Being should be …” and, in the shocked silence which ensued, he con­ceded, “a con­sid­er­able absence.”

Tal­madge Mar­quis was known far and wide to suf­fer from con­sid­er­able absence of Being in this sense. To the unphilo­sophic view of peo­ple engaged in mak­ing soap and pro­duc­ing radio pro­grams, he seemed (such was their lack of insight) to be an entirely evil bully, loud, capri­cious and mean, and as obsti­nately resis­tant to progress as a hun­dred square miles of mud. The saw this large man, with his large, red face, large, bel­low­ing voice, and large indif­fer­ence to rea­son and good man­ners as an epit­ome of bad­ness, not hav­ing the scholas­tic train­ing to rec­og­nize in him an imper­fect Being strug­gling toward per­fec­tion. This griev­ous error was so wide­spread that he was hated by those he employed, feared by those he ben­e­fited, and despised by those who were beyond his power. The pity was that, for all his upward striv­ing, he seemed to acquire no Being what­ever, because in the twenty years since he had inher­ited the Mar­quis com­pany at the death of his father he had only become more per­verse and noisy in the opin­ion of all who knew him, whereas he had started with no small endow­ment of these qualities.

pg 84–85

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Tags: Aurora Dawn, eloquence, Herman Wouk, philosophy, satire, villains