Books - Roland in Moonlight, Charles Taylor: Avenues of Faith, What Happened to Sophie Wilder
These are the three books that I’ve finished this month. I mentioned Sophie Wilder in last week’s entry as a book about young people who don’t seem to have normal reactions to things like being cheated on by their partner with close friends. (By the way I’m going to reveal what happens in this book, so just skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know.) It turns out that actually the characters are really bothered by this kind of thing. Sophie knows that her sort of boyfriend Charlie loves her with a kind of totally disinterested and straightforward love. But she chooses to reject that love for no reason at all apart from that she decides to do so. There is actually something quite Dostoyevskian about this. Dostoyevsky believed in a true freedom of the will and for him that meant having the freedom to choose to do something even if it was totally self-destructive and pointless. It is the choi…
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