Word: devil
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...Lobos' exultant Bertha, Lyle Lovett's Friend of the Devil, Costello's Ship of Fools...
Many writers have said that one of evil's higher accomplishments has been to convince people that it does not exist. Ivan Karamazov's bitter diabology was a bit different: "If the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness." In a nightmare, Ivan meets the devil, a character of oddly shabby gentility, who mentions how cold it was in space, from which he lately came, traveling in only an evening suit and open waistcoat. The devil speaks of the game of village girls who persuade someone to lick...
Evil is a word we use when we come to the limit of humane comprehension. But we sometimes suspect that it is the core of our true selves. In Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Everyman goes to a satanic meeting in a dark wood, and the devil declares, "Evil is the nature of mankind. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race...
...such exertions have been unconvincing. Augustine, speaking of the struggle to understand evil, at last wrote fatalistically, "Do not seek to know more than is appropriate." At the time of the Black Death, William Langland wrote in Piers Plowman: "If you want to know why God allowed the Devil to lead us astray . . . then your eyes ought to be in your arse...
...pursuing an endowed chair from a funding source of such dubious morals, Harvard demonstrated its willingness to sell its soul to the devil. Clearly, the University did not allow Prince Turki's record to stand in the way of a sizeable donation--something a committee overseeing the gifts process would have done if given a chance...