Imagine doing both simultaneously.
Not easy? Well, suppose you could join a therapy group to help you over the rough spots. And if the reward for success was absolutely heavenly, you might consider trying it? Now suppose one requirement would be to make peace with your worst enemy. Would that be a disincentive? At the very least it’s an interesting proposition for discussion, isn’t it?
Dalma Takács likes to pose questions, big, probing, existential ones. And discussion is what she wants to stimulate with her new novel, The Condo or ... Life, A Sequel. In the spirit of full disclosure I must say that she is a generous friend who has given much good advice on the book I’m writing. She asks tough questions in a gentle way. I imagine that she uses the Socratic method as a professor of English at Notre Dame College in Cleveland, Ohio, and though Socrates does not appear as a character in her book—if he had, he could have had a chat with George Bernard Shaw—the reader senses his presence nonetheless.
She has developed a wonderfully imaginative concept as a framework to consider the nature of evil and whether it is acceptable or desirable to forgive evil. To what extent must one resist evil? Should we make a distinction between evil and the evil-doer? Do we connive with evil by not resisting it? And most crucially, do we destroy ourselves by resisting it too rigidly?
Questions like these arise in extreme circumstances like wartime, and Ms. Takács brings to her task the knowledge and experience that lends urgency to them. Like a good Socratic teacher, she doesn’t presume to give answers. She only frames the questions and so challenges us to think about them.
What is most remarkable is the deceptively simple vehicle she created for this discussion, an easy read of only 149 pages in paperback from Xlibris, described at http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.aspx?bookid=87668.
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