David McElroy

For most of my life, I had generally avoided novels written before I was born. They were stodgy. The language was outdated. They were boring. Even if they were significant in the historical sense, I saw them as the literary equivalent of reading the King James Version of the Bible.

I was wrong, of course, but I didn’t realize that until the last decade or so. I first started reading English translations of some Russian classics. I came to love Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” among others.

Then a friend introduced me to German novelist Hermann Hesse. To one extent or another, I found that I loved “Steppenwolf,” “Siddhartha,” “Narcissus and Goldmund” and “The Glass Bead Game.” I’ve read “Narcissus and Goldmund” four times so far — and I keep finding new things to appreciate about it.

But I was slow to appreciate the English writer Charles Dickens — and I’ve come to understand that this has meant depriving myself of a kind of literary joy that I haven’t experienced for a long time. I just finished the Dickens novel, “David Copperfield,” a few hours ago — and I’d like to suggest that this book is better than almost any fiction that’s been written since I was born.

I’m left feeling serious regret that I’ve had such a huge hole in my education about literature and human existence.

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Whatever goes wrong in our lives, there’s always someone else to blame. Always.

The boss wouldn’t give me a chance. The woman I loved cheated on me. The man I married turned out to be an abuser. He was a terrible father. My friend made me start using drugs and partying all the time. I had to go into debt because all my friends had nice things and I had to keep up with them. I didn’t get the education I needed. I’m fat and nobody likes me.

Our excuses are endless. But even when our justifications for ourselves are completely accurate, there was always someone else who ultimately had control. And even if we got into a terrible situation — or a hundred terrible situations — there’s always someone who can take control to fix things and make our lives better.

It can be a painful shock to accept that the man in the mirror — or the woman in the mirror — almost always has the power to turn a miserable life into a satisfying life.

But it’s easier to blame someone else and ignore the man in the mirror. I’ve done that at times. Maybe you have, too.

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I’m often terrified to remember that the veneer of civilization on top of the savagery of human history is razor thin and comes off easily. That veneer is wearing very thin right now — and evil is forcing its way out into the open.

What’s even more terrifying is that many people are eagerly cheering for one form of evil or another. But they all assume they’re on the side of what’s right — and that the people they hate are the only evil ones.

We like to see political and social struggles as battles between good and evil. We like to choose good guys and bad guys. We like to see ourselves on the side of angels who are fighting against demons, whether real or metaphorical.

But there are times when titanic clashes are between one form of evil and another form of evil. Western civilization is locked in one such battle right now. The United States is ground zero for that clash of evil — which some people try to see as “the lesser of two evils.”

Choosing either side right now ensures that you become part of the evil.

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