I’m a rational person. I grew up in a family of scientists. My dad, who studied the brain, told me when I was a kid that Santa and God didn’t exist. (Don’t say anything at school, he suggested.) My uncle, a molecular biologist, delivered impromptu poolside lectures on the recombinatory power of DNA. But my mother, who’d been an English major, was superstitious. She was alert to the sinister possibilities of weird coincidences—two tails-up pennies found on the same day, three flat tires in a row on the left side of the car. One summer, a cardinal took to flying at the glass of our living-room window; she interpreted this as an omen. She was drawn to people with a similar orientation. Once, one of her boyfriends claimed that he was seeing the Devil. He’s right there, the boyfriend said, in the far corner of the room. Look—you can see his eyes.
Maybe it’s not surprising that, in middle and high school, my favorite writer was Stephen King. Later, I fell into the vortex of “Twin Peaks,” and of David Lynch more generally. The world is full of bad actors—cheats, liars, tyrants, sickos—who are, ultimately, mere human beings; at least, this was how rationality would have it. But King and Lynch were interested in evil, an abstract force. An outmoded concept, evil was baggage from a pre-modern age, the least useful way to interpret bad behavior. And yet it still exerted a pull, I thought, because every so often people do things so terrible that our rational, psychological vocabulary feels impoverished. Did I believe in evil? No. But I believed that people believed in it. And sometimes I could think of no other word for the insensible malevolence that seemed to steer people and events toward awful ends.
And yet my mom’s boyfriend didn’t say that he saw evil in the corner. He said that he saw the Devil. To matter to us, abstract forces have to become concrete. At that point, they risk becoming hackneyed, unimpressive, absurd, even silly. “What was hidden in the depths would often appear so flat when brought to the surface,” an artist named Tove thinks in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel “The Third Realm.” “The meaning would be squashed if the symbols were too familiar.” Tove wants to depict the intensity of having a body—a violent, irresistible reality that breaks down the boundaries between living things. But she can’t do it—in fact, she laments that her drawings look like New Yorker cartoons. This doesn’t mean that the intensity she recognizes doesn’t exist, only that she’s failing to properly understand or represent it. It could be that some of the forces that shape our lives will always resist being represented. They may be too big or strange to fit into our heads.
