Angel Down

Eh, only enjoyed one sentence in this entire novel.

• god must love satan so much to wager with him over and over again. 🥺

  • i see bagger as the object of one of their little bets. bagger’s perfect too; i thought “who would play bagger in the movie adaptation?” bob odenkirk came to mind. slippin’ jimmy, saul goodman, chimp with a machine gun. (now that’s a fun bet!)
  • oh the deliciousness of a morally corrupt person with a fundamentally decent core lol. just intriguing. (i think it’s bc they’re the best fun to root for.)
    • i consider myself one. sometimes i actually surprise myself with the badness i’m willing to let slip, and sometimes the overwhelming guilt my conscience unleashes to make me take it all back.
    • there’s kind of a parallel here w greek heroes. since there was no good vs. evil (everyone was evil) and might is right, goodness was not tested, strength was. and what heracles so interesting to watch and root for was in part his demigodiness. gods are perfectly strong and immortal, but there’s no fun watching them subdue a multi-head serpent, is there? no, i want to see the person who has all that superhuman strength performing impossible feats, and i want the suspense! i want him to be able to fail and die, so that i can root for him.
    • job was a BORING candidate for the wager. the bible is kinda weird that way, how do i put it? reads unsatisfyingly? on an extremely tilted moral axis? i should probably read the bible and think more about this

• the vision of the infernal machine reminded me of this tweet i read recently:

  Samsara is fractal. […] This is what makes samsara what it is — not a place, not a collection of places, but a self-replicating structure that produces itself wherever ignorance-contact-craving meet.

  This is the structural meaning of karma at its deepest level. Karma is not a metaphysical bookkeeping system. It is the fact that patterns of intentional action create the conditions for similar patterns to arise again. The reproduction is analogical: this-like-that-because-structurally-resembling. When the tradition says that killing leads to rebirth in hell realms, the mechanism is not divine punishment; it is that the structural configuration of mind that produces killing is itself a hell-realm configuration, and such a configuration, when sustained and reinforced, reproduces itself at progressively larger scales until it constitutes an entire mode of existence.

  • so interesting to me rn. might be why i picked up Science of Enlightenment (currently reading.) now sure how that’ll go or influence my next read, but on my reading list rn:
    1. c.s. lewis, screwtape letters
    2. chuck palahniuk, damned (i love the cover)
    3. penguin book of hell