A Frame Without Content

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 19 March 2014.

One other thought about Farthington: he corresponds to Augustine's definition of evil not being anything. Rather, evil is lack, is absence, is privation (even my use of the word "is" loses the sense of evil's non-existence).

Evil is real, but it doesn't exist, because God never created it, and this universe is only made up of good things created by God.  The only reason we can fall at all is because we were, unlike God, created ex nihilo.  Evil, then, is a turning away from the Source of Being and back toward our origin (although I wish I could omit the word "origin" because, again, we didn't exist; our origin is God).

So Farthington is just a frame without content.

He borrows content.  He borrows existence.  He lives parasitically or not at all.  C.S. Lewis describes Hell as the state of being "next to nothing."  Once the thing he feasts on is gone, he seizes on something else.  How many people get coaxed into this sort of borderline non-existence in our day and age?

McLuhan says that the proscenium arch makes us want to be an actor.

I wonder, though, if it ends up turning us into just another arch radiating out from the proscenium, just another iteration leading our eyes back to the few remaining actors on stage who themselves appear progressively more distant and diminished in stature.