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That night at the Corn Exchange, I spoke about Rule 6 from my book, 12 Rules for Life: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.

It is by far the darkest chapter in what can be a very dark book; a meditation on the deepest motivations of those who have chosen a truly malevolent path. I spoke about the hatred for humanity and for Being itself — for God, really — felt and expressed by the Columbine killers. What is anyone to make of the following statement, penned by Dylan Klebold, perhaps the most literate and creative of the two, the day before the assault?

“About 26.5 hours from now the judgement will begin. Difficult but not impossible, necessary, nerve wracking & fun. What fun is life without a little death?”

Photo by Marc Piscotty/Getty Images

Constant dwelling in dark places leads to the generation of dark ideas. That is an insufficient explanation, given the horror of the situation. It’s more like this: For centuries, human beings have meditated on the nature of evil, abstracting out its central aspects, and clothing it in personified form. Why? Because evil is a personality. Each villain is an avatar of evil, a partial actor of a very complex part. Each of us is capable both of understanding that part, and of acting it out, in our darkest times.

I delivered what was likely the harshest and most hellish of the many lectures I have given so far to the waiting Cambridge crowd, speaking about Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, who was not so much an articulate atheist but someone who hated God for the suffering of life, and Solzhenitsyn’s experience of the Gulag Archipelago, and the story of Cain and Abel, which is in truth the account of two fundamental modes of being, one that aims heavenward, and the other aimed at hell.