What leapt out at me [in a recent book review I was reading], though, was this, introduced by the reviewer’s observation that it is his “favorite sentence thus far in 2012”:
“I have never felt like a good person, but I think that, thanks to my father’s influence, I have sometimes managed to be a non-practicing bad person.”
I don’t know what that’s like in the original Spanish, but in English it’s a precise description of unredeemed human nature, and a good reason for the church’s practice of the confession of sin every day. Mr. Abad is under no illusions about “good people” and “bad people.” He does not go along with the much-misused thought of Anne Frank to the effect that people are essentially good at heart (and by the way, my files are full of critiques of the widespread sentimental fixation on that one sentence of Anne’s).