Writing in Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple takes an allergic reaction to the elastic in a pair of cheap socks as the occasion for a nocturnal meditation on the relationship between pleasure and pain and the futility of theodicy.
I think it is a fact of our nature that there could be no pleasure without pain, no goodness without evil, and no beauty without ugliness, though their precise proportions are not fixed. A perfect world would be imperfect, deprived of meaning or significance: Therefore, there is no such possibility as a perfect world. That is why depictions or descriptions of heaven are so much less vivid than those of hell, which are always very lively, if horrifying.