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Strange, how a moment of existence can cut so deeply into our being that while ages pass unnoticed, a brief love can structure and define the very topology of our consciousness ever after.
“No. Sorry. The true religion is Zoroastrianism, I’m afraid. Bit of bad luck there. Christianity certainly borrowed a great deal from the one true religion, but not enough, unfortunately. Not nearly enough.”
What kind of God would leave you burning forever?
How do you pray if you don’t know what God is like? Maybe God was a demon – that would explain much of the misery of earth life.
Lastly, you are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.
“Yes. Anything that can be written is there. The history of your big toe as viewed from the perspective of your shoe is there. Anything you can imagine, anything you can picture being written is here is this library.”
I began to think how strange it seemed that I never met a single person of color. Not an Asian, not a black person, not a Hispanic, not anything but a sea of white American Caucasians. Was there no diversity in Hell? What did this endless repetition of sameness and of uniformity in people and surroundings mean?
Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives?
How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning – that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.
We can’t care about anything here. We can’t make a difference – all meaning has been subtracted, we don’t know where anything comes from or where it goes. There’s no context for our lives. We’re all white, equal ciphers, instances of the same absurdity repeated over and over. We try to scratch some hope or meaning out of it with our university, but ultimately there is nothing to attach meaning to. We’re damned.”
‘To murder a sinner in the morning is the start of a blessed day.’”
But somehow I feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting uniformity, its lack of variation from type. If there was a heaven at the end of this, it must be filled with great variety, perhaps a multiplicity of intelligent species spread across universes. Yes, heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.
“Ninety-five raised to the one million three hundred twelve thousandth power.”
“You mean there are more books in this library than there were electrons in our whole previous universe?”
like the book of my life, she exists somewhere.
What is love that it has such power? Whatever it is, it seems unlikely this God who placed me here knows anything about it. If it loved me in the least, could it inflict what it has upon me? Who can understand? Once I feared to say such things, dreading a worse punishment. But what worse fate could there be? To remember love and know it is unattainable? To know love wanders somewhere light-years and light-years distant, ever knowing it is forever out of reach? Forever hidden?
Finite does not mean much if you can’t tell any practical difference between it and infinite.
catch trees as windy dots
Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.
Now the search is all that matters. I know there will come a time when I find my book, but it is far in the future. And I know without doubt that it will not be today. Yet a strange hope remains. A hope that somehow, something, God, the demon, Ahura Mazda, someone, will see I’m trying. I’m really trying, and that will be enough.
