The God is Not Willing (Witness #1)

by Steven Erikson

The present age is only unique because you live in it. When you die, you cease to care about that age. And you know this. Which is why you don’t care about anything past your own life. Why should you? It follows, quite reasonably, that every generation is righteous in cursing the one that precedes it. Namely, yours. And the vicious fighting withdrawal that is your own conservatism – this bitter, hate-filled war against change – is doomed to fail, because no age lasts for ever. One follows upon the next and this is an inescapable fact. So step aside. Your day is done. Any regression into childish tantrums makes a mockery of wisdom. The age dies with you, as it must, and you now show its face to be that of a mewling child who can no longer hold on to what has ceased to exist.

I knew this would come On a bright morning exulting In its eternal present Nothing of night left to hold Even the drops of dew blaze With the sun’s blinding fire On such a morning life begins Bursting its shout to heaven Yet still I stand apart Feet buried in the dark earth Caught frozen in my upward climb The past twisting my limbs Etching the bark of my skin In the knots of my eyes Linger the whorls and worlds In their immemorial canopies Where remembrance illusions Play at being alive I will feed from the roots Of the lost mornings behind me Each like this one something other It is this sensibility of estrangement That lifts my mind like a crown From the mortal broken brow As if to float both free and lost And all the unknowing Looms like a loved one’s face I cannot recognize The Delusion of Standing Alone Fisher kel Tath

Hollow is the head of a fool. And everyone who listens only to the echoes bouncing in his skull, believing them true, is doubly a fool. Yet these echoes are all we ever hear. Beliefs feeding into beliefs, mindless as serpents devouring their own tail.

To be believed in is an obligation. Only by heeding that obligation are you made worthy of that belief.