Pure Colour

by Sheila Heti

After God created the heavens and the earth, he stood back to contemplate creation, like a painter standing back from the canvas. This is the moment we are living in—the moment of God standing back. Who knows how long it has been going on for? Since the beginning of time, no doubt. But how long is that? And for how much longer will it continue? You’d think it would only last a moment, this delay of God standing back, before stepping forward again to finish the canvas, but it appears to be going on forever. But who knows how long or short this world of ours seems from the vanishing point of eternity?

There is no peace as complete as to die. It is the end of your story and the end of you.

She doesn’t know why she spent so much of her life thinking about such trivial things, or looking at websites, when just outside her window there was a sky that was not trivial.

Sure, I think a person should enjoy themselves instead of worrying about whether they’re going to live to ninety-one or ninety-two. Yeah, who cares.

My basic premise is that in life, you live forever, because as soon as you die, you don’t realize you’re dead, so you’re kind of always alive, so the thing is, you shouldn’t worry about yourself.

And they say that Christianity solved it because you can live forever, but you might go to hell forever, so that’s really sick.