The Vaster Wilds

by Lauren Groff

The last time she saw stars so bright as these, so bold, was upon the boat in the very center of the ocean, and she lay back and felt herself upon those endless waters beneath the yet vaster sky and so awash with immensity that she found herself infinitesimal. But now she sensed the earth under her in its spin and knew herself to be a piece of it, necessary and large enough.

She would give herself a new name born of her struggle on this new land. It felt wrong for her to travel through this wilderness without a name; she felt she was walking through the world unskinned. But no name that came to her seemed right, and soon the fever and the walking burned the idea out of her mind, and she went on walking, still nameless, unmastered, through the wilds.

Then she thought that perhaps in the language of the bears there was a kind of gospel, also. And perhaps this gospel said to the bears the same thing about god giving bears dominion over the world. And perhaps bears believed that this gave them license to slaughter the living world, including the men within it.

And this meant that when the godliest of the ministers in the city and in this awful place, back in the fort, spoke on god’s behalf they were only speaking a mote of the far greater truth. They were only speaking the part of god that they themselves could glimpse. And this truth was only as small as they themselves were small.

And perhaps, she thought, god was neither trinity nor singular but multiple, as various as the many living things that did live upon the earth. Perhaps god is all. Perhaps god already lived within all. And this place and these people here did not need the english to bring god to them.

She understood this new phenomenon of overabundance to be born of the arrival of yet more of her people in the land. There was a new imbalance, a strangeness unsustainable. Henceforth, there would be far too much in some directions and in others a wretched poverty.

The hunger inside the god of my people can only be sated by domination. They will dominate until there is nothing left, then they will eat themselves. I am not of them. I will not be.

She had once believed that in the deepest reaches of everything was a nothing where men had planted god; but now she knew that deeper within that nothing was something else, something made of light and heat. It was this light and heat that endured, that was everlasting. At the center was not nothing, no. Out of the light and the heat all goodness poured.