[b]Robert Penn Warren
They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren’t any other people there wouldn’t be any you because what you do which is what you are only has meaning in relation to other people.[/b]
Still, even if that’s true philosophically, it’s bullshit. If, for example, you’re me.
She lifted her sewing and bit off the thread in the way women do to make your flesh crawl.
More to the point: the look on her face as she chomps down.
Lois looked edible, and you know it was tender all the way through, a kind of mystic combination of filet mignon and a Georgia peach aching for the tongue…
I know the type. Only her name is Lucy.
The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know.
Let’s figure out what that is.
For life is a fire burning along a piece of string–or is it a fuse to a powder keg which we call God?–and the string is what we don’t know, our Ignorance, and the trail of ash, which, if a gust of wind does not come, keeps the structure of the string, is History, man’s Knowledge, but it is dead, and when the fire has burned up all the string, then man’s Knowledge will be equal to God’s Knowledge and there won’t be any fire, which is Life. Or if the string leads to a powder keg, then there will be a terrific blast of fire, and even the trail of ash will be blown completely away.
And then Big Bang 2.0 begins. With or without God.
The creation of man whom God in his foreknowledge knew doomed to sin was the awful index of God’s omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create mere perfection. To do so would, to speak truth, be not creation but extension. Separateness is identity and the only way for God to create, truly create, man was to make him separate from God Himself, and to be separate from God is to be sinful. The creation of evil is therefore the index of God’s glory and His power. That had to be so that the creation of good might be the index of man’s glory and power. But by God’s help. By His help and in His wisdom.
Try to imagine God reacting to this. Your God, for example.