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| Ethan Goffman |
Comforting God
One day I touched the soul of God. Instead of all-encompassing love and soaring harmony, I felt a pervasive sadness.
“Why are you so sad,” I asked God.
Because of all the suffering and hatred on Earth.
“But you created it. Why didn’t you just create a happy place where people treat each other well?”
I needed to do it, said God. Without hatred, greed, and suffering there would be no history. Art would be dull and lifeless. There would be no grand moral decisions, no heroic acts, no sacrifice for a greater cause. No Achilles, no Joan of Arc, no Mahatma Gandhi, no Nelson Mandela.
“Still, I can’t help but curse you for all the suffering you’ve caused. Did you have to make people so horrible that they could carry out the Holocaust and all the other genocides? The war in Ukraine? The devastation of Gaza?”
It might all be a mistake, said God. Sometimes I think I should just end it all.
“The entire universe?”
And myself along with it, since we are the same thing.
Adrenaline jolted every nerve and capillary in my body, vibrated my bones. “Don’t do it,” I said. “There’s great beauty as well. There’s joy. There’s love.” Although perhaps this isn’t what I really felt. Perhaps, despite my daily struggle with depression, I just couldn’t stand the thought of ending consciousness.
I didn’t say ending the universe was rational, said God. Still, I can’t stop the despair.
“You’ve done a fantastic job,” I said, as though I were comforting a student who had come to me in anguish. “You’ve got too much to live for. The universe has too much reason to exist. There’s such a great future ahead. I’m sure of it.”
Still, there are eons I wake up and just don’t see the point of it all.
“Come here,” I said, terrified for the suicide of the universe, suffused with pity that a being so much greater than I should feel such pain. “I’ll give you a great big hug.” And I held God in my arms, or rather God held me, enveloping me in a love beyond understanding.
***
A Tiny Slice of Pi Will Never Satisfy
In a hall at a great university through a door slung so wide open it begged for voyeurism, a woman sat in an office littered with books reciting an unending string of numbers: “740952267166306005469716387943171196873484688738186656751279298575016363411 . . . .” She droned on and on and on and on, her voice echoing softly in all parts of the vast hall, a faint mantra that vibrated my nerves. I felt a vague oneness with the universe alongside an irritation as though plagued by a mosquito bite one yearns to scratch.
“Who’s that,” I asked my professor as the mantra receded and, after myriad steps, we approached his office. He had offered to help me with some calculus problems.
“Oh, that’s Anastasia Leiborowitzborowitz,” he said, “the most brilliant mathematical mind in human history. She has psychological issues, though. Once she gets hold of a problem, she’s existentially incapable of letting it go.”
“What’s she doing?”
“Reciting pi to the last decimal. She’s been doing so for over 200 years, since this great university first opened its doors. Some speculate that she’s been reciting pi since well before the university existed, that she took a break to earn a PhD and an eminent position before returning to her life’s true calling.”
The tutoring session did not go well. The professor explained derivatives one way, and then another, then, in exasperation, repeated the first way again. But it all seemed mumbo jumbo, like runes from some long-dead wizard no human alive could hope to understand. I would have been better off endlessly reciting pi.
“You have no head for higher mathematics,” the professor finally blurted out. “Maybe you should become a plumber.” But I was not good with my hands, either.
I realized that, instead of a physicist, I would have to become a writer who scrawled stories about metaphysical paradoxes while having no understanding of the true nature of the universe, or of anything, really.
