Description: A Providence mortician has a conversation with God through the cadaver on her table.
“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” - Blaise Pascal
I am not God, though some of you will stubbornly insist after reading this that I am. God is a comfortable fairytale that you dreamed up when first you could dream, in an attempt simply to understand the concept of me. Some of your philosophers have called me Nature; the wisest of them stopped at that for fear of going mad if they attempted to define me further. Look to the furthest star in your lofty night sky, and that distance is but the tiniest point compared to that described by the vast orbits of heavenly bodies revolving in the firmament. At the far edge of that point your eyes have failed you, but your imagination can be stretched just a little further. Can you imagine a planet one thousand times the size of your own? Can you imagine fifty? And amidst these, suns gone into supernova at temperatures so high that they do not burn, but evaporate. Can you imagine two galaxies tearing each other apart over billions of years without so much as a rumble in the silent vacuum of space? I can tell you now that your imagination will grow weary of conceiving things before I tire of producing them.
I am everything, lifeless and deathless, beginning and end; I know the amplitude of time,
and I inhabit the infinite spaces which you cannot fathom. Your languages do not hold the space to contain me, therefore I cannot describe myself to you with the precision you were no doubt hoping for. However, you have always had a fondness for naming things—hacking vast and complicated systems and concepts down to a single word. I have no true name, but a title will suffice for the purposes of this account—my first and no doubt my last. You may call me Infinity. It has a certain elegance.
“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” - Blaise Pascal
I am not God, though some of you will stubbornly insist after reading this that I am. God is a comfortable fairytale that you dreamed up when first you could dream, in an attempt simply to understand the concept of me. Some of your philosophers have called me Nature; the wisest of them stopped at that for fear of going mad if they attempted to define me further. Look to the furthest star in your lofty night sky, and that distance is but the tiniest point compared to that described by the vast orbits of heavenly bodies revolving in the firmament. At the far edge of that point your eyes have failed you, but your imagination can be stretched just a little further. Can you imagine a planet one thousand times the size of your own? Can you imagine fifty? And amidst these, suns gone into supernova at temperatures so high that they do not burn, but evaporate. Can you imagine two galaxies tearing each other apart over billions of years without so much as a rumble in the silent vacuum of space? I can tell you now that your imagination will grow weary of conceiving things before I tire of producing them.
I am everything, lifeless and deathless, beginning and end; I know the amplitude of time,
and I inhabit the infinite spaces which you cannot fathom. Your languages do not hold the space to contain me, therefore I cannot describe myself to you with the precision you were no doubt hoping for. However, you have always had a fondness for naming things—hacking vast and complicated systems and concepts down to a single word. I have no true name, but a title will suffice for the purposes of this account—my first and no doubt my last. You may call me Infinity. It has a certain elegance.