“You
know, God, you’re great at creating stuff,” said Satan, washing down the last
bite of her big chocolate macadamia nut cookie, “but you’re not very good at
fixing stuff.”
And when
Satan said that, then God thought back over all the thousands of paintings and
sculpture and pottery and drawings He’d made while He was Picasso and all the
concertos He’d written while he was Mozart and realized that Satan was probably
right. Never once had He ever gone back and changed anything to make it
“better.” He’d just made His pieces, then stepped back and let them “live,”
which was exactly the same thing He’d done with all the planets in the Universe
that had life, as well as the trillions that didn’t, and the trillions of stars
that had no planets, the stars that were now dead, and the great clouds of
intergalactic dust.
God could
not remember a single time that He’d ever gone back and changed anything in
order to make it “better.” Instead, He’d just created it then gone on to
another project and let His creations live out their natural lives, whether
those be of a mouse about to be eaten by some owl or a giant star evolving into
a black hole. Nobody ever called Him God the Fixer of What He’d Made Imperfect
in the First Place. Instead everybody called Him just God the Creator. So now
He began to worry a little bit about the Parallel Universes that He was
thinking about creating, and wondered if Satan might be right about those, too,
if they ever came to pass.
“I get up
every morning early and try to create stuff,” said Satan, “but then I have to
go back and fix it. I got pages and pages of stuff like that. They’re called
Really Shitty First Drafts in this book I was reading about how to write books.
Then I spend all night editing them, and moving sentences around here and
there. Because I say I’m a writer, people think I’m a creative force, but
really I’m only a fixer. That’s what I spend most of my time doing, fixing
Really Shitty First Drafts. You’re a creator because you spend so much time
building stuff. But I’m trying to be a creator and you’re sitting there
wondering why all your creations need fixing.”
“There’s
just something . . . something so incredibly satisfying about making a piece of
art,” said God. Of course He wasn’t thinking only about “art”—literally—but
about everything someone might call “art,” for example shrews and begonias and
mosquitoes and paramecia and planets and solar systems and globular galactic clusters
that gave out highly periodic bursts of strange radiation.
“There’s
also something extremely satisfying about fixing things,” countered Satan. “I
mean, look at all the stuff I could fix if people would just let me do it.”
“Like
what?” asked God.
“Well,
for starters,” replied Satan, “like the environments of all those millions of
planets where You have dumb people reproducing like crazy and tearing the
places up at the rate of 50 acres a minute, or whatever units they’re using to
measure their space that ones who believe only in You think it’s okay to do
that because You’re going to come take them to Heaven some day and they don’t
need to take care of the places they live.”
No comments:
Post a Comment