Thursday, September 02, 2010

on compassion

I weigh in my heart a stray moment of compassion and it affrights me that were there a god and were she a compassionate and fair god, then how would she carry this compassion, which must be without pause across eternities and infinities for each and every being that exists; which is the heart deep enough to hold that kindness and to brave this weight, this enormous understanding of another's existence and suffering as if it was your own; to look at them as they would be once, as tiny morsels of thought progressing infinitesimally with great anticipation and sometimes joy, through birth and childhood and youth, to the middling of age and the despair of time and the imminent apprehension of death, then to be old and die; and to watch with helplessness the inevitable going of that which you created and loved and yet to continue creating; to feel that even if there is nothing of any permanence coming out of all this there is perhaps a point to it; to feel but not to know; and also to feel but not to know what if she was wrong; how does one endure such understanding, and having arrived there what does one do; no god can survive it and that is why there is no god

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