“Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been her in my place but who will never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia….In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.” – Richard Dawkins
I sit here and wonder why they chose this brick in
place of all the others: why its cracks and red rivers of the
infinite Earth rage before me. In the teeth
of what man, what God was the chimney of
that wild mustached man chewed up yet preserved? These
questions erode the bedrock of my sanity into grains stupefying
in their immense number. There are no inquiries as important. The game of odds
we have won is jagged and breaks more questions than it
answers into more burgundy questions. Why is
it I who lives and not an unborn brother? Why you,
Hart Crane, who was the suicide and
not I? Why did God throw a trillion “I”s
into this world to be nameless forgotten suffering souls? In
the mirror I see nothing exceptional in my black hair – our
claim to life is only our ordinariness.
God broke nothingness into a million pieces – arbitrarily chose us that
we may build the chimney of human history. When it crumbles, are
we sure our life won’t be the one remembered, like the half devoured brick lying here?