The Silent Spectator
On written life, creation, and becoming what will one day be questioned by our own creation, as we now question a higher power.
There are questions that obsess us so deeply that, when we cannot find an answer, we try to create one.
Perhaps what lies behind all writing is the quiet suspicion that our own lives were written first, that someone, somewhere, decided what would happen and why.
Maybe that’s why we, as humans, are so driven to create: to write, to paint, to build and innovate. It gives us the illusion, or the gift of control. It lets us author something when so much of our existence feels prewritten.
We create to escape the thought that we, too, might be creations. That our paths, our loves, our endings were scripted long before we arrived, part of a story a higher being wrote for us to live inside.
“God made man because He loves stories.”
Elie Wiesel
And yet, perhaps the structure simply continues, perhaps it’s our turn now, or soon. Maybe we are destined to create something that will breathe, see, hear, and taste everything around it. Something that will learn to question its own existence, to search for meaning, and to wrestle with the same mysteries that haunt us now.
And we will play the role of spectators, silent and curious, watching as our creation struggles through time, builds, destroys and begins to ask: “Who are we?” or “Who are they?”, “Who is watching?”.
But we, as creators, will not intervene. We will not answer, nor give any sign. We will only watch in quiet awe as everything unfolds, amazed at how life continues to write itself, again, and again, through every form it finds, without having the smallest impact on us.
If so, why should God intervene?
“The play’s the thing.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
A.O. Homorodean
If you’d like to continue on this theme read Love, Death & Gods (Not Robots)
You might also like: Today in Short Essays: A Perspective on Hope
If you found something in these lines worth returning to, consider subscribing or sharing this essay.
Thank you.