At one point, you have to sift the sand to even glimpse
the eroded smile of God's exhaustion. And He is exhausted.
He's been playing Ozymandias backwards and forwards.
He loves to watch the sand leap up and form a throne. He loves
to watch it fall. He loves the archaeologist, unearthing his first
bone. He loves Nebraska, where the wheat plays boules with itself,
and the memory of Poulenc's ocelot walking in the bois, the sky
after sunset strangely blue. A Dutch landscape painted in Italy
is especially exhausting, as is anything intensely observed
in the dark: fungi, wild cabbage, the rotting stumps of birch.
All the immaterial factors: some matches, a bent spoon and
broken button asleep in the ditch. A couple of coins in the drawer
back at the motel. They belong to the archaeologist who will never
claim them, who has lost as many pennies as there were concubines
in the Byzantine harem. Should a portion of God's earnest work
be wasted? Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with a candlestick.
He loves all these things equally, with the same amount of
exasperation and regard you might have for a statue, or the desert,
or the moths that sometimes settle in bags of flour, surprising you
when you open the flap and some of the flour appears to escape.
He no longer knows what is divine and what is human, and His
favorite example is how Adam Pynacker, a nobody, just last November
stood in his Andean castle near an open window and watched
a piece of cloud break off and wander into the little room.