'Nothing at all to do with the principles of Good and Evil,' I broke in immediately. Snow hesitated, but his attitude no longer showed any of the wary reserve of recent weeks: And he has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures his unending defeat.' He has created systems or mechanisms that serves specific ends but have now overstepped and betrayed them. A god who has created clocks, but not the time they measure. He is a.sick god, whose ambitions exceed his powers and who does not realize it at first. 'I'm not thinking of a god whose imperfection arises out of the candor of his human creators, but one whose imperfection represents his essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating things that lead to horror. The Greek gods had fits of sulks and family quarrels, and they were just as imperfect as mortals.'
The God of the Old Testament, for instance, required humble submission and sacrifices, and and was jealous of other gods. 'In a way all the gods of the old religions were imperfect, considered that their attributes were amplified human ones. 'What do you mean by imperfect?' Snow frowned. I'm no expert in the history of religions, and perhaps this is nothing new-do you happen to know if there was ever a belief in an.imperfect God?' I don't mean the traditional God of Earth religion. Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.” At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence.
We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. A single world, our own, suffices us but we can't accept it for what it is. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. We are humanitarian and chivalrous we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. “We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.” I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox.
The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. “On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something.
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