Prose: Temporal

Temporal

By G. David Schwartz
QuailBellMagazine.com

That everything gets done temperately and nothing get done absolutely is proof of something concerning the works of the Absolute. Everything is temporary.

He leaves and he returns when it suits him. The other is calm when it suits him. They are in reality satisfied only temporarily. 

I am indefinitely dissatisfied -- or worse, if I can coin a word, missatufied (so close to mystified). I am a spent spark plug. The absolutely and people would laugh when Woody Allen says it's missatufied. A reassuring but false voice cons its way back into a house.  

A sobbing, so temporary, voice pours its way over a sizzling heart -- not to smooth it.  No. That would be too much to ask. But to put it out. 
            
That such insignificant a thing in temporariness can speak louder than the Absolute proves nothing terrible, but does prove troubling. Yes, it is the old problem of evil, but aren't we all? That a loop we know will ring through and then disappear for a time (yeah, even that is for a time) is more significant than the pole which does not move.    
            
Yes, and how terrible. They want the ring without the pole, or the pole with motionless ringing. Both are absurd. Better to have neither.  
            
To paraphrase Voltaire, if God does exist, God shouldn't. How Nietzschian. Was then Nietzsche a humanistic thinker? Certainly, he had a different, possibly better vision.    
            
The question, again, (and again and again and) is not the existence of God, nor the nonexistence, but of God's relevancy. Today God gives me nothing whatsoever. I eat, but it is from food which grows whether I eat it or not, grown and picked by farmers and, or farm hands. It is put in a shelf at the local grocery which is run by an atheist, kept clean by a Southern Baptist, rung up by a Catholic and so on. Many religious people including non-religious humans make, produces, and take care of my needs, my family's needs and all the needs in the world.
            
And these people, just like me, are temporary. As temporary as the aging product…as humans (another aging product) as, I hazard to guess, not only all of humanity, but all of every thing.
            
Thus I do not claim to be an atheist but inasmuch as the Master of the Universe (who has a virtual infinite number of names) may be as well. We were created in the image. 

Schwartz is the author of A Jewish Appraisal of Dialogue and Midrash and Working Out Of The Book.