Creation and War
From Proust, The Times Recaptured:
Be frank, my dear friend, you yourself exposed the theory to me that things only exist thanks to a perpetually renewed creation. You used to say that the creation of the world did not take place once and for all, but necessarily continues day by day. Well, if you said that in good faith you cannot except the war from that theory. It is all very well for our excellent Norpois to write (trotting out one of those rhetorical accessories he loves, like ‘the dawn of victory’ and ‘General Winter’) ‘now that Germany has wanted war, the die is cast’ the truth is that every day war is declared anew. Therefore he who wants to continue it is as culpable as he who began it, perhaps more, for the latter could not perhaps foresee all its horrors.
I am not quite sure what to make of this, but it contains some sort of truth. The part about war is easier to understand— the decision to end a war is always open. Later, Proust raises a related question:
How is it that the restitution of Alsace-Lorraine appeared to France an insufficient motive for a war and yet a sufficient motive for continuing it and for declaring it anew each year?
But what of creation generally? Certainly new things arise each days, so there is new creation in that sense. But what of everything? We cannot know, I suppose, whether God must continually keep the world in existence, like the creator of a movie who must keep it going with new frames continually lest it freeze in one frame or go blank.
January 31st, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Proust’s thought that perhaps creation of the world , rather than having been done inthe past, continues day by day reminds me of the thought that the Kingdom of God is not something that is to be in the future but continues to build day by day here on earth.
This whole thing then leads to a consideration of Time – fact or fiction?