'Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator's, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happned? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disapears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey? "God is subtle," Einstein said, "but not malicious." Again Einstein said that "nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning." It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God "sets bars and doors" and said, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further." But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?
Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous. About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four story-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.'
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.20.
