![]() Galileo made me see myself as a child again, drawing on a sheet of paper as big as the sky, completely engrossed. ![]() Every time I think of them, I remember something I had forgotten. I see them as a dynasty of polar explorers with furs and sleds, never afraid of catching the flu. I admire them not just because of the order they impose on the heavens but because they are untroubled by the sidereal chill. Some of my greatest heroes are the scientists of the sky. I left things all over, a clutter all around. Take a walk outside and look at the disposition of the night sky: it is the room of a child at play. The peculiar assemblage visible above still shows it. I dream of my infant self roaming through space with measuring tapes, compasses, rulers, toys, all mixed together. Judging from the firmament above, my early inclination for physical and mathematical games must have surpassed all others. I am God just before breakfast, face buried in my pillow, as if resting on a cloud. Shoulders and head are stretched toward the bottom of Earth, toward the warmest of the warm seas. The left reaches out toward Europe and meets with the other in the Far East. ![]() The right arm spans California and the islands of the Pacific. My feet point toward the northern hemisphere, beyond Canada, beyond the Pole. I lie in bed, my body stirs slowly and eagerly beneath the sheets. Even now that I am an aged divinity, I feel the same way in early mornings, in the infancy of my day. When you are young, the sensation of life knows no limits, and the mere fact of existing is enough to feel happy. The thought of childhood warms the cockles of my soul. I am inside all blasts of passion, for it is there that I rejuvenate myself. I am inside the thunder as well as the lightning. I am not talking about thunderstorms, which nobody likes except me and a few other dramatically inclined souls, poets and lovers especially. How pigheaded the rain seems, coming down as though everything were about to turn into water, or as though gray clouds and wet asphalt were all there is to the world. I can't really warm to the heavy, damp days of in-between seasons either. I've always been a bit of an oddball, full of contradictions, and for all my love of the light I still have my dark side. It was stirring inside me, insisting on being recognized. It banged at my door and demanded to be let into the world. I admit, right from the start, that it was foolish to create winter. I felt like a child again, eager for springtime, ready for open skies. From that moment, I began feeling as I always do when I remember that I am God. As the camera circled around a flower on a seabed, I suddenly remembered that I had created all this. I saw a volcano spewing lava, a skiing race in the Alps, a film on Paris as it was forty years ago, hunting in Ecuador, an office in Ottawa, open-heart surgery telecast live, a documentary about submarine landscapes of the North Sea. ![]() Then one night I switched on the television set, and a firestorm of events burst before my eyes. The last time it came back to me I was sunk in one of those late-winter depressions. ![]() It comes and goes with a will of its own. For long stretches at a time I forget that I am God. ![]()
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