The Skies Went on For Ever

And reading in silence by a window is a gift, but maybe one to make to yourself. She did not care that it was rude in others eyes, to take a book when visiting relatives. She always asked for and was given at least one book at Christmas and it would be finished over the weeks away from school, during the un-regimented moments at home, or sitting in the alcoves of various big houses belonging to ‘the relatives’ as she called them privately.

By sweet degrees, they closed the gap between them, without eye contact but each sensing a gradual, tacit agreement made over weekends away.

Arguments are tiresome she thought and so she stopped asking for things that she knew would be refused, knowing that the gentle reproach for the misdemeanour after the event was less intense than the forbidding of the deed in the first place. She would carry vast numbers of aging and dusty books around with her, and soon enough this was expected and no longer questioned by the adults. What things there are out there to learn, massive understanding of the world is still far away she thought, beyond some horizon that seems to recede forever, a boundary to our own space, where coloured art and science meet in what she saw as a distraction from the real life stuff of maths and equations. God is hiding, always retreating from us, taking each of our tiny advances towards his own world and adding conditions – destroying information with one paper and proving it cannot be destroyed in another. They still think they can determine the world in terms of numbers; button everything down until out of the long and winding mill of human knowledge comes a single set of numbers and letters which will explain everything - the universe, the life that holds on precariously within it and all the abstract stuff of numbers and shapes that exist only in the heads of the people trying to see it all.

This she saw in each new book and while she knew deep down that understanding was required to voice these concerns, there was a painful tug at her mind whenever she thought of it, some idea that you could simplify everything with a bypass of some form. And what is the extent of all this understanding? Where is the end of what we can explain or even just know we have to explain? Numbers have to go on forever and indeed, they do. You can define a whole universe with a set of numbers that will fit into another. Or can you? Is there not some barrier to understanding and definition, an aura of reality than is required to spark things from the mind into real existence? Call it the soul of the universe, where atoms, gravity and consciousness meet in one singularity, the dot that lives in everything and links God to the universe to us to everything that is inside and outside all that can be explained and all that cannot. And time goes on forever, with no end and no beginning, like an elastic band stretched over a sphere; it begins, and ends where it begins out of the time we see, extended infinitely.