The Life of God (as told my himself) - Franco Ferrucci

[EXCERPTS]
“Bored by the reptiles and mystified by the birds, I decided that it was time for a fresh idea, and soon I hit upon a radical new concept. I wanted life to meditate upon itself so as to better comprehend itself. There followed from this that my next living beings should bear their children inside themselves, and that their eggs should open in the warmth of the womb instead of being hatched outside...I had chosen the females to carry the burden because they were the more generous and patient gender.”

“I had to find an animal that I could transform into the most splendid of beings, and I immediately started to look around…I rejected the ferocious inhabitants, the tiger, the alligator, the predator. Violent types wouldn’t do for this assignment…I found birds something profoundly mediocre…One disappointment followed another. The cat was too lazy, the marsupial was prone to getting lost, the worked blindly and was undecided between the wet and the dry, the serpent was perfidious [disloyal] and unable to build anything at all…Look at the dog, how distracted he gets…One day I was sitting beneath a tree on the beach, munching a banana and wondering where in creation I would find the animal I needed. Right then, from a branch above me, dropped the monkey.”

“I concede that God should not have such a profound need for affection that he immediately trusts whoever compliments him. But it is not his fault that he was born an orphan, that he spent his childhood alone and starved for affection. I’m being defensive, I suppose, so it comes naturally to fall into the third person.”

“It was also necessary to do something to reinforce sexual desire, which had dwindled dangerously. I decided to invent clothes to cover limbs of both men and women to see if they would become more desirable. The genitials figured prominently in my plan; they became invisible to the point of being dreamed about and even idolized. This proved an excellent ploy. The human body, which naked soon provokes only boredom mixed with irritation, once covered is clouded in an indistinct élan. Such is the power of illusion.”

“In reality there were neither angels nor pairs of gods. There was only myself, capable of so many mistakes, something that I found hard to get across to humankind…My only genius consisted in having created someone who might understand and describe me…I was waiting for them to become clever enough to explain to me who I was and why I was carrying on in such an unseemly manner.”

“Everything led me to believe that the devil was the fruit of an overactive human imagination. But I also knew that when there’s talk about something, it means that something does exist, and it becomes a matter of looking for it in the right place. Finally I gave in to the most obvious but distasteful strategy before me: I became an exorcist.”

“The popes appearance was so incredibly noble. I was about to fall to my knees and ask him to give me a sign of paternal welcome, but I caught myself just in time. ‘It is I who am his God,’ I repeated to myself several times.”

“[God leaving] I go back and forth, make the rounds, close the doors, turn off the lights. My anxiety about watering the plants before I leave has made me overflow more than one region. My moving the furniture and my emptying the drawers has caused some recent earthquakes that could have been avoided with more caution on my part. I feel sorry about that.”

“Confused prayers reach me, intersected by electrical signals. I can barely make out the words.”