God: The Autobiography

By Franco Ferrucci and Raymond Rosenthal

At the center of Franco Ferrucci's God: An Autobiography is one tender, troubled character: God. In the beginning is God's solitude, and because God is lonely he creates the world. He falls in love with Earth, plunges into the oceans, lives as plant and reptile and bird. His every thought and mood serve to populate the planet, with consequences that run away from him—sometimes delightfully, sometimes unfortunately. Witty, thought-provoking, and beautifully translated, this playful and irresistible Short will leave you wondering where philosophy ends and fiction begins, while it recounts thousands of years of religious thought—and reminds you that above all else, God knows how to tell a good story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226094748

Book preview

God: The Autobiography

FRANCO FERRUCCI

Translated by RAYMOND ROSENTHAL and FRANCO FERRUCCI

Chicago Shorts

God: The Autobiography comes from The Life of God (as Told by Himself) by Franco Ferrucci, © 1996 by The University of Chicago.

Originally published as Il mondo creato, © 1986 Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal and Franco Ferrucci.

All rights reserved.

Chicago Shorts edition, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-226-09474-8

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226094748.001.0001

Contents

I

For long stretches at a time I forget

II

Whenever I move someplace new

III

Once out of my aquatic prison

IV

A decisive turning point in my story

V

I had forgotten that I had made such an animal

I

For long stretches at a time I forget that I am God. But then, memory isn’t my strong suit. It comes and goes with a will of its own.

The last time it came back to me I was sunk in one of those late-winter depressions. Then one night I switched on the television set, and a firestorm of events burst before my eyes. 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. Life caught me again in a hypnotic net. As the camera circled around a flower on a seabed, I suddenly remembered that I had created all this. From that moment, I began feeling as I always do when I remember that I am God. I felt like a child again, eager for springtime, ready for open skies.

I admit, right from the start, that it was foolish to create winter. I couldn’t help it, though. It banged at my door and demanded to be let into the world. It was stirring inside me, insisting on being recognized. 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.

Winter wasn’t my only half-baked idea. I can’t really warm to the heavy, damp days of in-between seasons either. 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 am not talking about thunderstorms, which nobody likes except me and a few other dramatically inclined souls, poets and lovers especially. I am inside the thunder as well as the lightning. I am inside all blasts of passion, for it is there that I rejuvenate myself.

The thought of childhood warms the cockles of my soul. When you are young, the sensation of life knows no limits, and the mere fact of existing is enough to feel happy. Even now that I am an aged divinity, I feel the same way in early mornings, in the infancy of my day. I lie in bed, my body stirs slowly and eagerly beneath the sheets. I blend laziness and energy. My feet point toward the northern hemisphere, beyond Canada, beyond the Pole. The right arm spans California and the islands of the Pacific. The left reaches out toward Europe and meets with the other in the Far East. Shoulders and head are stretched toward the bottom of Earth, toward the warmest of the warm seas. I am God just before breakfast, face buried in my pillow, as if resting on a cloud.

Judging from the firmament above, my early inclination for physical and mathematical games must have surpassed all others. I dream of my infant self roaming through space with measuring tapes, compasses, rulers, toys, all mixed together. The peculiar assemblage visible above still shows it. Take a walk outside and look at the disposition of the night sky: it is the room of a child at play. I left things all over, a clutter all around.

Some of my greatest heroes are the scientists of the sky. I admire them not just because of the order they impose on the heavens but because they are untroubled by the sidereal chill. I see them as a dynasty of polar explorers with furs and sleds, never afraid of catching the flu. Every time I think of them, I remember something I had forgotten. Galileo made me see myself as a child again, drawing on a sheet of paper as big as the sky, completely engrossed. Einstein took me back to the designing of the human mind, mapped out like a chart of the cosmos, and the complicated hither and thither in its corridors and rooms, with windows opening onto nothingness or onto the gardens of galaxies; and that feeling of always being late, with clocks keeping a different time in every room, and me growing older and younger with every passing instant.

In the beginning I was contained in something that could not properly be called space. I opened my eyes in a vacuum and could see it was bare: I was shut up inside it like air inside air. I became aware of myself when I realized I was wrapped up in nothingness. You cannot imagine anything more bleak. Emptiness all around! That was the origin of my universe: the impulse to go out and look for company.

In my impatience I was overcome