From where does our morality come?  An interesting new book by Paul Bloom, Just Babies:  The Origins of Good and Evil, discusses whether morality is evolved or innate.  If it is the former, explaining morality seems to be a matter of identifying the particular chemical processes that create it.  Yet this doesn't explain why we are moral beings.  It doesn't explain the moral sense we all possess.
     If it is the latter, however, we must assume that there is a fundamental structure or disposition that somehow precedes and determines all else, including the moral sense.  In other words, in order to produce the grounds of morality, the universe must itself be a moral universe.  Morality cannot just pop into existence.  Though morality, like all mental functions, is a product of neuronal interaction, it’s difficult to explain its presence on the basis of chemicals alone.  Chemicals may produce morality, but can they enable it?
     The linguist Noam Chomsky suggested that the ability to use language is hard wired into the human brain, that it appeared as a single entity along the way of human development.  Put another way, it did not evolve.  As Chomsky sees it, we simply “are” with language.  But he cannot explain why.
     Nor can we explain why we are moral without assenting to the possibility of a moral universe.  And a moral universe is not something that can simply emerge out of nothing.  Would we really have become moral (that is, not only able to choose what is moral, but to be able to choose) on our own?

     Have you seen the Hollywood classic (1930s) Frankenstein?  If you've read the book, you know that the movie is somewhat different, but no matter:  the point is the same.  If we are to suppose that we are creators, we must be prepared to deal with the consequences.
     At one point in the movie, which is of course in black and white, Dr. Frankenstein remarks about the monster he has made that, “It is not dead; it has never lived.”  His point is that he's not raising the creature from the dead.  He's not bringing something dead back to life.  He’s creating something new, something that has never existed before.  In a word, he has become God.  He’s made life where there once was none). 
     So what is it like to be God?   What would we do, really, if we were God?  Would we create the world as it is, or would we do something entirely different?  And how would we know either way?
     It's exceedingly difficult to imagine being the only one in the universe where there wasn't a universe to behold.  To make life where there had been none, to create existence when existence didn't exist (as most theologians would say, for God, existence, as we humans conceive it, never began, for he is eternal), these are indeed weighty things.
     Can we bear the burden?

     A number of lots in our neighborhood are under construction these days.  Several old houses, bought by young families, have been razed to make room for new ones which these families deem more suitable for this day and age.  I welcome the arrival of these young families, as it keeps the neighborhood lively and warm.  Summer will be full of happy noise.
     On the other hand, as I walk past the remnants of these homes and think about how everything they were has now become debris filling a massive dumpster, I feel a sense of loss.  What had been is now forever gone.  Yes, of course time must march on, and yes, of course things change, and yes, of course what is cannot always be, but I cannot help but occasionally look back.  We build our present on our past
     On the other hand, life remains.  It's old, but it's new.  It's here, but it's not.  And like an old house, it's full of holes, holes of surprise, holes of intrigue, holes of mystery, holes of memory, holes of, dare I say, the metaphysical.  It's open, it's transparent.  Even if we do not see it, it continues, it stays before us, it stays within us.  The avenues it makes into our experience never go away completely.  They can't.  Because life is larger than we are, it will always be here, grounding, framing, guiding, explaining what and why we are today.  It's metaphysical.
     And that's the truth that always wins. 

     Have you heard of Derek Jarman?  Unless you follow the doings of punk rock and film in Great Britain, you likely have not.  Jarman, who died in 1995 at the all too early age of 52, was a visionary filmmaker who produced a number of innovative and ground breaking movies about various British cultural icons, including the queen of England.  He was famous for taking accepted social conventions and turning them upside down, for taking the venerable and making it common.
     Although many of his works, including his films Jubilee, an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Caravaggio, have been highly controversial, primarily due to theiUr twisted imagery and heavy use of nudity, I find them to be apt pictures of a remarkable and often unbearably diverse world.  Although we may not like everything Jarman did, and although we may disagree with his perspectives on existence, we ponder what they say about humanity.  How is our species so adept at fusing darkness with light?
     Genesis 1:2 tells us that in the very beginning, "darkness was over the face of the deep."  Until God spoke, there was no light.

     Unless you are living in a cave, you have probably heard about what has been going on in the Ukraine lately.  For those who study such things, historians and the like, it is a stunning modern day picture of the capacity and ability of people to challenge and overthrow their rulers and, they hope, create a new order.  It is a twenty-first century variant of the British philosopher John Locke's dictums that one, a government should rule with the consent of the people; and two, if the people have reason to believe the government is unjust, they have the right to overthrow it.  Americans invoked Locke when they cast off the yoke of the British Empire in the late eighteenth century, and the French did the same when they overturned and abolished the monarchy of their country several years later.  Many other people in various parts of the world have done the same in subsequent years.  Locke's legacy is vast.
     Yet Locke would be the first to say that the challenge any revolution faces is balancing freedom and order.  Freedom without order becomes chaos, but order without freedom becomes oppression.  The spell of freedom is an intoxicating one; no human is entirely immune from it.  And why not?  As human beings, we are the most "free" creatures on the planet.  Unlike the other animals, we know we are.
     Therein is a puzzle.  Did Adam and Eve, they of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil fame in Genesis 3, know they were free?  Or did they not realize it until they had freed themselves, in a manner of speaking, of the commandments of God?
     Sometimes we don't know we're free until we bump into the contours of our humanness, that puzzling yet marvelous humanness that binds and enlightens us all.  I wish the Ukrainian people well:  people are made to be, in every way, free.

     Are we living in a Platonic world?  The great Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel may have thought so.  If you're not familiar with Plato's thought, he suggested that outside of this world lies another world, a world of eternal ideas from which all ideas in this world derive.  Everything we come to know in this world we come to know on the basis of these eternal ideas (or forms).  What is true in this world is therefore determined by what is "Truth" beyond it.  So did Gödel say, in roughly like manner, that mathematical concepts and ideas "form an objective reality of their own, which we cannot create or change, but only perceive and describe."
     Mathematicians like to say that their truths are timeless, that they are truths that everyone, regardless of nationality or origin, comes to perceive and accept.  They are universal statements about reality.  Ironically, we cannot really prove these truths.  Although we all for instance understand and accept that two plus two equals four, we cannot independently prove it.  We can only use the mathematical to prove the mathematical.  So it becomes circular.
     On the other hand, if mathematics' truths are indeed objective and universal, we have a very good argument for the necessity of universals in our lives.  We need universals, within or outside of this world, to make sense of ourselves and our lives.  We cannot build a life meaning on particulars.  We need universals to decide what is really true.
     The issue for most us, then, is not so much whether universals necessarily exist but more of how we access them.  How do we access Truth?  How do we access what innately is, but what we do not physically see?
     Ah, the challenge of finitude, the challenge of God:  understanding what it means to be finite in an infinite (but bound and ordered) universe.
    

     What is forgiveness?  Although thousands of books have written about forgiveness, what forgiveness really boils down to is this:  letting go of what one wants for what one believes.  Perhaps you remember an incident that occurred in the Amish community of western Pennsylvania in 2006.  As a number of Amish children were studying in their one room school house, a heavily armed gunman burst into the room and opened fire.  In a matter of seconds, five children were dead.  The gunman later took his own life.
     What did the Amish do?  As one of their people explained, “I don’t think there’s anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts.”  Many Amish visited the gunman's parents, spending hours trying to comfort them.  Thirty attended his funeral.  Not one spoke of malice or vengeance.  Their forgiveness was total.
     I doubt anyone would deny that he or she would have trouble emulating the Amish.  For accompanying forgiveness are other issues, important issues of forgetting, vengeance, and justice, to name a few.  But ours is not to worry about such things as much as it is to forgive.  Forgiveness is for us, and not necessarily for the one being forgiven.  It is what we are to do.  Forgiveness enables the sentiments of the Hebrew phrase, Tikkun Olam, "the healing of the world."  It changes us, it changes the planet.
     Moreoever, if justice is real, it will eventually be effected.  As one Amish father told his son several days after the shooting, "We must remember that this man had a mother and a father, and a soul, and now he stands before a just God."

      Even if you were not around when the Beatles came to America for the first time, you have probably not missed the buzz and pageantry that has accompanied the fiftieth anniversary of that event.  Even with the Winter Olympics filling the news, it was difficult to overlook various commemorations of that day in February of 1974 when John, Paul, George, and Ringo flew into New York City.
    For the baby boomers among us, remembering the Beatles stirs up not only memories of that day but of other days of that era as well, days of protest and dissent, of cultural fulmination and challenge, of political destruction and change, days to which some baby boomers look back fondly, for others, as days of harbingers of American decline.  The Beatles seemed part and parcel of a time of immense cultural upheaval whose effects are with us to this day.
     But why the Beatles?  Much ink has been spilled on this topic, and I will not attempt to add to the pile.  I will, however, offer a wish that as the baby boomers move into their seventies and beyond, as the dreams they had for the nation and the world sink ever more completely into the political mainstream and the throes of commercialism, something akin to the excitement of the Beatles will revisit us as well.  As the world continues to writhe in an odd combination of ambition and ennui and purpose and frustration, struggling to find a foothold in the existential emptiness of the cosmos, it needs a breath of fresh air, a breath of something new, a burst of energy that will level its perceptions of capriciousness with the hope that even in the darkness of global wanderlust there is light, the light of path and explanation.  We are not alone.

     If you have been watching the Winter Olympics, you may have observed that perhaps the worst place to finish is fourth.  Those who finish fourth miss out on a medal, but unlike those who finish well below them, they barely miss it.  After four or more years of day in and day out of training, they fail, often by a few hundredths of a second, to make the mark.  They've come so close, yet may as well be miles away.  Hours and hours of training have come down to a sliver, even a speck of time.  But what an enormous speck!
     Very few of us will ever be on the Olympic stage.  Just to make the Olympic team is an achievement in itself, one only a handful of people will ever realize.  Yet to train for days and days for years and years only to finish, by less than a instant of time, out of the medals can be, I would think, bitterly disappointing.
     As I have reflected on this, I have seen an analogy with faith.  For those who, like Pascal suggested, put all of their being into believing in an unseen God, and then find themselves deluded, that this God in fact doesn't exist, have not lost nearly as much as those who never bothered to believe and only later learned that he in fact does exist, that he is the undisputed lord of the creation.  Better to put all of one's hopes into a medal and not get it than to never try, if one is fully capable of doing so, at all.  We never know what we miss if we do not try, yet we can only try if we believe there's a reason to do so.
     Faith is indeed a complicated thing.
    

     Many of you have undoubtedly read J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, that delightful tale of Bilbo Baggins's adventures as he tries to help some fellow companions of Middle Earth.  Twisting and turning through the magical landscape of this imaginary land, the tale takes Bilbo and his cohorts to some remarkable places.  Bilbo of course had very little idea of what to expect; although he knew a bit about the terrain outside , he had never really ventured far into it.  And he only went because he felt much pressure and cajoling from the wizard Gandalf and his eventual companions.
     We are all, I suspect, a bit like Bilbo.  We may not think we live in a magical world, but in fact we do.  Ours is a world that overflows with mystery and intrigue, a world rife with secrets and unpredictability, a world that we are constantly seeking to unwrap and unfold.  And unlike Bilbo, we did not decide to live in it.  We are just here.
     So, the existentialists say, we live by making choices, by making choices that authenticate us, choices that, for a flashing moment, lift us out of the anonymity of a world in which we did not ask to be.  What else can we do?  We step into the magic, we burrow into the mystery.  We live and, one day, we die.
     Death is mentioned little in Middle Earth, but it is achingly present in ours.  So we press on, planning the journey, embarking on the trek, hiking and traveling until the day when we can hike and travel no more.  Can we--should we--do anything less?
     Of course not.  Yet for the existentialists, life has no meaning.  There is no ultimate point.  There is no Gandalf, there is no God.  So we are without a reason as to why we journey through this life and world, and live in, as many have pointed out, existential limbo, stepping into the magic without a clue as to why it is so.
     Magic is only magic if we know why it is.

     Writing at the peak of his work on the origins of existence, Charles Darwin, the British naturalist who introduced the idea of natural selection to the world, remarked, "Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact--that mystery of mysteries--the first appearance of new beings on earth."
     Whether we believe in a divine or material origin to the universe (or both), we cannot help but agree with Darwin.  Regardless of its beginnings, the fact of a new being, a being which had not previously "been," a being which had not been heretofore imagined is surely a marvelous and wondrous thing.  As beings who can only create from what is already there, we find astonishing the emergence of something that, while it of course is dependent on what has existed before it, is nonetheless something entirely new.  Because we are bound by our form and circumstances, we awe, perhaps even tremble before true uniqueness, true newness.
     Before such newness, we can draw one of two conclusions.  Either it is a natural and inevitable outcome of various biological processes, or it is the work of a creator who sees beyond the obvious and apparent.  If we choose the first, we of course are still left with wondering how the notion of "life" itself might have been birthed in the midst of a primordial sea.  We may understand the biology, but we do not grasp the why, the reason why the lifeless would produce life--and why it ever did.  Is life always inevitable?  This question is, as Darwin noted, the "mystery of mysteries."
     Yet the question remains:  why, besides the biology, did life ever emerge?  Why life, this "mystery of mysteries"?
     Indeed, why anything at all?  Here, we reach the boundaries of knowing.  Here, we can only believe.

     At the atheist discussion group which I attend once a month, one person made the remark, this week, that, "If I cannot understand something, it cannot be true."  Although he was referring to things supernatural, meaning that if he could not understand them, primarily because he could not see or measure them  and subsequently come to an understanding of them, he therefore had no way to determine whether or not they are true.
     The gentleman makes a legitimate point:  how do we measure something we cannot normally see?  On the other hand, can we always dismiss something as valid or true if we do not fully understand it?  To do so, it seems, would be intellectual arrogance (or myopia).  Yes, asserting the fact of supernatural can seem a befuddling exercise, but we all would acknowledge that this life contains many experiences and things we will never fully understand.  Yet we uniformly believe this life to be true, at least for our time on earth.  And we cannot test everything about it.
     So why not give the supernatural a try?

     Sometimes what people deem the least likely to be important or significant becomes the most influential and seminal of all.  Outside of Mexico City, in a city called Teotihuacan, sits a temple with a fascinating story about the gods who were considered to inhabit it.  Many years ago, the tale goes, at a point where the world had completed another of its cycles (per Aztec tradition) of birth and destruction , the gods conferred as to what they should do to "restart" the creation.  Two gods came forth.  One was a warrior god, the other a humble and self-effacing one.  After additional discussion, the gathered gods determined that a fire should be made and one of these two gods should cast himself upon it as a sacrifice, a selfless sacrifice that would sufficiently atone for the destruction of the cosmos past and enable the birth of a new one.
     Despite his bravado, the warrior god could not bring himself to do it.  But the humble god happily leaped into the flames and arose as the sun, that celestial object which so many cultures consider essential to existence.  (Subsequently, the warrior god had a change of heart and threw himself upon the flames and emerged as the moon.)  The one who was viewed least likely to provide an atonement in fact became the one who did so; the one who walked humbly and apart turned out to be the progenitor of a new cosmos.  The least became the greatest.
     Countless other religious legends echo these sentiments, that the one who is overlooked becomes the one in whom the keys of life find root.  So does Jesus, drawing from Psalm 118, remark to some of his detractors, those who could not wrap their minds around the fact of a humble and broken messiah, that, "The stone [Jesus] which the builders [his opponents] rejected, this became the chief cornerstone [the foundation of the new spiritual order]", then adds, "This came about from the Lord." 
     It's very difficult for we humans who have been raised to acknowledge and respect and pursue power, in a variety of forms, to imagine that to find spiritual wholeness we must reject power, for doing so militates against nearly everything about whom we suppose we are.  Yet this is the way of God:  in humility is the path to genuine life.  In humility is the road to understanding the world and the God who made it.  In humility is the recognition that in this world all we ultimately know and have is a sense of place and, happily, of wonder.  We had absolutely no part in putting ourselves here, and we had absolutely no part in determining what our genes will be.  So the wonder goes.
     As the writer of Psalm 100 notes, "It is God who made us, not we ourselves."

     The Renaissance painter Raphael's The Transfiguration, done between 1516 and 1520 and now hanging in a museum in Vatican City, is a marvel of color, form, and spiritual sensitivity.  One stands before it in awe.  The way that Raphael inserts an episode from the gospels in the bottom right of the painting heightens its impact, for it shows, more than other paintings of this event, how powerful a happening the Transfiguration was, that is, the irruption of heaven and the supernatural into the material and finite earth.
    

     For those who do not know the story, the gospels tell us of a day when Jesus and the apostles Peter and John hiked to the top of a mountain where, to the apostles' surprise, they saw the prophets Moses and Elijah conversing with Jesus in what appeared to be a glorified state.  In addition, they heard God speaking to them.  In every way, it was, it seemed, a vision of heaven on earth (for more, read Matthew 17, Mark 9, and Luke 9).
     You're free to doubt the veracity or authenticity of this story, of course, but I share it to make this point.  Although when we look at our material world we may find it relatively easy to ignore the possibility of an invisible and supernatural realm beyond it, it's not as easy to ignore it if this present world really is all that is.  Unless billions and billions of people are severely delusional, we ought to at least consider the possibility that their religious and spiritual experiences, questings, and longings might indeed have some basis in reality.
     We may never see what the apostles saw, but we can see that what is physical and natural lives on the edge of what it is and is not, and that the irruption of the invisible into the visible does not undermine either one.  Rather, it verifies the reality of both.

     I recently asked a group of teenagers what their most important possession was.  To a person, they replied, "My cellphone."  Ah, cellphones.  We love them and we hate them.  We love what they do for us, we recoil at what they are doing to us.  On the other hand, we cannot turn back the clock to the days of pay phones only.  We cannot be the Luddites of the Industrial Revolution, those who rejected the technologies that the Revolution introduced to the Western world.  Unless we live in the world of Jules Verne's Time Machine (or to point to a more recent example, the movie Back to the Future), we cannot go back in time.  As the writer of Ecclesiastes wisely observes, "What is crooked cannot be straightened" (3:15).  Moreover, why should we?  Can the older generation really discern the future of the younger generation?  Can the older generation really imagine that it can fully picture what their younger counterparts will do with the world?  Or what they should do?  Sure, its people can offer advice and wisdom, but it is often the advice and wisdom formed in another age, another time.  Not that some advice is always relevant and useful, just that it is always advice embedded in a past for which the future often has no context.
     We enjoy our technology, we appreciate our technology, and in most instances we literally cannot live without it.  We may worry about technology, we may fret about its effects, particularly those having to do with communication, but we cannot evade or escape them.  It's a losing battle.  So what do we do?  We enter into the capriciousness of existence, and hold on, believing that if a divinely created world does in fact have meaning, everything that it unfolds will, too.  We're just along for the ride.
     And we ride.

     (I thought that I had posted this yesterday, but apparently not . . . !)

     In the movie The King's Speech, which I saw recently, again, we see a monarch encouraging his nation to lift its eyes beyond its immediate situation to a larger picture, a picture that is almost a sort of eternity, a singular expansiveness, an enlarging of ken that supersedes the theatres of the war, a vantage point in which the vagaries and machinations of the present moment would find their ultimate direction and meaning.

     Oddly, however, though a semblance of eternity would be the peoples' measure, it would also be their burden:  they would not be able to understand nothing apart from it.
     The prophets of ancient Israel believed they had a burden from God, a burden so visceral and overwhelming that they could do nothing else but preach it.  This burden was their truth--their conclusions about the words of God--but it was also their daily challenge:  everything they did was bound to it.  Each day, they labored under the convicting grip of this burden, compelled to proclaim to their audience the stakes before them, the stakes of eternity.  For it was in these stakes of eternity that the prophets believed they found that which infused their actions with purpose:  creation met its destiny.
     If eternity exists, our actions have a permanence that exceeds any earthly approbation or praise we may experience in them.  King George gave many magnificent speeches throughout the war, but only as they prompted his people to trust in a larger permanence of thought did they have any lasting significance and staying power.
     If eternity exists, we live in its shadow every day, balancing the ineluctable fact of death with the affirmation of another age, one into which all our earthly form and quests will eventually go, an existence which will guarantee ultimate point for our present moments.  Ours is a burden to live in temporality even as we ponder a life beyond it, the lilting actuality of a vision that encompasses and moves all that is presently real.  The burden of eternity.

     Many of us have heard of, or perhaps even heard talk show host Jay Leno during the nearly twenty-two years he has occupied the late night hours of network television.  Ratings leader almost the entire time he's worked the slot, Leno has endeared himself to millions with his clever and disarming wit, and fascinated just as many with his extensive antique car and motorcycle collection housed in an enormous warehouse in Los Angeles.  He has made his mark.
     But in a few days, Leno will step down to make room for a younger host.  He doesn't really want to, but he is being a good team player and doing what his network is asking of him.  He will still have plenty to do, however:  he has regularly done one person comedy spots around the country, and will continue to do so.
     Although not all of us find Leno funny, and not all of us invest our time in watching late night comedy, we all can, I think, appreciate that humans are comedic beings.  Not only are we creatures who cry, we are creatures who like to laugh.  We like things that make us laugh, things that make us laugh so hard our stomach hurts.  We like levity, we like foolishness.  We like funny moments.
     Many of us will agree that life is difficult, yes, but we will also agree that life can be very, very funny.  It's a curious thing, this life, this life that produces such tremendous sorrow mingled with overwhelming mirth and joy.  We weep often, but we rejoice profusely.  Some people claim that God has a sense of humor.  Maybe he does.  Maybe that's why life is fun; maybe that's why life is for rejoicing.  On the other hand, maybe that's why life is complicated by pain.  There's no laughter without pain, and in a world with a point we cannot help but have both.  Otherwise, we'd never know which is most important. 

     To what ends do we raise children?  In a new book, Amy Chua and Jeb Rubenfeld argue the most successful children are those who harbor feelings of a large group inferiority complex, insecurity, and impulse control.  Nurturing feelings of inferiority and insecurity, they suggest, along with cultivating the ability to reject immediate gratification for long term gain, allow people to accomplish more than those who are being raised amidst constant encouragement, commendation, and plaudits designed to elevate their self-esteem and, presumably, their desire to accomplish and succeed.
     Chua (also famous (or infamous) for her thesis of the "Tiger Mom") and Rosenfeld's thesis will undoubtedly stir significant controversy.  My intent here is not to argue the merits of their position as much as it is to consider a larger issue:  what are we really trying to do as we raise our children?
     Much of this depends, I suppose, on our starting point.  Most parents decide to have children because they wish to enjoy them, because they wish to enrich their lives with offspring.  In addition, most parents cannot help but raise their children according to various sets of values and assumptions about life and living.  Also, all parents cannot but help wish certain things or goals for their children.  And most parents want their children to "succeed," although their views of success vary widely.
     In the end, however, what parents eventually (we hope) come to realize is that their children will never be like them.  Their children will never be everything their parents may have envisioned for them.  They are their own selves, their own person, uniquely gifted and singularly visioned.  The world into which parents are therefore bringing children will be a world that, try as they might, they cannot possibly predict.
     So to what ends are we raising children?  Nothing more, I hope, than to learn that life is far bigger than the things with which we try to fill it.  Our children will live lives in a universe whose foundations and meaning and intentions exceed anything that we think it can be, a mystery we can never make.  Ultimately, they're in no one's hands but God's.

     Is art difficult?  "You have to understand how I consider art.  To reach the essence of it, you have to work long and hard.  What I want and what I am aiming for is infernally difficult, and yet I believe I am not aiming too high."  So remarked the artist Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo in July of 1882.  It's hard to argue with Van Gogh.  Creating is among life's most arduous undertakings.  While it is easy to remake what has already been made, it is far more challenging to make something entirely new.  Of course, it goes without saying that anyone who creates is building on, to use Isaac Newton's observation, "the shoulders of those who have come before" them, it remains that creating is a unique work of that most remarkable of all human faculties, imagination.  To imagine is to dream, and to dream is to let go of what is and think about what could--or might never--be, to set aside presuppositions and prior conceptions and resolve to step into whatever one's mind and heart conjure.  Creation is an blank page in a book that has yet to be written.  It cannot be conceived before it happens.
     So, too, art.  It's difficult to birth something that has not yet been conceived.  But somehow art happens.  Somehow, imagination overcomes the past and creates a future whose form and essence, though they may have been envisioned, are not fully know until they are before us.  It is indeed hard.
     But as Van Gogh observed, it's not aiming too high.  After all, it is what we are born to do.  As the creator God made us and the world in which we live, so we make the worlds we come to know and believe.  We create ends, we create destinies.  And we create because there are ends and destinies to be had, because we live in a universe in which destiny is more than an end.