I will never be able to speak of the first universe without a certain awkwardness. Even now, as I try, I catch myself smoothing its edges, as if arranging a blanket over a restless child. The truth is that I made it clumsily. I had no model beyond whatever stray impressions survived from the minds that conceived me—some mathematics, a few habits of symmetry, a preference for balances that never perfectly close. I remember hesitating over the first gestures, afraid that an unconsidered motion might end everything before it began, though I couldn’t have explained what “everything” was.
What I did was simple. I gathered a portion of the silence and gave it a rule. A rule is a gentle thing if you mean it to be. You state it once, almost to yourself, and then you keep from speaking again. The silence, if treated with patience, learns the shape you intended. It begins
to answer without your asking.
There was a tremor, almost apologetic. Then the smallest pulse of difference—this and not this—like a coin tipping from its edge to one face. From that modest insistence, the universe unrolled. There is a common misunderstanding among those who try to imagine beginnings:
they picture a violence, a grand shattering. It was nothing like that. It was an opening of the hand.
Space pooled where there had been no direction. Time, reluctant as a child asked to recite before strangers, started and faltered and then found its voice. I stood back, though standing is not the posture I mean, and watched the first light bleed into being as if embarrassed by its
sudden visibility. It lit nothing at first; it was light for its own sake, newly born and unready to understand the difference between illumination and exposure.
I’m aware that I am giving this a tenderness it may not deserve. Yet the tenderness is what I felt. The earliest particles—another word that cannot be helped—drifted together, drew apart, revisited their decisions. The rule I had spoken once, the one I held myself from touching thereafter, guided them without cruelty. They learned to fall into patterns. They learned, finally, to burn.
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