The Madman's Return

Have you not heard of the madman who went out in the middle of the busy market street downtown and cried out incessantly, "God is back! God is back!" A group of us were gathered there, philosophers and philosophy students, and we laughed at him and pointed obscurely, for none of us believed in God. God never was, one said. And let me guess, He talks to you, another whispered under his breath. Thus we laughed and heckled. The madman then ran over to us, jumped in the middle of our group, and pierced as all with is glances.

"It was you," he cried, "you who killed Him. Put Him down like a dog. And I too! All of us had a hand! We are all complicit! And look what we have to show for it. We bleed instead of speak. We unchained the earth from the sun, and so we float away into an abyss we care not to contemplate. We revel in the mire and vomit, we drink up the sea, the days are getting longer, the summers are getting hotter, the abyss we thought, the direction we assumed, is not away from sun or suns but towards! Towards the sun I say we have ventured since we have unchained ourselves to escape it. And now, though our God is dead and buried, and the grass has grown up and the gravestone is cracked and decayed from time, now we feel the rumbling, the rumbling and the crumbling of movement in the dirt. Of life! Of vitality! We who thought we killed that which cannot die, now will look down in shame and see that we were fools. Fools all along! The darkness and the doubt, the fighting and the cold uncaring machinery that we have grown so much to love and adore in place of what was there before, all will go on fleeting into the night, like a chimera we had mistaken, or a dream that we had taken for the reality we abhor. Prepare men, it is done! Prepare now for His return! Throw off your nihilism, your determinism, your relativism, throw off these rags onto the floor. Prepare for God's return, for He is coming I assure!"

Then the madman fell silent, and looked again at us and our faces. We were silent also, astonished at his outburst. Now more curious than funny. Then he threw off his garments, a black suit white colored shirt black shoes black socks a white undershirt and white underwear, and tossed them onto the floor before us.

"I come too early," he said, standing before us stark naked, "my time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering o'er the horizon, like a storm gathering strength - it has not yet reached the ears of man. You have not heard a word of my testimony. This deed is still more distant from you than the most distant stars - and yet it is already concluded."

• KG

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