The Cream of the Jest

But even so, there was no real symmetry in man's body save in externals. The heart was not in the center; there was no order in the jumbled viscera; the two divisions of the brain did not correspond; there was nothing on the left side to balance the troublesome vermiform appendix on the right; even the lines in the palm of one hand were unlike those which marked the other: and everywhere, in fine, there was some irrational discrepancy. Man, the highest form as yet of life, had attained at most only a teasing semblance of that crude symmetry toward which all life seemed to aim, and which inanimate nature appeared to ignore. Nowhere in the universe could Kennaston discover any instance of quite equal balance, of anything which, as vision went, could be divided into two similar halves – save only in man's handiwork. Here, again, insects approached man's efforts more closely than the rest of creation; for many of them builded almost as truly. But man, alone in the universe, could produce exact visual symmetry, in a cathedral or a dinner-table or a pair of scissors, just as man so curiously mimicked symmetry in his outward appearance. The circumstance was droll, and no less quaint for the fact that it was perhaps without significance…

But Kennaston bemused himself with following out the notion that life was trying to evolve symmetry – order, proportion and true balance. Living creatures represented life's gropings toward that goal. You saw, no doubt, a dim perception of this in the dream which sustained all human beings – that to-morrow living would begin to be symmetrical, well-plotted and coherent, like the progress of a novel… And that was precisely what religion promised, only in more explicit terms, and with the story's milieu

fixed in romantic, rather than realistic, settings. Kennaston had here the sensation of fitting in the last bit of a puzzle. Life, yearning for symmetry, stood revealed as artist. Life strove toward the creation of art. That was all life cared about. Living things were more or less successful works of art, and were to be judged according to art's canons alone. The universe was life's big barren studio, which the Artist certainly had neither planned nor builded, but had, somehow, occupied, to make the best of its limitations. For Kennaston insisted that living things and inanimate nature had none of the earmarks of being by the same author. They were not in similar style, he said; thus, presupposing a sentient creator of the stars and planets, it would seem to have been in contradiction of his code to make both a man's eyes of the same color.

It was this course of speculation which converted Kennaston to an abiding faith in Christianity, such as, our rector informs me, is deplorably rare in these lax pleasure-loving days of materialism. To believe this inconsiderable planet the peculiar center of a God's efforts and attention had for a long while strained Kennaston's credulity: the thing was so woefully out of proportion when you considered earth's relative value in the universe. But now Felix Kennaston comprehended that in the insensate universe there was no proportion. The idea was unknown to the astral architect, or at best no part of his plan, if indeed there had been any pre-meditation or contriver concerned. Singly on our small earth – not even in the solar system of which earth made a part – was any sense of proportion evinced; and there it was apparent only in living things. Kennaston seemed to glimpse an Artist-God, with a commendable sense of form – Kennaston's fellow craftsman -the earth as that corner of the studio wherein the God was working just now, and all life as a romance the God was inditing…