I suppose that my first memory is from the day that I had my eyes painted into being. Hundreds of years ago though it may have been, I still remember. Seeing, actually seeing for the first time, being able to take in the wonders of the figures around me, the constantly changing view of my Artist as he painted me in. It was hard to realize what was happening at first. I could tell that this man wasn’t like me. I was the same no matter how you looked at me, I knew that much. He was… different in every direction, though, as different from me as a dot was from a line. He went somewhere, while I knew that my reality was flat in comparison, constrained to the plaster to which I was painted. Lacking though I was, it was miraculous to finally be aware. It was a great day for me. It may not have been such a great day for the Artist, though, because that was the same day he painted my mouth. That was the day I started to talk back.
I remember the first words out of my mouth, still wet with paint. “What am I?”
“Whatever I make you to be,” was his simple reply.
“Why are you making me?”
“It’s what I do.”
The day progressed, and after the wonder of existence wore off a little, I began to realize that it wasn’t exactly comfortable to be created. I had eyes, but they weren’t quite right, so stroke after stroke of new paint was added, a stinging prodding wetness that was impossible to get used to.
“I have eyes!” I interrupted “Won’t these do just fine?”
“Not quite yet. I wouldn’t yet want to sign my name to those eyes.”
The Artist took breaks every once in a while, to work on other pieces around the room. Some were like me, but some were mere sketches, lying on the ground, completed within a matter of minutes. Some were paintings, not paintings of whatever I was, but paintings of landscapes or arrangements of objects. The Artist worked carefully on all of these things, and they were all exceedingly beautiful, but it was me that he kept coming back to. He would paint a little bit, then pause and step back, cocking his head and taking me in. Without fail, he would return, to add a few more lines to my form.
By now, all the novelty was gone. It was downright painful to be worked over with that brush, smeared around and stared at, sometimes even sanded down.
“I wish you would stop,” I said petulantly.
“You’re not finished yet.”
“What about the others? Paint me like the grass, or like the horse on the other wall. You didn’t nitpick over them like you have been over me! What a blessing to be ignored.”
“They are not what makes the masterpiece.”
Was he really doing this right? I felt like if I could hold the brush, I could do the same with a little less pain.
“Stop,” I said. “You don’t know how this feels. Let me try for a minute.”
A slight smile crossed his lips. “If you think you can,” he replied.
He held out the brush to me. I knew I had a hand to pick it up with, I just knew it. I knew I had fingers and a thumb. But that paintbrush was somehow still infinitely far away, so even as I grasped with all my strength, it clattered to the floor.
With resentment in my eyes, I watched as the Artist picked the brush back up and continued with his work.
After a few days, I had had it.
“I want to be done.”
“If I stop now, I can’t call you mine.”
I thought about it for a while. I wasn’t sure I wanted any more of this. I wasn’t sure I could ever be what he wanted me to somehow become. There was fear too, fear of being unfinished and discarded. Part of me thought that this would be a greater pain. I thought about asking him to let me be, deny his role as my creator, give me comfort now instead of splendor later. But I looked at him, with his strange and awesome dimensionality, the beautiful things he had created all around him. If anyone could make me into something worth the pain, it was him.
“Paint on,” I said.
There came a day when he stood back and looked, and put down the brush. Refined and reworked, I was finally complete. The Artist took a mirror down and arranged it so I could see what he had made me. In that moment, I was sure. All the work he had been through and all the pain I had suffered was worth it, because in some small way, I had been made to look like him.
That was a long time ago. I’ve had a long time to think about it, a long time to think about why the Artist had made me, as I had asked in the beginning. It came to me a little clearer as I saw people file by and admire me. They never told me how beautiful I was, but would always say instead, “What a talented master!” I began to know why he had done it: this is what he did, this is what he wanted to do, because he could and because it was beautiful; this glory in him had to be magnified and expressed. All I was was the lucky vessel. The pain was worth it, because I had been made for the glory of the Master.
Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture o his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble—and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but less.
– C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Know the Certainty 