Since I have been working on my illuminated manuscript of the Bible (or Genesis, at least; we'll cross more bridges when we come to them), I have come across another work that inspired me to create an illuminated version, and that is a passage from the E. L. Doctorow novel City of God, in which the author starts off talking about water, wheels quickly to talking about the creation of the planet, then the climate of the planet, ending in a funny observation. I think it's an interesting contrast to the Genesis story of creation, as this one takes a scientific approach, yet is also philosophical.
In case my italic script is a difficult for you to read, I am reproducing the text below. You may note, as I did, that some of the grammar/punctuation is not exactly standard, but I kept it as he wrote it. After all, it is a quote. I also understand some of the choices that he made are to stylistic effect. I also can't complain, as this is simply a masterfully evocative piece of prose.
“The planet Earth is blessed with water, great slops of it, swaying tonnage of saline ocean and sea, clear blue lakes and fish tremblant rivers, streams, brooks, rills, and pulsing springs, mountain runoff, rains, mists, fogs, and hurricanes. At our birth billions of years ago, an amorphous heap of buzzingly radiant star spinoff, we melted inward to a core of iron and nickel, molten at its edges, and formed on top of this a hot rock mantle and mineral crust.
We began immediately to cool, thus creating enormous clouds of vapor, which rained down into the great craters and basins of rock until the seas were filled. The rock dissolved into soil, granulated into seabed, and the seabed granules salinated and produced the first bubbling nitrogenized, oxygenized possibilities of blind, dumb life. Dead cellular matter flung up from the seas fertilized the rock soil.
We are a blue oasis in black space, cocooned in our atmosphere of nutrient gases. We look peaceful, but we are not. We are a planet of water and rock, sand and silt and soil. The tectonic plates under the Earth's crust move and shift about, breaking the landmass into continents that float and change their shape over eons.
The plates collide, ride over one another, crack, and great upheavals of the sea floor rise gasping into mountain ranges, enormous volcanoes in the sea floor create islands that bob up in the oceans, the Earth's crust quakes, shivers us into different shapes, we buckle and cleave, storms assail our heavens, our mountains shake thunderous avalanches of snow down upon our valleys, our Arctic and Antarctic Ice floes crack like the bones of God, our windworn dunes of desert pile up to bury us, maniac tornadoes fling us about and thump us against the ground like rag dolls, great floods of viscous burning lava bury our villages, and in all this fury of planetary self-fulfillment, we spin about an axis and roll around the sun, and our oceans are pulled and pushed by lunar tides, our oceans roll in waves which exist apart from the water they pass through, our atmospheres are shot through with electromagnetic frequencies, and we stand abroad our terrains totally magnetized by the iron core at our center, with our skies at night tumbling with asteroids and flashing with the inflamed boreal particles of solar winds that flare like the luminous eyes of saber-toothed tigers circling the darkness beyond our fire.
What a merry planet, everything said and done. For isn't it, after all, livable?”
For more illuminated manuscript, please check out my Genesis series (ongoing):
https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-illuminated-manuscript-project.html
For less yadda yadda and more actual art, check out my Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/allsortsofart
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