On God: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon Page B

stopped in the full flight of his rhetoric and replied, “There are no answers. There are only questions.”
    The point is that the purpose of life may be to find higher and better questions. Why? Because what I believe—this is wholly speculative but important to me—is that we are here as God’s work, here to influence His future as well as ours. We are God’s expression, and not all artworks are successful. But we are here because God has a vision of existence that is at odds with other visions of existence in the universe. There we get into the real question of cosmic hegemonies. There may be a majordomo at the core, maybe not. There may be gods—the heavens may be analogous to pagan times. These gods are fighting for dominance over one another.
    So we come back once more to “Where is the ethic?” And again I return to trusting the authority of our senses. What now do I mean by that? Isn’t it true that as we free ourselves of false conceptions of what life might be, as we free ourselves of the maxims and injunctions other people have put into us from childhood, as we come to have a better sense of “whatever I am, I am beginning to have my own ideas,” you can also develop some instinct that one is doing the right thing or one is not. Or, all too often, one is not doing much. As we get older, “Not much at all” can take over most of our lives. If I am doing a crossword puzzle, there is no high motive necessarily involved. Instead, the activity might be to some most modest degree on the side of evil—I’m consuming time that could be spent in better ways. Or, to the contrary, I might be preparing my system to get ready for something worthwhile. It’s not a large question: I do the crossword puzzle, and I don’t think about it as good or evil. And I don’t think of myself as good or evil so much as probably leaning slightly in the right direction or the wrong one when it comes down to how I am exercising my time.
    So if you ask where the ethic is at any moment, it can be no more than that one is the resultant of all the forces that are in you as that vector confronts all the forces supporting you and opposing you. It’s as if we live in a triangular relationship with God and the Devil, trying to sense the best thing to do at a given moment, be it a good thing or a bad thing. Let me go back to what might have been my lone visitation from the Lord. What God might have been trying to tell me was, “Get over this notion of good, right, proper. Because very often when you’re moving in a direction you think improper, you might be helping Me more than when you’re trying to be proper. Because when you’re trying to be proper, you could be poisoning yourself with frustrated annoyance that makes you a colder person and of less use to Me.”
    What I’m offering to people as an ethic is to have the honor to live with confusion. Live in the depths of confusion with the knowledge back of that, the certainty back of that—or the belief, the hope, the faith, whatever you wish to call it—that there is a purpose to it all, that it is not absurd, that we are all engaged in a vast cosmic war and God needs us. That doesn’t mean we can help God by establishing a set of principles to live by. We can’t. Why not? Because the principles vary. The cruelest obstacle to creating one’s own ethic is that no principle is incorruptible. Indeed, to cleave to a principle is to corrupt oneself. To shift from one principle to another can, however, be promiscuous. Life is not simple. Ethics are almost incomprehensible, but they exist. There is a substratum of moderate, quiet, good feeling. Generally, if I’m doing things in such a way that the sum of all my actions at the moment seems to be feasible and responsible and decent, that certainly gives me a better feeling than if I am uneasy, dissatisfied with myself, and not liking