God, Literature, and Anton Chekhov

Reading along in Old Truths and New Clichés, a recently published collection of the essays and lectures of Isaac Bashevis Singer, I came across Singer’s extraordinary notion that talented people “cannot be atheists for the simple reason that by their very nature they must wrangle with the higher powers. They may revile God, but they cannot deny God.” Elsewhere in the book, Singer notes that “God is a writer and we are both the characters and the readers,” and that “the fear of death is nothing but the fear of having to close God’s book.” He adds that, if God is an artist, “he is not a modernist.”