How can you play God, after all, when you have understood, what the intellect cannot understand, that God is only playing God?”

When I read that, I immediately thought of Heraclitus, Fragment 52:

“Aiōn is a child at play, moving pieces in a game. Kingship belongs to the child.”

Aiōn here is something like an eternal dimension of time, or temporal eternity, if you want to put it that way.

And then there’s another passage Le Guin reminded me of, this one from Book VII of Plato’s Laws, where the Athenian Stranger says, roughly, that man has been made God’s plaything, and that this is the best part of him.

MS