“You were experiencing a non-epiphany.”
“A what?” I said.
“A concept of my own invention,” he said. … “The trouble with God isn’t that He so seldom makes Himself known to us … . The trouble with God is exactly the opposite: He’s holding you and me and everybody else by the scruff of the neck practically constantly.” He said he had just come from an afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where so many of the paintings were about God’s giving instructions, to Adam and Eve and the Virgin Mary, and various saints in agony and so on. ‘These moments are very rare, if you can believe the painters —but who was ever nitwit enough to believe a painter?’ he said, and he ordered another double Scotch, I’m sure, for which I would pay. “Such moments are often called ‘epiphanies’ and I’m here to tell you they are as common as houseflies,” he said.
“I see,” I said. …
“‘Contentedly adrift in the cosmos,’ were you?” Kitchen said to me. “That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while. How long did the feeling last?”
“Oh —maybe half an hour,” I said.
And he leaned back in his chair and he said with deep satisfaction: “And there you are.”
Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut