Somewhere there’s a room where all the drawings are on file
Every world that could have been, arranged and reconciled
Every version where the fever broke, where nobody was sent
Where you turned left instead of right and every letter went
He looked at all of them at once, the finished and the flawed
And every single one of them was possible to God
He held them in the balance and He weighed them, sheet by sheet
And this, the one you’re standing in, is what He called complete
No jealous hand, no accident, no roll of any dice
The reason runs beneath the world and nothing here is twice
The clocks were wound before the first and every hand was hurled
And this is it, the finest draft, the best of all possible worlds
Nothing here can touch you. There’s no window in your wall
No pressure from another and no push behind the fall
Whatever happens to you, it was folded in your seed
And every state you ever hold you carry and you breed
And still the whole thing answers, still the mirrors correspond
Your grief arrives on schedule with the weather and the dawn
Two clocks that never spoke and never varied by a beat
A harmony arranged before the parts had learned to meet
No jealous hand, no accident, no roll of any dice
The reason runs beneath the world and nothing here is twice
The clocks were wound before the first and every hand was hurled
And this is it, the finest draft, the best of all possible worlds
But what about the fever, and the famine, and the grave?
The child who never grew, the wicked man they never gave?
A finite thing is limited, and limit is a lack
The shadow in the painting is what brings the color back
It wasn’t willed, just permitted, only borne to bring the rest
Remove a single sorrow and the sum would come out less
Your suffering is load-bearing. It’s holding up the frame
And every other world they could have built comes out the same
So take it as a comfort, that’s the offer on the page
That nothing here is wasted and there’s reason in the cage
No hand to blame, no accident, no other way to fall
That every single loss you ever had was worth it all
And if you can’t accept it, if it doesn’t hold you warm
It’s still the strongest argument that ever took this form
He proved it like geometry, He showed it like a sum
And Lisbon hadn’t happened yet. There’s forty years to come
No jealous hand, no accident, no roll of any dice
The reason runs beneath the world and nothing here is twice
The clocks were wound before the first and every hand was hurled
And this is it, the finest draft, the best of all possible worlds
Windowless points, mathematically aligned
Each state gives birth to the next in its design
A universe of perspectives, beautifully confined
The supreme monad holds the line
The supreme monad holds the line