as the story goes
As the story goes . . . God seeing how desperately bored everyone was on the seventh day of creation, racked her overstretched imagination to find something more to add to the completeness she had just conceived. Suddenly her inspiration burst even beyond its own limitless bounds and she saw a further aspect of reality: its possibility to imitate itself. So she invented theatre. She called her angels together and announced this in the following terms, which are still contained in an ancient Sanskrit document. "The theatre will be the field in which people can learn to understand the sacred mysteries of the universe. And at the same time," she added with deceptive casualness, "it will be a comfort to the drunkard and to the lonely." The angels were very excited and could hardly wait for there to be enough people on earth to put this into practice. The people responded with equal enthusiasm and rapidly there were many groups all trying to imitate reality in their diff...