With love, from afternoon translation sessions with the Meister:

“When someone asks me, then, why God did not create the world earlier, I respond that he could not have because he was not. Before the world was, <God> was not. Further: how was he able to create earlier, if he had already created the world in that very ‘now’ in which he was God? For we should not falsely imagine that God stood anticipating some future time in which he would create the world. For that once and at once in which God was, <that once> in which he generated the Son co-eternal as in all things equally God, so too he created the world.”