The Usurper

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It is difficult in our enlightened era to understand the dark and troubled times. How terrible they were, how fearful to live then! How fortunate that they are past! And yet, then, one suspects, men, and women, were alive, as they are not now. Perhaps something was lost with their passing. But one should not speak such thoughts. Indeed, one should not even think them, lest they be inadvertently spoken. Have not many been sentenced, for words spoken in sleep, monitored by the electronic listeners?

What is one to make of the thousand sciences, of the thousand worlds?

The ant has his world, the vi-cat his, and we ours.

Some believe that time is the creature of clocks; yet it seems there was a time before clocks; if clocks stopped, might they not have stopped for a coding or less; some believe that length is the child of marked sticks; yet it seems that a length lay in wait, so patiently, for the stick. It is fortunate we have discovered the end of space. We are informed, and wise. One wonders what lies beyond that end, and where our space might be. Some say the world had a beginning, but how could it begin? Would it just appear? Were things not lonely then, so empty, nothingness, without even space? A universe contained in a spoonful of energy? And whence that spoonful of energy? How wide and deep that spoon? Was it far from here? Perhaps there are tides in worlds, as universes breathe, expanding and contracting.

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