All impermanent
Richer than absolutes, we should take solace in true inevitabilities. We waste too much playing them down. The one eliciting coldest awe: There will be a concluded history of man. Barring interplanetary or interstellar expedition — granting hard limits to the capability of the technology we create — which both we may well bar, and well grant — to humanity’s history there is an inevitable end. While it cannot be written, this future will obtain to be known: it is inevitable I will never know it.
As a poet retreading a difficult phrase for the fiftieth time, one has to estrange oneself into this thought. It is like the fact this century there is to be vastly the most of us coexisting here, on a decreasingly habitable planet, that ever has. Which is a new thing. I want to know what I can’t, What on earth will happen?
(For the title.)
