Canopy of Time
To begin with – though it is certainly no beginning – the first fragment is of a strange past world, where the clouds of nationalism have gathered and broken into a storm of war. Over the forgotten continents – Asia, America, Africa – missile of destruction fly. The beleaguered people of that day have not fully comprehended the nature of the struggle in which they are engulfed.
Those simple blacks, whites and greys which constitute the political situation are grasped readily enough with a little application. But behind these issues lie factors scarcely understood in the council chambers of Peking, London, Cairo or Washington – factors which stem form the long and savage past of the race; factors of instinct and frustrated instinct; factors of fear and lust and dawning conscience; factors inseparable from the adolescence of a species, which loom behind all man’s affairs like an insurmountable mountain chain.
So men fought each other instead of wrestling with themselves. The bravest sought to evade the currents of hatred by turning outward to the nearest planets in the solar system the cowardly, by sleeping away their lives in vast hives called dreameries, where the comforts of fantasy could discount the depredations of war. Neither course ultimately offered refuge, when the earthquake comes, it topples both tower and hovel…
It is fitting that the first fragment should start with a man sitting helplessly in a chair, while bombs fall.
