In relation to a fixed date in the future, time, from the subjective standpoint, will always appear to accelerate exponentially as the designated zero hour approaches, making great leaps a year long, and then six months, then a month, a week, a day; the spiral tightens, the calendar loses all perspective, and suddenly it is over.

An uncharacteristically fierce wind combs the boulevards today, lifting children like lice, chipping away at the old, concrete structures one crumb at a time; in no time at all a grey desert of concrete dunes is formed in this manner.

Fatigue, a longing for the womb, a will-to-nothingness, all that, is there, somewhere, but where? In what nothingness, in what pitiful hovel, does this will take shelter from the blinding overabundance of existence which is everywhere without exception?

The seconds divide themselves indefinitely so as to avoid passing without leaving some indelible mark, indeed, so as to avoid passing at all. Call it a skill of the habitual, one acquired without any real effort.

The ancient amoebas of the causal sequence, the timeless asexual specks, are making great haste to decelerate, as far as their powers are capable, the slip of time, desiring each second to be precisely twice as long as its predecessor.

Consciousness is chained to this sequence and therefore sees instead, with the unflinching fidelity of the serf to his lord's fistful of dirt and the poverty of beets and turnips it turns out in a good season, a steady shortening of the moments which induces the sensation of being hurled into a vortex of stars.

There are theories, yes. They are not actually stars; that is simply a formality of speech with at least some small pretension to intelligibility for the discursive mind to latch upon. A longer life, greater density of experience or eventfulness, or some literal, sucking vortex which can be grasped with the acute capacity for terror which many have called free will?

Fatigue, a flimsy alibi.


James Bradley