.....................Time itself is, as fire is, the heart of the sun and
gravity is, as I'm walking at a pace, heart, respiration. Any December
becomes any January. My favorite idea of time is an illustration
of a loaf of bread in a textbook from college, each slice a thing
that exists forever in its place, each tick of the clock we’re locked out of
by our tick still ticks in its place, as we call it past or future.
And this other part of the illustration, that there’s a heal to the loaf,
this doomsday slice we’ve imagined a clock for, sandwich after
sandwich, dire becoming more dire. How close can you get
to doomsday without it actually being doomsday? Maybe it’s
our conceptions that have run out. Thinner slices, ever thinner.
A mere wisp of a slice. Next phase, we take the clock off the wall
and wear it. We get designer contact lenses of it made so our eyes
can look like they’re spinning, beautiful Doomsday Clock, the best
Doomsday Clock. And doomsday will pay for it, as really,
what this means is we’ve become unrecognizable to ourselves,
what our actions have made us into, a little joke fluttering just
before midnight. That’s really the heart of the matter. And I wish
the matter had some other heart. A real heart.

--from 'It Is Three Minutes to Midnight / It Is Still Three Minutes to Midnight / It Is Two and a Half Minutes to Midnight'



[via tupelo quarterly]