Light, redshifted, from distant, dying stars reveals that the margins of space are rushing away from each other at ever-increasing rates—rushing where? —a phenomena that decouples geometery and fate while repelling gravity. Immeasurable forces responsible for this expansion set a wheel in motion an unfathomable sward of time ago and here, sensate, we construct tools to estimate the rate at which the planets will crumple back into the abyss from which they rose. To what end? Knowing that different densities of matter curve space in predictable ways—like a saddle, a sphere or a plane in which photons travel in straight lines—provides no narrative nor illumination on the conditions of presence, the actuality of awareness, here and now, crystalline, expunged of the past — but created from it nonetheless—and bereft of the future—yet unavoidably extended into it.

Lawrence Fixel, in an excerpt from The Book of Glimmers, writes, "the movement of Imagination at first appears to "go into" itself, but it does this only as a prelude to a further outward motion. This is to integrate, to work upon, even to transform what is "already there."… Imagination needs the reassurance of the correlative between "in here" and what has been, is now, and will be "out there."" The quest to find the unified theory that describes the force that binds electrons to a nucleic core as well as planets to a sun has obsessed scores of scientists, but such a formulation, even if discovered, will not further the attempts to alleviate suffering or to reveal the motivation of energy—and if science, based on theories that alter through time, is the religion of our age, then we are as much the acolytes of fiction as Lutherans were during the Reformation.