ISBN: 2940013741065

IS IT credible that our world should have two futures? I have seenthem. Two entirely distinct futures lie before mankind, one dark, onebright; one the defeat of all man's hopes, the betra… Meer...

IS IT credible that our world should have two futures? I have seenthem. Two entirely distinct futures lie before mankind, one dark, onebright; one the defeat of all man's hopes, the betrayal of all hisideals, the other their hard-won triumph.At some date within the age that we call modern, some date notprecisely known to me, for I looked back towards it from the distantfutures as though searching in my remote past, the single torrent ofterrestrial events is split, as though by a projecting promontory, sothat it becomes thenceforth two wholly distinct and mutually exclusivesurging floods of intricate existence, each one a coherent and actualhistory, in which the lives of countless generations succeed oneanother along separate ravines of time.How can this be? It cannot! Yet I have seen it happen. I have watchedthose two divergent futures. I have lived through them. In any world,as on our planet, it needs must happen, when the will for the lightand the will for the darkness are so delicately balanced in theordinary half-lucid spirits of the world that neither can for longprevail over the other. Out of their age-long stress and fluctuatingbattle must spring at last a thing seemingly impossible, seeminglyirrational, something wore stupendously miraculous than any orthodoxmiracle. For how can time itself be divided into two streams? And ifour planet has two futures, which of them has place in the future ofthe solar system, and what of the other? Or does man's vacillationcreate not only two future Earths but two future universes of starsand galaxies?Reader, affirm if you will that only one of the two futures that Ihave watched is the real future, knit into the real cosmos, while theother is mere fantasy. Then which, I ask in terror, is real, thebright or the dark? For to me, who have seen both, neither is lessreal than the other, but one is infinitely more to be desired.Perhaps, reader, you will contend that both are figments of my crazymind, and that the real future is inaccessible and inconceivable.Believe what you will, but to me both are real, both are somehowclose-knit into the dread and lovely pattern of the universe. Naymore! My heart demands them both. For the light is more brilliant whenthe dark offsets it. Though pity implores that all horror should turnout to have been a dream, yet for the light's own sake some sternerpassion demands that evil may have its triumph. Digital Content>E-books>Fiction>Fiction Literary>Fict Literary, WDS Publishing Digital >16<

ISBN: 2940013741065

Darkness and the Light Darkness-and-the-Light~~Olaf-Stapledon Fiction>Fiction Literary>Fict Literary NOOK Book (eBook), WDS Publishing