Gathering


Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.
Salman Rushdie

Don’t worry about tomorrow; who knows what will befall you today?
–Yiddish folk saying
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
–Isaac Asimov
You’re at that age when everything Mother Nature gave you, Father Time is taking away.
–Milton Berle

If the space terms predominate in the expression for the interval between event-points, the interval is said to be space-like, since it is then possible to select a co-ordinate system–belonging to an observer with an admissible velocity, in which the events appear simultaneous, and therefore separated only spatially.

If, however, the interval is time-like the events cannot be simultaneous in any co-ordinate system, but there exists a co-ordinate system in which the space terms will vanish entirely, so that the separation between events will be purely temporal, id est, occurring at the same place, but at different times.
A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)