Contemplate carefully your curious eyes:
Your world-windows—wondrous informers
For our forebears, foregone by eras,
Scores of secrets their sight could tell:
Where to find water. When the stars
Brought the beasts beyond the plains;
The time of tides.
This talent evolved
As with our ancestors, answering questions
Broader and bolder; we're able by sight
To compare, discover, equate and to judge.
We discern by sight—we see and believe.
Can there be boundaries to such blessings, then?
We've clever inventions, devices to cast
Our sight into stars, inside each atom;
We've mapped the material, mastered its puzzles.
But still we sit through each second's passing:
Powerless against perpetual Present, we remain
Interned by time.
We've turned in the past
To soothsayers and sages to scry our fortunes,
Their vague visions and evasive hereafters
Granting mere glimpses of the games Fates played,
Their schemes still concealed.
Now consider our future:
Devoid of diviners, prevailing by reason,
We swap sages for science, trade
Myth for method, making our vision
Stilled and restricted, stuck in the Now.
We crave complex, accomplished technology
To award us the wisdom once reserved
for Fates and far-seers. But failures await us
when science assumes Second Sight.
Prologue