Prologue

If I had to tell you everything that happened, we would both be crying, and it would take more time than either of us is prepared to spend. So I'll tell you part of it, and we'll try together to understand what it all means and what will happen next. I almost said, 'where it will end,' but, in fact, it never ends The road runs on and on, wide and flat, higher and higher, into the clouds. We can look back but not go back; we have to keep moving forward, leaving some behind us, catching up to others. We might walk side by side for a while, but around the next curve, anything can happen.

Time unfolds in gigantic concentric circles. It spirals upward from its origin in the distant, hidden past far below us. It winds around and around in front of us, each cycle bringing us a little higher. How long is each loop? How long might it take to reach the same point again? No one knows, and we can't know. The cycles expand and contract to unseen cues, creating the patterns of history and our experience.

'We'll rest when we're dead,' the old people used to say. The living have to keep going; the need to know what will happen next never leaves us as long as we continue to breathe. When our loved ones die, we leave them behind and continue along that long, long road. If we look back, we can still see them in our mind's eye, but their image becomes less and less clear as the distance grows, and the curve of the road blocks our view, and new scenes rise in front of us.

Still, looking down, back along time, the way we came, we can see the cycles complete themselves, and we reach places our ancestors passed before us on their way around. The substance of our experience is different because it grows from theirs that happened long ago and far below our own arc on the road of time. So much has already passed from our view and is obscured by our position. It will not come into view again until we pass that way again, but our journey may not take us that far.

So, my dear friend, I will tell you some of the things that happened, and you can tell me what you think.