Walking in Time

I’m walkin’
Yes indeed.
I’m talkin’
About you and me . . .
—Fats Domino

So, little by little, time brings out each thing into view, and reason raises it up into the shores of light.
—Lucretius

Once, years ago when young and proud, I tried by walking for a single day to grasp the enormity of the past.

Space I knew a bit about. Since childhood I’d studied astronomy books and the boundless book of the night sky, acquiring a sense of cosmic cartography. I knew the directions and distances of scores of stars, was familiar with the reefs and shoals of the Milky Way thousands of light-years out, and could find my way down lanky archipelagoes of galaxies stretching from here to the core of the Virgo Cluster. I felt at home in the depths of the sky.