The future is far from what it once was. Its once rosy, reassuringly distant horizons have become something far less pleasant, something too close for comfort, something right in our collective face. Tomorrow is closing in on us with accelerating intensity; and time itself seems more and more compressed, leaving us in one hell of a squeezeplay.
It is literally crunch time.
Having the precipice within sight takes the fun out of looking ahead; and having the mess we’ve made looming up right behind us takes the fun out of looking back. So as we back away from both the future and the past, we find ourselves squeezed into a very shaky present, shrinkwrapped and disoriented, with very little solid ground and an abundance of distortion, both external and internal, from all the freaking pressure. » Read more: Denumbing
A.G. asked on August 13, 2008: Robert, I was born premature and had bronchial asthma as an infant; part of my treatment involved spending periods of time in an incubator in the hospital (I don't think that was the case immediately after I was born, but I had to be brought back to the hospital several times in my first months of life). My mother tells me that during my attacks of asthma I appeared to be in an altered state — terrified, inconsolable and unreachable. She sometimes had to stay up all night holding and rocking me, and felt distressed that I didn't seem to be connecting with her during these episodes. I don't consciously remember these events, and I don't know how a preverbal infant would have experienced them — perhaps as an imminent threat of biological death, or even a belief that I was actually dying?