TIM BARRUS, NEW YORK TIMES

I am a communist. Space and time are held together by gravity. This is the construct in which all events happen. First, we doubt. Then, we plot. Then, we build. Then, we wait. Then, capitalism will grab you and pull you into a darkness of ruthless entropy. You either fit in. Or you are living on the street. The abstraction of time becomes divided, much as an electron can exist in two places, probably more, at the same time. Space is not independent of what it contains. A wise old man with a long white beard who lives up in the sky measures us like a wavelength. There is no god anymore than we can accurately measure the speed of light. Nothing is exactly what we see. Perhaps a fraction, perhaps a bending. How our cities respond to the ideas of distance and time and bending translate into cities and culture bumping, breaking heads in a combined, four-dimensional volume space of plus time. Galileo maintained that all motion is relative. Cities of past, present, and future construct 4-D spacetime that math has no problem with, but is impossible for the human brain to grasp. There was a huge fountain in the city park across the street where I lived. A paradise where the art that was the fountain itself could compel you to sit down and stare at it with what comes up, then goes down unless you get naked and swim in it, which many did. You cannot solve the split between rich and poor because we do not know about it, and never will. The distances between us just cannot reached.