Fear is a strange thing, irrational, but incredible in the way it achieves truth faster than reason.

Not once in nearly twenty standard years—not once—had either of my parents shown me an ounce, an instant of physical affection. That one embrace made up for nearly all of that. I didn’t move for the longest time, and it was only with a sort of shellshocked slowness that I moved to embrace her in return. But I did not cry; I did not make a sound

Another problem with Augustine’s common-sense vision of time: it assumes a sort of causal relationship between past and present, between present and future. True, perhaps, in the physical sense, but in the narrative? No. Stories are not subject to Time, Ever-Fleeting. They transcend time. They are eternal. In Classical English, the word “present”