When?

Fear deferred maketh the heart sick.

When the loved one, the one lover, lies in peril, the clutching dread that precedes is crueller than the long sorrow that follows.

And as terror of things to come is more than all grief for things gone past, so time, whether past or to come, is more terrible than space, Eternity more awful than the abyss. Who would not rather know⁠—rather not know⁠—when he will die than how or where he will die?

And as for ourselves and our beloved, so likewise with our qualms for the world. Man has ever concerned himself more passionately with the hour than with the way of destruction.

Which problem, if it holds greater interest, holds also greater difficulty. Surmise now moves from the humdrum sphere of matter into the wild realm of number, there to cower among kabbalistic patterns of fixed dates and patternless rows of cold zeros, or among the terrors, beyond all designs and digits, of the dateless zeroless Everlasting. How? was a hard query with many answers. Each of these adds its own complications to the questions When? Soon or late? What notice? At what stage of humanity’s career? Each several mode of the world’s ending brings several guesses at its time. The possibilities are added and multiplied, like the Biblical sums and astronomical ciphers themselves.