Time & Perspective Quote by Clifford D. Simak

Time gets demoted from destiny to infrastructure. Simak’s line treats it less like an arrow and more like a material: a “medium” you move through, like ether in old physics or signal in a wire. Then he yanks the comfort away. “No future and no past” isn’t just a metaphysical flourish; it’s a refusal of the story we instinctively tell ourselves, that the universe is headed somewhere and that meaning accumulates along the way. What replaces it is colder, stranger, and very science-fictional: “an infinite number of brackets,” each isolating a “single phase” of everything.

The bracket image does heavy work. Brackets are editorial marks; they suggest annotation, containment, and the tyranny of context. Each phase is complete and sealed, like a frame of film you can hold up to the light, but never inhabit as continuity. That’s the subtext: we experience flow, but reality may be a stack of discrete states that only look like movement because our consciousness stitches them together. It’s time as montage.

Simak, a writer of humane, pastoral SF, often used big cosmic ideas to make human assumptions look provincial. Here he’s quietly skeptical of progress narratives (technological, moral, even personal). If the universe is bracketed into self-contained instants, then “history” is less a march than an arrangement - and “the future” becomes not a place we’re going but a label we apply to unread frames. The intent isn’t to sound mystical; it’s to estrange the familiar, forcing readers to feel how fragile our timeline-based certainties really are.