Belvedere is to Tactical Disadvantage as Retirement in Resplendence is to the Ghetto of the Now

Consigned to the ghetto of the present, it is obvious to me that our forebears could have gotten nothing done had they been prescient.

Or, then again- look at the psychopaths littering the path of prescience throughout written history. Mojave 3 has a song, Return to Sender, goes something like "The word on the street/is that hell is complete/when you think that you know where you're going."

But whose hell would that be? Suppose that depends on who the "you" is in the song. Did you force everyone into 5-year-plans or gulags? Did you find it to be a good idea to gather all your bits of science like kindling to build a burning black hole the size of a quarter on Long Island?

Memory is a prism, a honeycomb of mirrors- looking down the right rabbit's cubbyhole can steel you at the crucial hour or break you on the jagged ends of doubt.