Darkness and the Light

IS IT credible that our world should have two futures? I have seen
them. Two entirely distinct futures lie before mankind, one dark, one
bright; one the defeat of all man's hopes, the betrayal of all his
ideals, the other their hard-won triumph.

At some date within the age that we call modern, some date not
precisely known to me, for I looked back towards it from the distant
futures as though searching in my remote past, the single torrent of
terrestrial events is split, as though by a projecting promontory, so
that it becomes thenceforth two wholly distinct and mutually exclusive
surging floods of intricate existence, each one a coherent and actual
history, in which the lives of countless generations succeed one
another along separate ravines of time.

How can this be? It cannot! Yet I have seen it happen. I have watched
those two divergent futures. I have lived through them. In any world,
as on our planet, it needs must happen, when the will for the light
and the will for the darkness are so delicately balanced in the
ordinary half-lucid spirits of the world that neither can for long
prevail over the other. Out of their age-long stress and fluctuating
battle must spring at last a thing seemingly impossible, seemingly
irrational, something wore stupendously miraculous than any orthodox
miracle. For how can time itself be divided into two streams? And if
our planet has two futures, which of them has place in the future of
the solar system, and what of the other? Or does man's vacillation
create not only two future Earths but two future universes of stars
and galaxies?

Reader, affirm if you will that only one of the two futures that I
have watched is the real future, knit into the real cosmos, while the
other is mere fantasy. Then which, I ask in terror, is real, the
bright or the dark? For to me, who have seen both, neither is less
real than the other, but one is infinitely more to be desired.
Perhaps, reader, you will contend that both are figments of my crazy
mind, and that the real future is inaccessible and inconceivable.
Believe what you will, but to me both are real, both are somehow
close-knit into the dread and lovely pattern of the universe. Nay
more! My heart demands them both. For the light is more brilliant when
the dark offsets it. Though pity implores that all horror should turn
out to have been a dream, yet for the light's own sake some sterner
passion demands that evil may have its triumph.