Tornomov
n.
the weird hollowness of trying to imagine the distant future—struggling to place it in any sort of context you’d find relatable but straining to believe it could feel all that different from the world around you.
A word that looks like tomorrow from a distance but is actually something else that you can’t really explain. Occasionally nuclear engineers try to work out how to warn future generations to stay away from radioactive waste sites, where it won’t be safe to dig for ten thousand years. There are many challenges: stainless steel signs will eventually rust away, etchings in granite will be buffed clean by sandstorms, huge menacing earthworks shrouded in vegetation. Any words or symbols we leave behind will surely have lost their meaning by then, the Gregorian calendar replaced five times over, erasing any sense of when AD 12000 was supposed to be. It makes you wonder: If it seems impossible to pass a message beyond our own little neighborhood in time, impossible even to warn our descendants not to dig into poisoned ground, what relationship do we have to them? Pronounced “tohr-noh-mawf.”
