The courage of a friend who faced death, a scientific meeting on sustainability and systems thinking, and a tragi-comic poem in 61 verses are the starting points for these 61 short, luminous essays on the human relationship to time. Begun as a letter to the friend's now-adult daughter, who had written to the author seeking to understand a mysterious poem dedicated to her father over 20 years previously, "The Chronosphere Commentary" takes the reader on a journey that varies from playful to philosophical to achingly personal, ultimately confronting the unreliability of memory and the unavoidable shortness of human life in the context of a vast, ancient universe.