A number of years ago, I read Robert Jastrow's Until the Sun Dies, a book examining the evolution of life on Earth in relation to the age of the sun while analyzing the likelihood of whether life (and particularly, Man) would outlive the sun. The book's ultimate message is grim, but the prose with which Jastrow expounds on the probable fate of man is quite beautiful and poetic. When constructing this piece, I first selected a few beautiful phrases from the book and created the text by combining it with references to light in the standard Requiem text, so as to create a dramatic textual dissonance between the eventual reality of celestial cataclysm and the warmth of religious promise. Additionally, there are sporadic, structural references to the C major "Licht" in Haydn's Creation, which goes through a transformation towards clusters over the course of the piece, while the religious chorus music becomes more and more dramatic.