"As" imagines a love that outlasts the universe itself. Stevie Wonder wrote it in 1976 as a list of conditions that will never be met -- until the rainbow burns the stars out of the sky, until the ocean covers every mountain. Each condition is more absurd than the last because the point is not the condition but the impossibility. A love that could end is not worth singing about. Only a love that defies logic, that refuses to acknowledge the laws of physics and time, earns the scope of this song. Stevie set impossible terms because he understood that real commitment does not negotiate.