" From gallery-grave and the hunt of a wren-king
to Low Mass and trailer camp
is hardly a tick by the carbon clock, but I
don't count that way nor do you:
already it is millions of heartbeats ago
back to the Bicycle Age,
before which is no After for me to measure,
j ust a still prehistoric Once
where anything could happen. To you, to me,
Stonehenge and Chartres Cathedral,
the Acropolis, Blenheim, the Albert Memorial
are works by the same Old Man
under different names : we know what He did,
what, even, He thought He thought,
but we don't see why. "

― W.H. Auden , Selected Poems