Derek

“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

“Here, where the possessive note is utterly silent and all events are tautological repetitions and no decision will ever alter the secular stagnation, at long last you are, as you have asked to be, the only subject. Who, When, Why, the poor tired little historic questions fall wilting into a hush of utter failure. Your tears splash down upon clinkers which will never be persuaded to recognise a neighbour and there is really and truly no one to appear with tea and help. You have indeed come all the way to the end of your bachelor's journey where Liberty stands with her hands behind her back, not caring, not minding anything. Confronted by a straight and snubbing stare to which mythology is bosh, surrounded by an infinite passivity and purely arithmetrical disorder which is only open to perception, and with nowhere to go on to, your existence is indeed free at last to choose its own meaning, that is, to plunge headlong into despair and fall through silence fathomless and dry, all fact your single drop, all value your pure alas.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“From Archaeology
one moral, at least, may be drawn,
to wit, that all

our school text-books lie.
What they call History
is nothing to vaunt of,'

being made, as it is,
by the criminal in us:
goodness is timeless.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“We today can still talk of a return to nature, because we are relics of it, only slightly modified in biological respect within civilization, but try imagining the slogan ‘return to nature’ uttered by a robot. Why, it would mean turning into deposits of iron ore!”
― Stanisław Lem, Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy