We Live in the Past

Why prostrate reason your Reason to meer Nature? We live off the Past: it is in our Words and our Syllables.  It is reverberant in our Streets and Courts, so that we can scarce walk across the Stones without being reminded of those who walked there before us; the Ages before our own are like an Eclipse which blots out the Clocks and Watches of present Artificers and, in that Darkness, the Generations jostle one another. It is the dark of Time from which we come and to which we will return.

Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (London: Penguin Books, 1993; 1985), p. 178.