“Nothing retains the shape of what it was, and Nature, always making old things new, proves nothing dies within the universe, but takes another being in new forms. What is called birth is change from what we were, and death the shape of being left behind. Though all things melt or grow from here to there, yet the same balance of the world remains. Nothing, no, nothing keeps its outward show, for golden ages turn to years of iron; and Fortune changes many looks of places. I’ve seen land turned to miles of flood-tossed waters, or land rise up within a restless sea; shells have been found upon a sanded plain with never an ocean or a ship in sight. Someone has seen an anchor turned to rust, caught among brushes on a mountaintop. Stormed by great cataracts, a wide plateau turns to a valley and Spring floods have swept far hills into the chambers of the sea. And where a swamp once flowed beneath the willows, is now a strip of sand, and where a desert was, a little lake sways under growing seeds. Here Nature touches Earth with sudden fountains and over there she closes ancient springs; and when the underbody of Earth is shaken, the rivers gush, leap, rise, or fade away.” – Ovid: The Metamorphoses, trans. Horace Gregory