"The modern world was not alive to the tremendous Reality that encompassed it. We were surrounded by an immeasurable abyss of darkness and splendor. We built our empires on a pellet of dust revolving around a ball of fire in unfathomable space. Life, that Sphinx, with the head of a lion and the body of a brute, asked us new riddles every hour. Matter itself was dissolving under the scrutiny of Science; and yet in our daily lives we were becoming a group of somnambulists, whose very breathing, in train and bus car, was timed to the movement of wheels; and the more perfectly, and even alertly, we clicked through our automatic affairs on the surface of things, the more complete to our insensibility to the utterly inscrutable mystery that anything should be in existence at all."
-Alfred Noyes,The Unknown God, London, 1934,pp176-177