Termitaries of the future

My rôle is not to belong to the future but, like Eliot's poet, "to live in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past". I believe that a conscious affinity with Nature forms the shield of Perseus through which man can affront the Gorgon of his fate and that, in the termitaries of the future where humanity cements itself up from the light of the sun, this dragon-slaying mirror will rust and tarnish.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 76