“I am part of the part that once was everything,
Part of the darkness which gave birth to light,
That haughty light which envies mother night
Her ancient rank and place and would be king’
Yet it does not succeed: however it contend,
It sticks to bodies in the end.
It streams from bodies, it lends bodies beauty,
A body won’t let it progress;
So it will not take long, I guess,
And with the bodies it will perish, too.”

—Goethe, Faust, 1790; translated from the German by Walter Kaufman, 1961.