dormir plutôt que vivre

"I never took it out except when Dad and Xandra weren’t there and I knew they wouldn’t be back for a while—though even when I couldn’t see it I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcement to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world."

the goldfinch by donna tartt

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Roman mosaic, the shell, at the Verulamium Museum. St. Albans, Hertfordshire, England.

Verulamium was a Roman settlement conquered by the Romans during their invasion of Britain in 43 AD. Burned to the ground during the Boudica Revolt in 61 AD, the Romans rebuilt it. Verulamium became one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the province of Britannia.