The poet Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) put it like this in his poem ‘The Garden’: Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness; The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find, Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade. I have always found these lines beautiful and astonishing. Now they read like a prediction of the not-so-distant future.
