Metamorphoses, Ovid.
Creation
Before the earth and the sea and the all-encompassing
heaven
came into being, the whole of nature displayed but a
single
face, which men have called Chaos: a crude,
unstructured mass,
nothing but weight without motion, a general
conglomeration
of matter composed of disparate, incompatible elements.
No Titan the sun god was present to cast his rays on the
universe,
nor Phoebe the moon to replenish her horns and grow to
her fullness;
no earth suspended in equilibrium, wrapped in its folding
mantle of air; nor Amphitríte, the goddess of ocean,
to stretch her sinuous arms all round the earth’s long
coastline.
Although the land and the sea and the sky were involved
in the great mass,
no one could stand on the land or swim in the waves of
the sea,
and the sky had no light. None of the elements kept its
shape, and all were in conflict inside one body: the cold with the
hot,
the wet with the dry, the soft with the hard, and weight
with the weightless.
