THE SHE-ANCIENT. A vortex. I began as a vortex: why should I not end as one?
ECRASIA. Oh! That is what you old people are, Vorticists.
ACIS. But if life is thought, can you live without a head?
THE HE-ANCIENT. Not now perhaps. But prehistoric men thought they could not live without tails. I can live without a tail. Why should I not live without a head?
THE NEWLY BORN. What is a tail?
THE HE-ANCIENT A habit of which your ancestors managed to pure themselves.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. None of us now believe that all this machinery of flesh and blood is necessary. It dies.
THE HE-ANCIENT. It imprisons us on this petty planet and forbids us to range through the stars.
ACIS. But even a vortex is a vortex in something. You cant have a whirlpool without water; and you cant have a vortex without gas, or molecules or atoms or ions or electrons or something, not nothing.
THE HE-ANCIENT. No: the vortex is not the water nor the gas nor the atoms: it is a power over these things.