Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measure, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle, but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backwards as well as forwards, divide his unit billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which out story sets out.
—George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
