And I never realized that [the cornices of the buildings] meant spiritual labor, to anyone—that somebody had labored to make a curve in a piece of tin—to make a cornucopia out of a piece of industrial tin. Not only that man, the workman, the artisan, but the architect had thought of it, the builder had paid for it, the smelter had smelt it, the miner had dug it up out of the earth, the earth had gone through aeons preparing for it.
Allen Ginsberg, 1965, The Paris Review interview, in The Essential Ginsberg, edited by Michael Schumacher, p. 282
