Change Makes Life Beautiful
To regard all things and principles of things
as inconstant modes or fashions
has more and more become the tendency of modern thought.
Let us begin with that which is without-our physical life.
Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals,
the moment, for instance,
of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat.
What is the whole physical life in that moment
but a combination of natural elements
to which science gives their names?
But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibers,
are present not in the human body alone:
we detect them in places most remote from it.
Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them-
the passage of the blood,
the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye,
the modification of the tissues of the brain
under every ray of light and sound-processes
which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces.
Like the elements of which we are composed,
the action of these forces extends beyond us:
it rusts iron and ripens corn.
Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast,
driven in many currents;
and birth and gesture and death
and the springing of violets from the grave
are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations.
That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb
is but an image of ours,
under which we group them a design in a web,
the actual threads of which pass out beyond it.
This at least of flame-like our life has,
that it is but the concurrence,
renewed from moment to moment,
of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.