Value for Wednesday of Week 48 in the season of Harvest and Celebration

Evanescence – Impermanence

Life seems to be everlasting, because it is all we ever experience. Like everything else, for each of us, it ends.

We dole out our lives in dinner parties and plane flights, and it’s over before we know it. We lose everyone we love, if they don’t lose us first, and every single thing we do is intended to distract from that reality. [Armistead Maupin]
Like an organism that perishes due to its failure to adapt to a changing environment, we hurtle ourselves against the relentless reality of impermanence until we perish from sheer exhaustion. The appearances to our senses are not the source of our frustration, misery, and despair. Rather, it is our clinging and attachment to them that causes us ceaseless unrest and dissatisfaction. [David Hodge and Hi-Jin Hodge]
Everything put together sooner or later falls apart. [Paul Simon, “Everything Put Together Falls Apart”.]

Young lovers promise to stay together forever. It is a promise no one can keep. If they are extraordinarily fortunate, one will watch the other slip peacefully into death seventy years hence.

Life is impermanent. Children grow up and leave home. Friends move away and drift away, and other friends take their place. Fads come and go. Customs change. Social orders are transformed. Even mountains do not last forever. Awareness of this fact provides a useful perspective for the things we will do, and the persons, places and situations we will encounter throughout life.

Real

True Narratives

Book narratives:

C. Sharman, Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order (Princeton University Press, 2019): “In Sharman’s account, the dominance of the West (note Europe’s easy baton-pass to the United States), roughly from the Enlightenment to World War II, represents a historical blip in the last millennium.”
Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021): “Life Is Short. What Are You Going to Do About That?”
Sue Leaf, Impermanence: Life and Loss on Superior's South Shore (University of Minnesota Press, 2023): “Impermanence, as a concept, may be best known as a basic tenet of Buddhism, generally referring to the state of not lasting forever. That we exist in continual change. That’s an apt definition as it applies to Leaf’s writing on Lake Superior and her life-long connection to and passion for it.”
Mary Pipher, A Life in Light: Meditations on Impermanence (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022): “Now long married, with middle-aged children and grandchildren off to college, Pipher has ‘found it difficult to accept a cycle of life in which children grow up and leave their parents, and in which we parents become more and more peripheral.’ Loneliness has been intensified by the pandemic. ‘If the first part of my life was about building attachments,’ writes the author, ‘the last two years have been about learning to detach. I am making an effort to find the love and warmth I need in my own heart.’”
Adriana Dr Proser, The Art of Impermanence: Japanese Works from the John C. Weber Collection and Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection (Officina Libraria, 2020): “The book includes works ranging in date from the Final Jomon period (ca. 1000–300 B.C.E.) to the 20th century. This dazzling range of art reflects the broad, yet nuanced ways that the notion of impermanence manifests itself in the arts of Japan.”
Paul Geerts & Kengo Kuma, Daniel Ost: Floral Art and the Beauty of Impermanence (Phaidon Press, 2015).

Technical and Analytical Readings

Haidy Geismar, Ton Otto & Cameron David Warner, eds., Impermanence: Exploring continuous change across cultures (University College London Press, 2022).
David Hodge and Hi-Jin Hodge, Impermanence: Embracing Change (Snow Lion Publications, 2009).
Ajahn Chah, Everything Arises, Everything Falls Away: Teachings on Impermanence and the End of Suffering (Shambhala, 2005).
Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation (Simon & Schuster, 2017): “. . . Burdick gently intertwines a captivating account of his own personal struggle with time — the modification of the sense and the organization of time that he is forced to undergo when his two delightful twin children are born and begin to grow up — with an extensive learned overview of the wealth of the last century and a half of laboratory experiments exploring the complex relation of living beings with time.”
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana & Julia Harris, Impermanence in Plain English (Wisdom Publications, 2023).
Dakpa Topgyal, Two Subtle Realities: Impermanence and Emptiness (Radiant Mind Press, 2nd edition, 2022).
Joan Stambaugh, Impermanence Is Buddha-Nature: Dо̄gen's Understanding of Temporality (University of Hawaii Press, 1990).
Lama Zopa Rinpoche & Kathleen McDonald, Wholesome Fear: Transforming Your Anxiety About Impermanence and Death (Wisdom Publications, 2010).

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

All at once, in the midst of this profound calm, a fresh sound arose; a sound as celestial, divine, ineffable, ravishing, as the other had been horrible. It was a hymn which issued from the gloom, a dazzling burst of prayer and harmony in the obscure and alarming silence of the night; women's voices, but voices composed at one and the same time of the pure accents of virgins and the innocent accents of children,--voices which are not of the earth, and which resemble those that the newborn infant still hears, and which the dying man hears already. This song proceeded from the gloomy edifice which towered above the garden. At the moment when the hubbub of demons retreated, one would have said that a choir of angels was approaching through the gloom. Cosette and Jean Valjean fell on their knees. They knew not what it was, they knew not where they were; but both of them, the man and the child, the penitent and the innocent, felt that they must kneel. These voices had this strange characteristic, that they did not prevent the building from seeming to be deserted. It was a supernatural chant in an uninhabited house. While these voices were singing, Jean Valjean thought of nothing. He no longer beheld the night; he beheld a blue sky. It seemed to him that he felt those wings which we all have within us, unfolding. The song died away. It may have lasted a long time. Jean Valjean could not have told. Hours of ecstasy are never more than a moment. All fell silent again. There was no longer anything in the street; there was nothing in the garden. That which had menaced, that which had reassured him,--all had vanished. The breeze swayed a few dry weeds on the crest of the wall, and they gave out a faint, sweet, melancholy sound. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume II – Cosette; Book Fifth – For a Black Hunt, a Mute Pack, Chapter VI, “The Beginning of an Enigma”.]

"Well, mace in one hand and Weena in the other, I went out of that gallery and into another and still larger one, which at the first glance reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralised upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly of the philosophical transactions and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics. . .” [H.G. Wells, “The Time Machine” (1895).]

Novels:

Armistead Maupin, Mary Ann in Autumn: A Tales of the City Novel (Harper, 2010): "a tale of long-lost friends and unrealized dreams, of fear and regret, of penance and redemption - and of the unshakable sense that this world we love, this life we love, this drama in which we all play a part, does indeed go by much too fast." This novel follows on Maupin's previous Tales of the City novels, which trace the life and relationship of a journalist from her youth in San Francisco to New York and back.

Poetry

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.

[Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”]

'The trouble with snowmen,' / Said my father one year / 'They are no sooner made / than they just disappear.
I'll build you a snowman / And I'll build it to last / Add sand and cement / And then have it cast.
And so every winter,' / He went on to explain / 'You shall have a snowman / Be it sunshine or rain.'
And that snowman still stands / Though my father is gone / Out there in the garden / Like an unmarked gravestone.
Staring up at the house / Gross and misshapen / As if waiting for something / Bad to happen.
For as the years pass / And I grow older / When summers seem short / And winters colder.
The snowmen I envy / As I watch children play / Are the ones that are made / And then fade away.

[Roger McGough, “The Trouble with Snowmen”]

Butterflies are white and blue
In this field we wander through.
Suffer me to take your hand.
Death comes in a day or two.

All the things we ever knew
Will be ashes in that hour:
Mark the transient butterfly,
How he hangs upon the flower.

Suffer me to take your hand.
Suffer me to cherish you
Till the dawn is in the sky.
Whether I be false or true,
Death comes in a day or two.

[Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Mariposa”]

Other poems: