And yet we cling to the comforting illusion that we remain, in some unmappable region of being, fundamentally ourselves - our immutable selves.

As life lives itself through us, our bodies change the physical places and social spheres we inhabit change if we are alive enough and courageous enough, our opinions and ideas about life change. And yet with every fiber of our being, we resist its fundamental reality - even though our very fibers, each and every cell composing us, have been replaced since we first came into being. The oracular Octavia Butler captured this in her reckoning with the meaning of God: “the only lasting truth is Change.” The rest of nature is constantly attesting to this inconstancy. And yet it does need to be stressed continually, because coursing through us is the fundamental paradox of our humanity: our longing for permanence amid a universe governed by entropy - the great source of our existential restlessness and our creative fury, to which all of our sorrow and all of our art can be traced. “It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis,” Henry Miller wrote as he contemplated humanity’s future.

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