#transcience

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

Allegory of Death & Salvation (1886/etching) - François Flameng

[pclysemia]

The particularity of a lover’s scent is a wellspring of eroticism. Its remembrance keeps passion alive even as it fills the soul with regret for the passage of time.

[...]

In memory, erotic scent, which is founded on the specificity of the beloved’s body, at last assumes a life independent of the body. As Casanova observes in his Memoirs, “There is something in the air of the bedroom of the woman one loves, something so intimate, so balsamic, such voluptuous emanations, that if a lover had to choose between Heaven and this place of delight, his hesitation would not last for a moment.” This transcendence reminds us of the transformative aspects of the alchemical process. “The only … alchemist that turns everything into gold is love,” writes Anaïs Nin. “The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.”

Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume, Mandy Aftel

[oneinchbarrier]

[beautymyeyes-see]

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

[ronk]

If only beautiful things lasted longer.

[aphrilisstate-blog]

[spiritualgateway]

Our lives are marked by transcience our comings and goings forming past and present this landscape has its noteworthy sights to which we hiked to see once more when the water level drops the fish traps appear during the winter the marshlands expand the monument to Master Yang is still here reading the words I keep wiping my tears

Meng Hao-jan

[hermitthrush]

All the works of mortal man lie under sentence of mortality; we live among things that are destined to perish.

Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, (~65 A.D.) | Campbell translation, Letter XCI.