Meditations VI.15
Some things are hastening to be, others to be no more, while of those that haste into being some part is already extinct. Fluxes and changes perpetually renew the world, just as the unbroken march of time makes ever new the infinity of ages. In this river of change,19 which of the things which swirl past him, whereon no firm foothold is possible, should a man prize so highly? As well fall in love with a sparrow20 that flits past and in a moment is gone from our eyes. In fact a man’s life itself is but as an exhalation from blood21 and an inhalation from the air. For just as it is to draw in the air once into our lungs and give it back again, as we do every moment, so is it to give back thither, whence thou didst draw it first, thy faculty of breathing which thou didst receive at thy birth yesterday or the day before.
- 19.See iv. 43; vii. 19.
- 20.Compare the parable of the sparrow in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History ii. 13.
Bede was an English monk and historian of the 8th century. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a counsellor of King Edwin compares human life to a sparrow flying through a lit hall in winter, in at one door and out at the other.
- 21.See v. 33.