transformation). If the process is harmful to the parts and
unavoidable, then it’s hard to see how the whole can run
smoothly, with parts of it passing from one state to another,
all of them built only to be destroyed in different ways. Does
nature set out to cause its own components harm, and make
them vulnerable to it—indeed, predestined to it? Or is it
oblivious to what goes on? Neither one seems very
plausible.
But suppose we throw out “nature” and explain these
things through inherent properties. It would still be absurd to
say that the individual things in the world are inherently
prone to change, and at the same time be astonished at it or
complain—on the grounds that it was happening “contrary to
nature.” And least of all when things return to the state from
which they came. Because our elements are either simply
dispersed, or are subject to a kind of gravitation—the solid
portions being pulled toward earth, and what is ethereal
drawn into the air, until they’re absorbed into the universal
logos—which is subject to periodic conflagrations, or
renewed through continual change.
And don’t imagine either that those elements—the solid
ones and the ethereal—are with us from our birth. Their
influx took place yesterday, or the day before—from the food
we ate, the air we breathed.
And that’s what changes—not the person your mother gave