God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath. And this the more, because it is one of the appointed conditions of the labor of men that, in proportion to the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the fulness of the fruit; and that generally, therefore, the farther off we place our aim, and the less we desire to be ourselves the witnesses of what we have labored for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success. Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can benefit those who come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.
—John Ruskin, from The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)
In the very earliest time
When both people and animals lived on earth
A person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen—
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That’s the way it was.
—Nalungiaq,
Inuit woman interviewed by ethnologist Knud Rasmussen in the early twentieth century.
Jesus lying in his mother's arms
is a photon released from a dying star.
We move through the forest at night,
the sky is full of momentary light,
and everything we need is just too far.
We are photons released from a dying star.
We are fireflies a child has trapped in a jar,
and everything is distant as the stars.
I am here and you are where you are.
We have lived a long time here in the forest.
We lie beneath the heaps of leaves.
We are partial to this partial light:
we cannot sleep and fear our dreams.
There is no order here and nothing can be planned.
We are fireflies trapped in a little boy's hand,
and everything is as distant as the stars.
And I am here and you are where you are.
We lie among our atoms and I speak to you of things and
hope, sometimes, that maybe you will understand.
There is no order here, and there is no middle ground,
and nothing can be predicted, and nothing can be planned.
A star is just a memory of a star.
We are fireflies pulsing dimly in the dark.
We are here, and you are where you are.
We are here, and you are where you are.
—"Fireflies", Ghosteen (2019)
Nick Cave