Heroes Not Zombies

I took this photo in Montaigne’s château a few years ago. What caught my attention was the play of light on the ancient stone floor. I think it’s one of those photos which is beautiful in its own right, but also one which gets me wondering and musing every time I look at it.

A preliminary thought is that the light is ephemeral, likely to be gone in a moment, or in a few minutes at most. The fact it isn’t even a solid band of light enhances that sense of something fragile. And the light is playing on solid stone floor. Something firm, substantial and unchanging.

So it’s like a contrast between the impermanent and the permanent.

But, wait, look a bit more closely at the stone tiles and you can see plenty of evidence of change. One of them is almost shattered. It looks like it is in several small pieces, yet, I can tell you none of those pieces moved when you stood on them. They weren’t loose. Others have smooth indentations, surely changed by the effects of thousands of human feet walking over them over hundreds of years.

There aren’t really two distinct categories in the world, one insubstantial and changing, with the other solid and unchanging.

The reality is everything changes all the time. Just at different rates. Still, the contrast between the rapidly changing and the really slowly changing is very beautiful, and wondrous. It heightens our awareness of the constant flow of life and time.