“The loveliest place, like the loveliest face, has to age, and Matterhorns are ripening towards decay as surely as apples and oaks. The Alps are all falling to ruin, the Sistine Madonna is fading, Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’ is gone, the glass of York Minster is rotting away. But, in a world that spins always more slowly round a sun that is losing its heat, we may well acquiesce in these minor examples of the ubiquity of impermanence and even in the irony that makes us so eager to hurry our freshest delights on into the dust to which they are in any case consigned.
“Besides, there are great consolations. A strong illusion protects us from panic, at least for part of our time. If one could really understand in youth the quiet ticking of one’s watch, and know it to be, in sober truth, the perpetual dripping of irreplaceable waters of life, most of them poured out to waste upon sand, one might go mad or run wildly this way and that, crying ‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’ But nature has excellent plans of her own to work out, and capital blinkers to put on the eyes of such creatures as seem to work better blind. And so things appear, to our sense, to stand still for a while, as if at a glorious climax; no garden that we knew as children could be thought of, then, as either older or younger than it was; and now Mont Blanc is, to us, no mere middle term in a series of blastings and levellings — just as it stands it is for our eyes a masterpiece finished, carved to the last touch, and eternal; for this the world has lived; and any earlier states of the earth were only steps leading up to the present divine consummation; any later states that may come can only be fallings away, gaps like the ones made by the failing of teeth or the deaths of old friends; the fall of the beech from which your swing hung when you were a child can never look like part of a growth or progress. For most of us, in our inmost thoughts, do not seem to stand midway up a long slope of time, but right at the top, as if on a hill, with the past and the future both falling away from our feet, and both declining in interest as they go.” (C. E. Montague, 1925, The Right Place).